Security and Liberty, Transparency and Secrecy, Parliamentary Control of the Secret Services in Canada and Germany: A Comparative Approach

After an ongoing 40-year debate, Canada is going to institutionalise its first Committee of Parliamentarians that is meant to control the federal agencies and departments activities in the realm of national security. In contrast, post-war democratic Germany discussed that kind of control early on, not least because of its totalitarian past, and had already established its first parliamentary control body as of 1949; its last major reform was in 2016. Adopting a com-bined historical and comparative legal perspective, the thesis aims at analysing and comparing the constitutional frameworks and the respective debates and institutions in both countries, inter alia, with the help of scholarly works and official documents. It poses the question: can Canada make use of the German experience? It concludes that the final answer depends on an appreciation of the legitimate constitutional limits that differ between the two countries as well as on the readers own political philosophy of the relationship between security and liberty, transparency and secrecy.