The independent agency that reviews the work of Canada’s spy services has not filed a contract disclosure to the federal government’s open data portal for any quarter since March 2025, even though federal law requires it to report contracts worth more than $10,000 every quarter and its own financial reports show it kept paying contractors.
A Canada News Media review of the Proactive Disclosure of Contracts dataset on open.canada.ca, as it stood on Oct. 1, 2026, found no records from the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency (NSIRA) for any of the five reporting periods between April 2025 and June 2026. The agency’s most recent entries cover January to March 2025, when it reported six contracts and amendments, the latest a legal services contract dated March 17, 2025, valued at about $199,000. Its total in the dataset stands at 153 records.
The agency also does not appear in the companion “nil report” file, which departments use to declare that they had no contracts to report in a given quarter. The rest of the government kept filing over the same period: the dataset holds 23,382 records for April to June 2026 alone.
NSIRA was created in 2019 under the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency Act to review the national security and intelligence activities of federal departments, including the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the Communications Security Establishment. It publishes many of its review reports on its website.
Section 86 of the Access to Information Act says the head of a “government entity” shall publish the subject matter, parties, period, value and reference number of any contract over $10,000 entered into during a quarter. Publication is due within 30 days after the end of each of the first three quarters of the fiscal year and within 60 days after the fourth. The act defines a government entity to include the divisions of the public service listed in Schedule I.1 of the Financial Administration Act, and the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency Secretariat appears on that schedule.
On that timetable, the deadline for the April-to-June 2025 quarter passed on July 30, 2025. The most recent deadline, for April to June 2026, passed on July 30, 2026.
NSIRA’s own quarterly financial reports show the agency continued to spend on outside services through the period with no disclosures. Its report for the quarter ended Sept. 30, 2025, published Nov. 28, 2025, lists $1.35 million in spending on professional and special services in that quarter alone, up slightly from $1.32 million a year earlier. Its report for the quarter ended Dec. 31, 2025, published Feb. 16, 2026, puts year-to-date professional and special services spending at $1.86 million, and attributes a drop in that quarter to “a decrease in use of several contractors.” The agency had $20.4 million in total spending authority for 2025-26, according to the same report.
Those figures establish that NSIRA was paying contractors, but they do not on their own establish that it signed new contracts over $10,000 during the missing quarters. Some of that spending could flow from agreements signed before April 2025, which were disclosed at the time. The agency’s past filings show it routinely amends multi-year contracts, however: its January-to-March 2025 report included amendments to contracts first signed in 2021 and 2023. Amendments that push a contract over $10,000 are also subject to disclosure under the act.
The gap appears to be specific to contracts. In the government’s separate Proactive Disclosure of Travel Expenses dataset, NSIRA has continued to file, with 114 records including trips dated in October and November 2025 and June 2026. That suggests the agency is still able to publish to the portal.
Canada News Media did not find a separate contracts disclosure page on NSIRA’s own website that might account for the absence from the central portal. A search of Canadian news coverage found no prior reporting on the gap.
The public record does not explain the missing filings. It is possible NSIRA signed no qualifying contracts in the period, but the portal’s nil-report file exists for exactly that situation, and the agency has never appeared in it. It is also possible the filings were prepared but not loaded to the portal, or that the agency has published them somewhere Canada News Media did not find. Answering the question would require a statement from NSIRA or the Treasury Board Secretariat, which maintains the portal, or the agency’s contract records themselves.
This is a developing story. Canada News Media has not yet put questions to NSIRA or the Treasury Board Secretariat, and will update this article with any response or correction from either. The finding echoes earlier gaps this newsroom found in the same federal dataset, including a nil report filed by Fisheries and Oceans Canada for a quarter in which its register lists 749 awards.
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