People and Places

One of the challenges facing CSE in the past was that its employees were scattered in several buildings in Ottawa. That situation improved with the recent acquisition of the former Canadian Broadcasting Corporation headquarters, which is close to the main CSE facility, the Sir Leonard Tilley Building. The new building - now named the Edward Drake Building in honour of the first head of CSE's predecessor organization, the Communications Branch of the National Research Council - will allow CSE to consolidate most of its operations in the two buildings, under the leadership of its new Chief, Mr. D. Ian Glen.

On a separate note, the government and the people of Canada lost an outstanding public servant with the death in August 1999 of Mr. John Tait. I had the honour of knowing Mr. Tait when he was Deputy Minister of Justice and I was Chief Justice of Quebec. When I took on this job, he was the Coordinator of Security and Intelligence in the Privy Council Office and thereby the Deputy Minister responsible for CSE's policy and operations. Among his many other contributions to the government was a 1997 report on public service values and ethics, produced by a task force that he chaired. The document, now widely known as the Tait Report, has helped generate a strengthening of values-based governance in the Government of Canada.