CSE campus from the air

Microsoft's Virtual Earth has up-to-date (fall 2006?) imagery of the CSE campus in Ottawa's Confederation Heights. The photo shows the two new 2-storey temporary buildings recently constructed to help accommodate CSE's massive increase in staff (Google Map's imagery, a couple of years older, shows the campus before the new buildings were constructed, making it easy to spot the change). The plan to construct the new buildings was mentioned by then-Chief Keith Coulter in his testimony before the Special Senate Committee on the Anti-Terrorism Act on 11 April 2005 (blogged here).

The addition of the two new structures adds about 4,000 square metres of floorspace to CSE's campus, increasing the total size of the Drake/Tilley complex to about 36,000 square metres. CSE presumably is also still using its old facilities in the Insurance building (2,400 square metres) and part of the Billings Bridge Tower (perhaps 3,500 square metres), so the total CSE floorspace is probably about 41,900 square metres, or about 25 square metres per employee. In 1961, when it was constructed, the original Tilley building provided about 14,000 square metres of floorspace for the agency's then-590 employees, or about 24 square metres per employee.

January staff figure

As of January 2007 CSE was back up to 1,624 staff members, according to the latest staff figures published by the Public Service Human Resources Management Agency. It looks like CSE's great expansion is essentially complete, with monthly totals simply fluctuating up and down a bit due to normal hiring and attrition (December's total was 1,601 and November's was 1,630).