Its analysis side certainly was no great shakes in the case of Iraqi WMDs.  And certain former officers have been very critical of its operational activities, as discussed in this essay in the NY  Times Book Review:

…these new memoirs cannot be shoved aside so easily. The most intriguing come from the case officers, like Jones, who actually meet foreign agents and collect information for the C.I.A. on a daily basis.

In book after book, operatives describe an agency that hires smart, aggressive and patriotic Americans, and then does its best to make sure they fail. Since 2008, two memoirs, Jones’s “Human Factor” and Charles S. Faddis’s “Beyond Repair: The Decline and Fall of the C.I.A.,” have gone so far as to call for the agency to be abolished and replaced.

While not the best written of the recent books, Jones’s paints the fullest picture of the agency’s troubles. He claims he served under “nonofficial cover” — that is, overseas and without diplomatic protection — for more than a decade. The agency never publicly discloses how many similar operatives are working, but Jones’s account makes clear that the number is tiny, at most a couple of hundred worldwide. A vast majority of employees work either at the C.I.A.’s headquarters in Langley, Va., or under diplomatic cover in American embassies.

Jones regards this breakdown of resources as worse than shameful. Employees under diplomatic cover are generally known to the intelligence services of the countries where they work and can operate only with the tacit approval of their host nations. Only nonofficial operatives can recruit agents in true secrecy. Only nonofficial operatives have a real chance of meeting or infiltrating terrorist groups. But these operatives face much higher risks than those under diplomatic cover, and the C.I.A. fears using them…

Charles Faddis, a case officer for 20 years, argues in “Beyond Repair.” Faddis describes the agency as rife with incompetence at every level and compares its leadership training unfavorably with that of the military. “Sixty years after its founding,” he writes, the agency “has never developed any system for the selection, training and cultivation of leaders.” Even the Sept. 11 attacks did not produce meaningful change. Faddis argues that adding a director of national intelligence to oversee the agency simply imposed another layer of bureaucracy. Of the 4,000 new employees in the director’s office, “not a single one of them runs operations. Not a single one of them recruits assets or produces intelligence. What they do produce, however, is process, lots of it.”..

The two books are also discussed at this earlier post,

9 to 5: The spies not in the cold…

where I write that…

…
I have little confidence that any newly-created Canadian foreign intelligence agency would be any different and I doubt the need for one.  From an earlier post:

…I do not think a separate Canadian foreign intelligence agency (i.e. HUMINT) should be formed; the Conservatives thankfully dropped their 2006 election promise to create one.  Early in the campaign they had pledged to “Expand the Canadian Foreign Intelligence Agency”–then they realized one didn’t exist (see “Securing our borders…The plan” at link).

Mark
Ottawa