Information & Ethics Committee on June 2nd, 2023

[Parm Bains, Liberal, Steveston—Richmond East, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to our witnesses for joining us today for this very important study.

Monsieur Juneau, when you appeared before PROC, you identified challenges in recruitment and retention for Canada's security agencies. I believe you mentioned it towards the end there with regard to one of my colleague's questions. We also heard from other witnesses before, in previous testimony, that CSIS does a poor job of recruiting, and recruiting diverse people from diverse diasporas within Canada.

What do you believe are the root causes of these challenges? Is there a culture factor that we need to consider? We heard about racism and things like that, which you also mentioned.

[Dr. Thomas Juneau]

Thank you for your question.

Just as a preamble, if you are interested in that, I would recommend two sources that are especially interesting and that go very much in depth on these issues. NSICOP's annual report—I think it might be 2019, but it may not be that year—has a full chapter on diversity in the intelligence community. It is very well done. It is one of the best things I've read on that issue from any source—academic, government or otherwise. The second source is the national security transparency advisory group, which I used to co-chair. I mentioned them in my remarks. Our third annual report, published just about a year ago now, focused very much on engagement by the intelligence community with minority communities in Canada to tackle very much in detail the issue you raised.

I want to emphasize that debates on diversity in the intelligence and national security community have become very politicized, like a lot of other debates, and are often viewed in these terms. I understand why that's the case, but diversity in the intelligence community, and for that matter in the armed forces, has to be viewed in operational and pragmatic terms whereby it's an operational necessity. When these services are not diverse, they shoot themselves in the foot. They close off large sectors of the population from recruitment. They are not able to achieve certain functions, whether it's civil-military relations on the military side, gaining information and recruiting human sources in certain communities on the intelligence side, and so on. It is mission-critical for these organizations to be diverse.

I think they are doing a much better job at CSIS, the RCMP and the CBSA now than they were 10 or 20 years ago, when the situation was abysmal, but there's still a lot of progress to make. That progress is unequal. CSE is ahead, I think, of several others. The RCMP and the CBSA have more catching up to do.

How do you improve that? It's engagement, engagement, engagement: They need to go out there with effective engagement units that are able to reach out to Chinese Canadian, Iranian Canadian, Indian Canadian and Saudi Canadian communities to build trust and open channels of communication. That's not only to get information on threats and communicate information on how to mitigate those threats but also, by building that trust and building that brand, to be able to better recruit.

All these things are connected.

[Andrew Mitrovica]

Mr. Bains, may I add to the question you've raised?

[Parm Bains, Liberal, Steveston—Richmond East, BC]

Sure. Go ahead.

[Andrew Mitrovica]

Thank you.

Mr. Juneau talks in the abstract. I've spoken to many intelligence officers at CSIS directly. I'll tell you why they're having trouble recruiting and retaining CSIS officers: The job is stupefyingly boring. That's the fact of it. You enter CSIS with this impression that you're going to be doing counter-intelligence and counterterrorism. You spend the first perhaps two to three years doing security clearance review after security clearance review. After a while, it becomes mind-numbing. That's just the fact on the ground.

Professor Juneau can go on and on about the abstract. I'm talking to you, having talked to many CSIS officers—

[Parm Bains, Liberal, Steveston—Richmond East, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Mitrovica. I don't mean to cut you off, but I have one more question and limited time.

I'll go back to you, Monsieur Juneau. Back in March, you stated in the CBC article, “Canada already does a fair bit to counter foreign interference, but I do think that we could do more”. Can you expand on what the government should do?

[Dr. Thomas Juneau]

If I have the right article that you're referring to, I was responding to a comment whereby somebody said the government does nothing to counter foreign interference, which I thought was just nonsense. The government does things. I think it should do a lot more. It was just to say that the “nothing” part was nonsense.

Concretely, what more should it do? I think it goes at every level. It goes at the political level in terms of taking it more seriously and having more resources—basically everything I said to the previous question.

I think I have to stop here.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you, Mr. Juneau, for recognizing that.

Mr. Villemure, you have the floor for two and a half minutes.

[René Villemure, Bloc, Trois-Rivières, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Two and a half minutes isn't much time.

Dr. Juneau, before I go to you, I want to check something Mr. Baxendale said before.

Mr. Baxendale, you mentioned that Canadian citizens had been forcibly repatriated to China.

Is that really the case?

[Dean Baxendale]

That is absolutely the case.

[René Villemure, Bloc, Trois-Rivières, QC]

Okay, thank you very much.

Dr. Juneau, we talk a lot about transparency. If we're talking about transparency, it's because we have darkness. Generally speaking, darkness is used to hide something, but it prevents us from understanding the issue over the long term. Our committee was told that a number of documents must absolutely be declassified.

How can we help Canadians better understand the current situation? There's all kinds of information out there, good and bad. What would you recommend to better inform the Canadian public?

[Dr. Thomas Juneau]

Thank you very much for your question. That's one of the things I'm most interested in.

One of the big problems we have in Canada is that collective national security literacy is low. In a sense, that's good. If you think about it, it's the result of our very secure geographical location, which is a luxury. However, Canada is increasingly facing threats, ranging from Chinese or other foreign interference to cybersecurity and economic espionage. We have some catching up to do to address these threats. This low literacy puts on the brakes and makes public debate more difficult. As a result, we don't feel enough political pressure to take action.

We could do a lot to improve the situation. First of all, we need to be much more transparent, which goes back to everything I've said so far. Canada also needs to do a better job of communicating with the media. I really want to emphasize that point. Politically and bureaucratically, the government must share quality information, not just in quantity, with local and national media, which it does very poorly.

[René Villemure, Bloc, Trois-Rivières, QC]

You raise an interesting point.

In this age where conspiracy theories abound online, if we have reduced literacy on the other side of that, we have a total imbalance.

[Dr. Thomas Juneau]

Exactly.

It's sort of a chicken and egg thing. We can sum it up in a few seconds: Our best tool to fight disinformation is information. In a democracy, information is our strength against autocracies, which are completely built on lies. We need to flood the market with truthful information and transparency.

[René Villemure, Bloc, Trois-Rivières, QC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you, Dr. Juneau and Mr. Villemure.

Mr. Green, finally, you have two and a half minutes.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'd have to say that, in my time on these committees, I'm not quite sure that I've witnessed the type of attack on a witness that I've witnessed here today. I think, out of courtesy, I'm going to provide Mr. Mitrovica the opportunity to respond to what I can only say was a fairly defamatory attack on his character.

I will use my time to allow the witness to respond to the defamatory attack from the Conservative member, if he so chooses.

[Andrew Mitrovica]

One has to consider the source. I'll leave it at that.

I just want to ask the committee to listen to what I had to say: Invite Paul McNamara here, and invite Peter Merrifield here.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Okay, I have one more minute left, and we do have that on the record. We don't need to repeat it on the record.

[Andrew Mitrovica]

Okay.

All right. Let me go back to the—

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

You stated that—

[Andrew Mitrovica]

—question you asked me.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Sorry, sir.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Hang on.

Mr. Green, it's your time. Go ahead.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thank you.

You've stated that the media coverage of China's foreign interference is hypocritical, given Canada's history on foreign interference.

Can you expand on this?