Thank you very much. Thank you for the offer to speak today.
I will focus on three things today. One is that the foreign ministry we need for tomorrow is one that should work seamlessly with intelligence. Two is that we do not have that at this point, and three is what we can do to get to that point.
First, very quickly, the foreign ministry for tomorrow is one that should be able to work seamlessly with the intelligence community. This is necessary to deal with a lot of the international threats that we face today. Think about foreign electoral interference, transnational repression, economic espionage, transnational terrorism, the security implications of climate change and so on. Concretely, this means that Global Affairs Canada has to work closely with CSIS, CSE, DND, Canadian Forces intelligence command and others in the security and intelligence community and beyond Ottawa to deal with these and other threats.
The second point I'd make is that the foreign ministry we need for tomorrow, one that can work seamlessly with the intelligence community, is not what we have right now. To be more specific, I would emphasize that the situation today is much better than it was 10 or 15 years ago. Intelligence works with the policy community much better. This is something that Professor Carvin and I have argued in some of our research, but we still have a long way to go.
Too often, our diplomatic and intelligence worlds speak different languages and fail to work with each other in a coherent way. That means sharing information in a timely way. It means coordinating policies and operations. Some of the blame has to go to the intelligence community for this. It remains too insular and too disconnected from the needs of policy. Some of the blame also has to go to the diplomatic side, where culturally the bureaucracy remains too neglectful of all things intelligence, again despite recent progress.
One way to illustrate this is that our diplomatic service has low intelligence literacy. This means that even though some individual diplomats have a solid experience of how intelligence can help them in their work, collectively the overall understanding of intelligence and an understanding of how to integrate it into their work remains below the level of the capabilities of diplomatic services of some of our key allies.
I would note, by the way, that the reverse is true and also problematic. Our intelligence community has low policy literacy, but that's not our focus here today.
This has consequences. We saw the tip of the iceberg of these problems emerge in debates about foreign interference in recent months and information not flowing efficiently. Different parts of the government fail to understand each other, and so on. What this means concretely is that the ceiling for success in our ability to counter foreign interference or other threats that we face will remain lower than it could be as long as we don't improve the relationship between the diplomatic and intelligence arms of national power.
Three, what can we do to better integrate our diplomatic and intelligence functions?
One—and this is a bit in line with what Professor Carvin says—we need a comprehensive review of our national security architecture, which is outdated. This can include reforming our intelligence priorities process, which is sclerotic; improving information-sharing mechanisms and reviewing and adjusting governance structures, including those that should allow for better coordination and information sharing with other levels of government, with the private sector and with civil society; tackling a major human resource crisis, as Professor Carvin discussed; dealing with the epidemic of the over-classification that I've discussed in other committees recently, which remains a major obstacle to making better use of intelligence, including in Global Affairs; and reviewing training programs.
Point two is more transparency and engagement, as Professor Carvin mentioned, with the public, with civil society and with the private sector. This is essential to bring in new ideas to reinforce a stronger challenge function, which is lacking in the department, and reinforcing accountability mechanisms by better shining a light on weaknesses.
The third point concerns secondments and exchanges. We need our diplomats to spend more time working outside Global Affairs in the intelligence community—and elsewhere, for that matter. This is the best way to build a mutual understanding and to deepen institutional linkages.
Four, in an ideal world, we should have a foreign human intelligence agency, which we don't have. Realistically, that is unlikely to happen at least for the foreseeable future. Until we have one, we should use existing structures and existing authorities and improve them to collect and then use more and better foreign intelligence through CSIS, CSE, CFINTCOM and so on. This is something that both of us have written together about in recent times.
In a world of growing uncertainty in terms of our relations with the U.S., we should push to further Canadianize our collection and our analysis of foreign intelligence and work through a lens of more properly Canadian interests.
Five, building on this, we should continue our ongoing efforts to develop our intelligence diplomacy capacity—which GAC and CSIS should do in tandem, although it's not always easy—diversify our foreign intelligence relations, and better leverage these partnerships.
Last, and I'll finish on this, is that to do this, we need sustained leadership at the political level and at the bureaucratic level—which currently is lacking—to really invest the time necessary to push these administrative reforms.
Thank you.