Procedure and House Affairs Committee on March 2nd, 2023

[Ryan Turnbull, Liberal, Whitby, ON]

That's great.

The panel relied on the input from our security agencies through the SITE task force to inform its discussions and deliberations. Is that right?

[David Morrison]

That's correct.

[Ryan Turnbull, Liberal, Whitby, ON]

We heard from the director of CSIS, Mr. Vigneault, that he had concurred with the findings of the panel that no attempted foreign interference during the election rose to the level of compromising the integrity of the election. Is that correct?

[David Morrison]

That is correct.

[Ryan Turnbull, Liberal, Whitby, ON]

Thank you.

I want to quote something from Ian Shugart, whom you mentioned in your opening remarks, Mr. Morrison. Recently, Ian Shugart, former clerk of the privy council and member of the panel in 2019, was on CBC and said this: “Yes, we would have been prepared to intervene and to go public and alert the public of a situation, had it arisen, even on the basis of one or two ridings or if something had been national in its scope. It would have depended on the nature of the intervention.

“But we need to understand that often intelligence information is partial, and it is incomplete in the sense that you have indications of interest, but it stops well short of having any effect. Do you intervene because the other side is interested and even that the other side may be at work? No, you don't, necessarily, because you may simply want to gather more evidence, or you might not have evidence that is clear enough about what their intentions are.

“So the intelligence agencies watch, and they pay attention, and they continue to gather information, but we on the panel at no point in the 2019 election were presented with information that said, 'This has the potential to distort things in such a way that the outcome of the election, either locally or nationally, could be affected.' Our mandate, our remit, would have allowed us to do interventions on either scale—either local or national.”

Mr. Morrison, given your opening remarks I think you've already made some comments in relation to the partial nature of intelligence being pieces that we're putting together to approximate some conclusions. Do you want to react to or comment on Mr. Shugart's statement?

[David Morrison]

No, I think it's self-explanatory. For those of us who consume intelligence on a daily basis, it really is a mosaic that helps us weigh what we learn against all our other sources of information and then provide advice to the government.

[Ryan Turnbull, Liberal, Whitby, ON]

Then you agree with his statement—

[The Chair, Liberal, Bardish Chagger]

Thank you.

Ms. Normandin, you have the floor for six minutes.

[Christine Normandin, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Morrison, I can't help but return to both the end of your opening remarks and the questions and answers we just heard.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but my analysis of your answers is that you take the information that is provided to you by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, CSIS, with a certain grain of salt. You mention that you have to take some and leave some and that you can't draw conclusions from information that sometimes seems patchy.

It almost gives me the impression that you are in some way substituting your own expertise for that of CSIS when it proposes conclusions based on the information it obtains. Am I wrong? Can I even perhaps see this as a questioning of CSIS expertise on your part?

[David Morrison]

Thank you for your question.

I want to be very clear that what I said before was not intended to question the competence of CSIS.

To be very clear on this very important point, I will respond in English.

The point I was trying to make is that intelligence reports that come across my desk every morning—and that have come across my desk every morning for five or six years—come with qualifiers and caveats. They are not an account of what happened. They are often an account of what somebody said might have happened.

The qualifications, the qualifiers and the caveats come as parts of the documents that our intelligence agencies produce, and that is to help us, as consumers, understand the reliability of what we are reading. They use phrases such as “a news source”, “a news source of unknown reliability” or “a single uncorroborated source alleges that”—this means that one person said it and that they have not heard it anywhere else by any other means. That is how intel comes to those of us who read it on a daily basis.

The point I am trying to make is that when leaked reports are circulating and those caveats are not taken into account, people can get a very distorted view of what the national security community in this country actually believes.

[Christine Normandin, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you for the clarifications. Despite this, I still get the sense that your perspective on CSIS seems to be that you can place your own views above its analyses and conclusions. Am I wrong?

[David Morrison]

I will respond in two ways.

What I tried to say in my opening remarks is that I'm proud to live in a country where we have intelligence agencies that are on the job 24-7 and are reporting what they hear. They have various means to hear things from human sources, from electronic sources and so on. It is their responsibility to pass that information up to people such as me and others who are senior members of the national security community.

The information always comes with.... I never know who it's from, but it is characterized as to its degree of newness or reliability and what we know about the source. Sometimes it openly says, “We don't know why the person is.... We may be being told this to influence us rather than to inform us.” The consummation or the daily receipt of intelligence comes with grains of salt. I, myself, am not putting those grains of salt in.

The second point is that it is one input into how people such as me form a world view and use that world view to inform the government. Here I would point to the example used in my introductory remarks, that there was a consensus view in the western intelligence community or the U.S. intelligence community that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. That was wrong.

Therefore, it is entirely appropriate for intelligence to be one stream of information that goes into the decision-making process of policy-makers.

[Christine Normandin, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I will continue in the next round.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bardish Chagger]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Julian.

[Peter Julian, NDP, New Westminster—Burnaby, BC]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

I believe it was Mr. Stewart who answered Mr. Cooper's question about referring intelligence to the RCMP or to Elections Canada. In the previous panel with Elections Canada, the commissioner of elections identified half a dozen areas touched by the allegations contained in the reports by Robert Fife, Steven Chase and Sam Cooper. Each one of them constitutes a violation of our electoral laws.

I'm concerned if that intelligence wasn't passed on to Elections Canada. Elections Canada and the commissioner of elections can take action on intelligence. They gather the evidence; that's part of their jobs. Why would suspicions or allegations not be passed on to Elections Canada? Is it because there was a verification done internally that showed there was no evidence at all of some of the allegations?

[Rob Stewart]

Allow me to clarify my prior answer, which was to the question of whether the panel had referred information to the RCMP. My point was that we know the panel receives information from the RCMP and, indeed, from other sources. Prior to the meetings of the panel, which at times included the Chief Electoral Officer, there was a process of gathering and distilling information by the SITE task force.

I am not privy to the discussions that the SITE task force had with the Chief Electoral Officer or the commissioner of elections, but I am confident that the information that was in the hands of our intelligence community that was deemed to be of importance was shared.

[Peter Julian, NDP, New Westminster—Burnaby, BC]

That's with Elections Canada.

[Rob Stewart]

That is correct.

[Peter Julian, NDP, New Westminster—Burnaby, BC]

Okay. Thank you for clarifying that.

Mr. Morrison, you mentioned the threshold. This is a question that has come up before. There's an issue of a threshold in terms of a national campaign and having an influence in a national campaign, but there are also thresholds at the riding level.

I wanted to know whether there is an evaluation of something that can have an impact at the riding level and what that threshold is, or whether this is something that is simply not considered. Ultimately, the threshold in each riding can have an impact, unfortunately, on the overall campaign.

[David Morrison]

It's a very important question. It is one that was addressed by Ian Shugart, a member of the 2019 panel, in his remarks, which I think have already been referenced today.

The threshold exists at the national level and it also exists at the level of individual ridings, because as it has just been pointed out, mathematically, an individual riding or handful of ridings could be material nationally.

Let me say, as Mr. Shugart has said before me, that the context within which allegations are made or interference is examined is very important, and the threshold for the panel to act is very high. Both the Judd report on the 2019 election and the Rosenberg report on the 2021 election affirmed that the high threshold is appropriate, given the remit of the panel.

I would also say, as I tried to say in my remarks, that the panel is but one mechanism, and it is designed as a mechanism of last resort. If there are things going on at the riding level or at the national level, there are others that can also call them out, including the parties or the candidates.

The answer to the question is yes. It's equally operative at the level of individual ridings.

Thank you.

[Peter Julian, NDP, New Westminster—Burnaby, BC]

I'd like to follow up with a question that came from Madam Romanado in the earlier panel, which is the issue of foreign diplomats who are not respecting our laws, or who are suspected of or have been shown to be breaking Canadian law when it comes to the Canada Elections Act, which is criminal behaviour subject to criminal sanctions.

What are the steps that we take from acting on the intelligence to ultimately, in your other hat as deputy minister of foreign affairs, coming to the point when we may take action against that diplomat, including, as we heard in the previous panel, declaring that person persona non grata?

[David Morrison]

As the honourable member has pointed out, there is a range of diplomatic tools that can be used. We begin, first off, simply by reminding all the foreign missions in Canada of their responsibilities under the Vienna convention not to interfere in our electoral processes.

Here we're talking about elections, but when any kind of interference comes to light, as is the case with the recent publicity around police stations, we take it seriously. We refer it to the appropriate authorities. In the case of the police stations, they have been shut down.

There is a tool in the diplomatic tool kit to declare someone persona non grata. That is allowed under the Vienna convention. It is a tool of last resort, because it almost always results in a tit-for-tat declaration of persona non grata that can be asymmetric, and that is often not in anyone's interest.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bardish Chagger]

Thank you, Mr. Morrison.

We will now go to a five-minute round, starting with Mr. Cooper and followed by Mrs. Romanado.

Mr. Cooper, the floor is yours.

[Michael Cooper, Conservative, St. Albert—Edmonton, AB]

I want to ask a question with respect to informing candidates. Given that no candidates were informed of interference, what is the threshold for informing a candidate?

[Rob Stewart]

I will go back to a point that Mr. Morrison just made.

The panel is briefed by the SITE task force. It looks at the evidence that it has to hand and the threshold for deciding that foreign interference committed by a foreign entity with covert and clandestine properties has occurred. The threshold for that determination is high.

In retrospect, looking back at the 2019 and 2021 elections, that threshold was not met. It was adjudicated as not met at a riding level and at a national level by the panel. It would be a hypothetical for me to answer the question as to what the threshold is.