Evidence of meeting #63 for Procedure and House Affairs in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was information.
A video is available from Parliament.
Jarislowsky Chair in Public Sector Management, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
No. The national security adviser is also essentially the chair and the dean of the heads of the various agencies and has the ability to contact the head of CSIS, the head of CSE, the head of RCMP and so on. It would depend on what you mean by instructions. It may well be “I want to know more about this” or “I agree with that”.
I did not get in the way of the traffic on the way up or on the way back.
Conservative
Blaine Calkins Conservative Red Deer—Lacombe, AB
In your role as the Clerk of the Privy Council, the Privy Council Office being non-partisan, you were the most senior public servant in the Government of Canada in a non-political office. Would you agree with my definition of the Clerk of the Privy Council?
Jarislowsky Chair in Public Sector Management, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
Yes. That's certainly one of them.
Conservative
Blaine Calkins Conservative Red Deer—Lacombe, AB
Could you describe to me, then, what the role of the Privy Council Office would be in any national security scenario? It sounds to me like the Privy Council Office, from what you've told me, has absolutely no role in either advising or executing instructions when it comes to national security from the Prime Minister's Office. Is that true?
Jarislowsky Chair in Public Sector Management, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
No. That's not the way to read it. I can commend to you my book from 2021, Governing Canada, which sets this out in some detail.
The Privy Council Office is the Prime Minister's department. The Prime Minister has seven distinct hats and roles in government. Chair of cabinet is one, first minister in the federation is another, international leader for the purposes of dealing with other countries is another, and so on. The Privy Council Office is a set of secretariats and teams that support those seven roles. One of them is the security and intelligence branch.
Conservative
Liberal
Sherry Romanado Liberal Longueuil—Charles-LeMoyne, QC
Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
I'd like to, through you, thank the witness for being with us this evening. My first question through you, Madam Chair, is to Mr. Wernick.
In your former role, you were involved in the development of the first iteration of the protecting democracy plan. Can you tell us a little bit more about that process? What was the impetus of the thinking behind it?
Jarislowsky Chair in Public Sector Management, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
I can reconstruct it.
We had seen Russian interference in the French election in 2017. We had seen Russian interference in the German election in 2017. We learned a bit later that there had been Russian interference in the American election of November 2016. There had been, in Australia, a considerable amount of attention to potential Chinese interference in Australian politics. I'm sure some of you have read the book that came out in 2018 in Australia on that topic. Australia legislated on foreign interference around December or January of 2017-18.
The question that was posed was, if the security and intelligence community became aware of attempts to disrupt the election...and it might be very subtle through disinformation. That was how the French election was attacked. It was disinformation through cyber-attacks and social media. It could also be denial of service attacks on Elections Canada, or it could be any number of pathways to interfere in the electoral process. Who was going to call it out?
If it was the minister of the day or the Prime Minister of the day, they were involved in the election campaign under way. They would be open to accusations that they were either blowing alarm bells for political reasons or withholding information for political reasons, so it was important to come up with somebody who could be the whistle-blower on foreign interference during an election campaign, during the caretaker period.
The alternatives that I remember kicking around would have been an independent commissioner or the panel that we came up in January 2019. It was my recommendation to the Prime Minister that we go with the panel that was created in 2019 and has been in place ever since.
Liberal
Sherry Romanado Liberal Longueuil—Charles-LeMoyne, QC
Thank you very much.
With that, I want to focus a little bit on NSICOP. We've had a couple of colleagues talk about NSICOP. Often we hear that this is a secret committee that does secret work. You were there for the creation.
I was watching the SECU committee earlier today, at which the chair of NSICOP was presenting and answering questions with respect to NSICOP. I believe that you were also clerk at the time and received some of their earliest reports. When we hear the words “secret committee”, the connotation is that they're doing some clandestine work that they don't want people to know about.
Can you elaborate a little bit for those watching the difference between some clandestine secret committee and the importance of understanding classified information with respect to national security and our Five Eyes partners and what this could do to the intelligence community if we are kind of playing loosey-goosey with intelligence information?
Jarislowsky Chair in Public Sector Management, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
The secret part of the information of the committee is the information that it sometimes deals with. It's classified information, sometimes highly classified information. There's a window for that group of parliamentarians to have access to it.
There is a similar committee in the United States of United States senators. There's a similar committee in the United Kingdom of members of Parliament. I believe there is a similar one in France as well, although I'll stop there, but it's a common practice in other countries to have some sort of window for legislators into the world of security and intelligence.
I'm not sure if I answered your question. I'm sorry; go ahead.
Liberal
Sherry Romanado Liberal Longueuil—Charles-LeMoyne, QC
You mentioned a little bit about aller devant, looking forward. We put in place the panel. We put in place SITE. We put in NSICOP and NSIRA. We've seen evolving threats. At the time we put this in place, we were looking at Russian state actors. We are now seeing there are other state actors who are looking to interfere with our democratic institutions.
I'm not quite sure you follow our committee much, but based on what you've been hearing, what would you recommend to this committee in terms of anything that we could be doing to improve?
You mentioned legislation, strengthening the legislation. Is there anything else that you would recommend to us in terms of deterring, detecting and countering foreign interference?
Jarislowsky Chair in Public Sector Management, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
The problem with revealing secret information, and there's always a desire for more transparency, is that doing that can reveal the collection methods. It can out your collection methods, whatever they were: human intelligence, signal intelligence, interceptions and so on. Revealing sources compromises them. Any journalist watching would understand the importance of off-the-record confidential sources and the risks of revealing sources, which means the information would dry up. If we want to be part of the club of Five Eyes, we have to present that we have secure systems in which information collected by our partners is not going to end up in the public domain.
What I would recommend to you is to go to Google, get the U.K. national security bill—which is before the U.K. Parliament right now—copy and paste, and bring it to Canada.
Bloc
Marie-Hélène Gaudreau Bloc Laurentides—Labelle, QC
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Mr. Wernick, I must admit that I'm very concerned about Canadians' loss of trust. According to one survey, 72% of Canadians are no longer confident that our democratic system is secure.
I'd like to read you an excerpt from the March 9 edition of the daily newspaper La Presse:
In a briefing note to Justin Trudeau, Privy Council clerk Janice Charette said that the registry had proved its worth in those countries that had adopted it. She maintained that, beyond a shadow of a doubt, a registry exposes activities being conducted by individuals or entities on behalf of authoritarian countries.
You mentioned earlier that the registry was essential, important and even urgent. You've provided good advice over the years. Did you recommend to the Prime Minister that such a registry be established?
Jarislowsky Chair in Public Sector Management, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
No, I don't recall having done so. However, I highly recommend that a registry like this be adopted. We could follow either the Australian or the British model.
Bloc
Marie-Hélène Gaudreau Bloc Laurentides—Labelle, QC
Thank you.
You said earlier that it was important to have robust laws. Have you previously put forward any such proposals?
There have been a few steps forward, particularly with respect to elections. I'm thinking of the Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections Task Force and the NSICP, the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians.
Apart from that, on the basis everything you know, what would you recommend for the future?
Jarislowsky Chair in Public Sector Management, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
When I was the clerk, I contributed to three bills, C‑22, C‑59 and C‑76. The investments provided in the 2018 budget are among the priorities I advocated. This is the budget that made it possible to establish the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security, the CCCS. It also provided for significant investments in the Communications Security Establishment, the CSE.
I worked on the elections protocol announced in January 2019. Interference was still a concern. And yet the government had tabled Bill C‑59 in June 2017.
NDP
Rachel Blaney NDP North Island—Powell River, BC
Thank you, Chair.
I really appreciated the earlier comments about the need to protect future elections. We know that in past elections there were concerns, but we know that they didn't have an impact on the outcomes. All parties have agreed this is the case.
I hear very clearly about improving our laws. You talked about the U.K., and just kind of pasting that piece of legislation and getting to work on that as quickly as possible in Canada. I don't expect you're an expert on the U.K. legislation, but are there particular parts you feel are important for us to address in your recommendation?
Jarislowsky Chair in Public Sector Management, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
That's a very good question. I do recommend that people go and download it and have a look at it.
Basically, any Canadian law would follow more or less the same model. First of all, you have to create a new offence and set of penalties. This leads you to definitions. What is “foreign interference”? It's different from espionage, treason, sabotage, deception or disinformation. The British law and the Australian law actually create definitions for foreign interference.
This committee could recommend the definition of foreign interference to the government. You have to define what a foreign actor is. Is it always a government? What about foreign activities that are laundered through law firms, companies, think tanks and so on? Is the Confucius Institute or the Alliance Française interference or just cultural diplomacy?
It's not going to be easy to find the right definitions. The Australian bill had knock-on effects to amend something like 20 other Australian statutes. You create all kinds of knock-on effects in the rest of legislation. You have to define whether somebody knowingly did something or recklessly did something.
I don't want to get into drafting—that's not my thing—but you can follow the Australian model and the British model and you will see the kinds of issues that you, as parliamentarians, get to work through. There are 39 million Canadians and there are only 338 of you who get to write laws. I think that, if you work together, you could use the British law as a first draft and you would be able to resolve these issues in a made-in-Canada model in a matter of months.
