Thank you, Madam Chair. Good afternoon.
I have been a reporter and writer for almost 40 years. For much of that time, I was an investigative reporter at CTV, CBC, The Globe and Mail and The Walrus magazine.
I have written a lot about intelligence services. That work led to a book called Covert Entry: Spies, Lies and Crimes Inside Canada’s Secret Service. It is one of only two books of any consequence written about CSIS. That fact speaks to how few journalists in Canada know anything about how this nation’s domestic spy service truly operates.
Despite having turned down many requests to appear as an expert witness in court, why have I agreed to appear here? I have been troubled by much of the recent reporting about alleged Chinese interference in Canada’s elections. I have been disturbed in particular by the reliance on anonymous sources to tar Canadians of Chinese descent as being disloyal to the maple leaf. This egregious, life-altering allegation should require much more than some spook hiding comfortably in the shadows to accuse other Canadians of being a tool of a foreign power.
I know about China’s interference in Canada. I wrote a series of front-page stories about Chinese interference throughout Canadian society while I was at the Globe in the late 1990s and early 2000s. That reporting culminated in a story about a joint RCMP-CSIS probe called Project Sidewinder.
Sidewinder was intriguing for several reasons. Its central finding—that the PRC was working with triads to infiltrate almost every aspect of Canadian life—was so controversial that the then CSIS director, Ward Elcock, did something that no director has done, to my knowledge, before or since: He publicly dismissed his intelligence officers’ work as, in effect, crap. Of course, he used much more diplomatic language. He called it an interesting theory.
The curious story of Sidewinder doesn’t end there. A senior CSIS officer ordered all copies of the report to be destroyed. This was also, I believe, unprecedented. Anyway, a surviving copy of the report made its way to me and subsequently onto the Globe’s front page.
Here is where my reporting and much of the recent reporting about Chinese interference differ. Sidewinder included names of a slew of well-known companies, organizations and high-profile individuals that the RCMP and CSIS believed had been compromised by the PRC. At the time, my editors and I agreed that it would be irresponsible to publish their identities when relying solely on a 23-page report, even if it was marked “top secret”.
Here’s the other main reason I have agreed to appear. A kind of hysteria is being ginned up by scoop-thirsty journalists and what is likely a handful of members of Canada’s vast and largely unaccountable security intelligence infrastructure. It’s dangerous, and people’s reputations and livelihoods are being damaged. My warning to you is to be cautious and skeptical about so-called intelligence, even if it is trumpeted as top secret—which, by the way, is a standard security classification.
The fact is that CSIS gets it wrong often. In the current somewhat hysterical climate, it’s worth remembering the following, which Eva Plunkett, a former inspector general for CSIS, wrote in 2010:
The reviews...have identified again what I consider to be a large number of...errors identified in CSIS information holdings. While my office only reviews a sample of CSIS operations, these...errors are not isolated to one program or one set of processes. They appear in the range of core activities of the Service and across regions.
Those errors have had profound and lasting human consequences. Just ask Maher Arar.
Finally, I am working on a story involving two dedicated police officers who have had their loyalty to Canada questioned by, frankly, incompetent conspiracy-consumed CSIS officers. Their lives and livelihoods have been damaged too. It’s a cautionary story, and after publication, I urge you to invite them to this committee to tell you directly the horror of what can happen when CSIS gets it so wrong.
Thank you for your time.