Procedure and House Affairs Committee on May 30th, 2023

[The Chair, Liberal, Bardish Chagger]

Good evening, everyone. I call the meeting to order.

It's great to see so many colleagues together on a Tuesday evening.

Welcome to meeting number 78 of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs.

The committee is meeting today to study the question of privilege related to the campaign against the member for Wellington—Halton Hills and other members.

We have with us today Mr. Wesley Wark, senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation. He's based in the Waterloo region, in the city of Waterloo, for which I am a proud member of Parliament, so full disclosure.

We also have with us Thomas Juneau, associate professor at the graduate school of public and international affairs at the University of Ottawa.

You will each have five minutes for an opening statement, which I understand has been shared with the interpreters, and then we will proceed to questions from the committee members.

I would like to remind all members and witnesses that care must be taken with regard to the earpieces for interpretation. Please be mindful to not place your earpiece near the microphone, as this can result in a feedback loop, which may cause an acoustic shock and could, in turn, cause injury to the interpreters. Your earpiece is attached to the device in front of you. Do not put it in near the microphone, but keep it away, just to ensure that we minimize risks to the individuals who are helping us operate in both official languages.

With that, Mr. Wark, the floor is yours. Welcome to the procedure and House affairs committee.

[Dr. Wesley Wark, Senior Fellow, Centre for International Governance Innovation, As an Individual]

Madam Chair and members of the committee, thank you for this invitation to appear.

In this brief opening statement, I want to address three issues. To begin, I want to support the call by member of Parliament Michael Chong for change to strengthen the Canadian national security and intelligence system. That call has been echoed in the first report from the special rapporteur David Johnston, who described the mishandling of intelligence with regard to known threats to Mr. Chong as “certainly the most prominent, but not the only, example of poor information flow and processing between agencies, the public service and Ministers.”

Mr. Johnston's analysis, as you know, will be open to critique by those who are able to read his classified annex, including the review bodies. This issue will also be taken up in the public hearings that Mr. Johnston has planned, which I regard as an important opportunity to come up with fresh ideas for reforming Canadian intelligence.

As we consider necessary changes to the machinery of government to ensure better intelligence flows, we must also look more broadly to the performance of what is often called the intelligence cycle, which includes intelligence collection, analysis, and reporting. Improving the machinery of government alone will not fix deficiencies in this broader intelligence cycle, or produce change to what is often referred to as a deficient culture of intelligence in the federal government.

Second, Mr. Chong, in his testimony before this committee, spoke of action taken by the British security service, MI5, in 2022 to alert the U.K. Parliament to the activities of a British lawyer of Chinese descent, named Christine Lee, who was identified by MI5 as a Chinese agent of influence. Such actions by British intelligence are extremely rare.

CSIS has available powers under statute, known as threat reduction measures, to use against identified actors engaged in foreign interference, and can deploy such measures even against the so-called sensitive sectors, including the political arena, long identified in CSIS policy. However, any threat of using threat reduction measures to publicly name and shame individuals, while potentially effective, must be guarded against abuse. We only have to recall the infamous case of a highly respected Canadian diplomat, E. Herbert Norman, who was driven to commit suicide by a relentless McCarthy ad campaign against him that falsely accused him of being a Communist agent of influence.

Third, I want to draw your attention to the ministerial directive issued on May 16 by the public safety minister in response to the Michael Chong case. That directive emphasizes the need for CSIS to “investigate all threats to the security of Canada that target Parliament and parliamentarians” and to ensure, whenever possible, that parliamentarians are informed about such threats directly. It also requires that CSIS inform the Minister of Public Safety about such threats “in a timely manner”.

While this is an appropriate expression of ministerial accountability, I want to register a hypothetical concern about the potential politicization of intelligence if a minister in any future government gets too drawn into a decision-making role in such matters. At the political level, it would also be important to ensure that the Prime Minister is similarly apprised of any such threat reporting, even if this is not spelled out explicitly in the ministerial directive. At the senior public service level, a dual key system, with the second key being held by the national security and intelligence adviser, might be worth considering.

I have a final note on intelligence challenges in terms of dealing with foreign interference, which I think is not well captured in most media reporting. Intelligence has to understand threat actor intentions, capabilities, and opportunities. These are all distinct elements, and intentions—which can be captured, for example, in communications among Chinese consular officials—do not always translate into capabilities on the ground. Monitoring opportunities for interference operations is also important for timely intelligence. Without timely intelligence, the effort is wasted.

Thank you for this opportunity. I welcome any questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bardish Chagger]

Thank you, Professor Wark.

Professor Juneau, welcome to PROC. You have the floor.

[Dr. Thomas Juneau, Associate Professor, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa, As an Individual]

Thank you.

I'm happy to be back to talk to the committee again. Last time I was here, three weeks ago, my focus was on how transparency should be better used as a tool to counter foreign interference. Today I want to continue in the same direction and focus on other reforms to the intelligence community that could help better counter foreign interference. I want to address issues directly related to what happened to Mr. Chong and, more broadly, to some of the structural problems in the national security apparatus as highlighted in David Johnston's first report.

My recommendations are broadly based on two sources. The first is a book I co-authored recently with Professor Stephanie Carvin from Carleton on intelligence policy dynamics in Canada. This book was based on 70 interviews with officials in the national security world. The second is a report I co-authored with Vincent Rigby, a former national security and intelligence adviser to the PM, with the support of a task force of a dozen retired senior officials, including CSIS directors, other NSIAs and deputy ministers.

My first recommendation is for the creation of a cabinet committee on national security. We need sustained attention at the political level on national security issues. This is essential to approach national security issues in a more proactive and strategic way. The current system encourages a much more ad hoc and reactive approach.

A national security committee of cabinet would need stronger bureaucratic support. That can only come through a stronger national security and intelligence adviser position. More generally, I think the national security committee suffers from a lack of coordination. To be clear, this is not about individuals in specific positions. It is the architecture of the system that encourages silos and prevents stronger coordination from the centre.

I would add that the policy capacity in Public Safety Canada, which also plays an important coordination role, is still too weak. If you look at the main threats that Canada faces today, including foreign interference, they all have to be countered by not just a whole-of-government effort but also a whole-of-society effort. This cannot be done optimally without stronger coordination.

One weakness in the community that has been glaring through recent events is that our intelligence community suffers from weak policy literacy, and the policy side suffers from weak intelligence literacy, though I would say that there have been significant improvements in recent years. This means that the intelligence community is often poorly positioned to provide optimal support to policy and political clients because of its poor understanding of their work. The culture in the intelligence community is still too insular, too closed and too resistant to change. The reverse is also true. Consumers of intelligence in policy, in the bureaucracy but also in politics, are not optimally positioned to ask for the right intelligence support, as we've seen very clearly in recent weeks, and then to know how to use it as part of their work.

It's hard to build better intelligence and policy literacy, but we could do some things better, such as better training. Training in the intelligence community is often mediocre. There is very little measurement of how the money is actually spent. We need secondments and exchanges. We need far more staff movement between the policy and intelligence worlds to help break silos and foster mutual understanding. As I said three weeks ago, there is also an epidemic of overclassification. That remains a major obstacle to information sharing between clients and the intelligence world.

Another major problem is human resources. There are major challenges in the national security community on recruitment, retention, morale and career paths. Security clearances face massive backlogs. These are complicated, frustrating issues to deal with, but the longer they are neglected, the worse the situation gets. If we don't get the human capital foundation right, we will not be able to allow the reforms that we're proposing to succeed.

Finally, there is a glaring need for a comprehensive national security review in this country. This is an exercise that is labour-intensive and bureaucratically very painful, but we have not had one since 2004. It is useful as a brainstorming exercise to consider and develop options and to answer difficult questions about threats we face, about tools, about governance and about human resources. It signals to our allies that we take national security seriously, which is a signal that we badly need to send right now.

To conclude, what may be most important is a point that is often neglected in Ottawa. It would signal to Canadians that national security matters, help raise awareness and provoke a more informed debate.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bardish Chagger]

Thank you very much.

We're going to go to six-minute rounds. Mr. Berthold will have the floor first, and he will be followed by Mr. Fergus, Ms. Normandin and Ms. Blaney. As always, I remind you that comments are to be addressed to the chair. Also as always, because we have two official languages, we will take the time to speak slowly so everyone can understand what we say today.

Mr. Berthold, the floor is yours.

[Luc Berthold, Conservative, Mégantic—L'Érable, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Mr. Juneau and Mr. Wark, thank you for being here today.

Mr. Juneau, I'd just like to go back to one point.

You mentioned security clearance backlogs. What do you know about current backlogs and what they imply?

[Dr. Thomas Juneau]

I simply can't answer that question accurately because the information you're looking for isn't public. So I can't give you any figures.

However, I can tell you that, based on the research I've done, my experience as a National Defence official and the information passed on to me by my students at the University of Ottawa seeking permanent government positions and student summer jobs, which is the case for most of them, there are very long backlogs for top secret security clearances.

However, those clearances are necessary for most jobs in the sector we're considering. Waiting times are more than one year, even two years or more in many cases. This is causing major problems for morale and personnel retention.

Consider, for example, a very talented young individual who wants to join the intelligence community and who gets a job after going through a process, which, in some instances, is very long as well, involving psychological tests, among other things. If that individual is told that he or she will have to wait an additional 6 to 12 months for a security screening to the completed, that individual may not have the patience to wait all that time and might feel frustrated.

This kind of waiting time is causing an enormous problem, one that has been known for a number of years now.

[Luc Berthold, Conservative, Mégantic—L'Érable, QC]

I understand, Mr. Juneau. Thank you.

I just wanted to know if you had some figures to pass on to us because the committee doesn't have any either. It will probably ask the question, which is a good one.

The Johnston report has been released since you last appeared before the committee. One of its recommendations is that no public inquiry be held because that kind of inquiry can't be conducted without compromising national security.

Do you agree with Mr. Johnston?

[Dr. Thomas Juneau]

I partly agree with him.

I think a public inquiry would have been possible, even though it would've had to be conducted mostly in camera. There are precedents for these kinds of inquiries, however. For example, the Public Order Emergency Commission chaired by Judge Paul Rouleau was partly held that way and the Arar Commission extensively so.

In this case, perhaps it could have been conducted more in camera because the information was extremely sensitive, although findings could have been published after the fact.

In my opinion, the more relevant argument for not holding a public inquiry is that it wouldn't have added any substantial value, given all the processes under way, such as the proceedings of this committee and those of the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians and the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency.

My assessment is ultimately somewhat different from that of Mr. Johnston. I think it would've added limited value.

[Luc Berthold, Conservative, Mégantic—L'Érable, QC]

So the public hearings that Mr. Johnston anticipates holding would also be—

[Dr. Thomas Juneau]

I think they may be helpful.

[Luc Berthold, Conservative, Mégantic—L'Érable, QC]

How will they be different from the hearings conducted by the House of Commons Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs?

[Dr. Thomas Juneau]

First, they'll be conducted in a less politicized setting since they won't be held by elected politicians. And, second, they'll generate debate.

But will they have a major impact? I don't think so.

[Luc Berthold, Conservative, Mégantic—L'Érable, QC]

What was your reaction, as an intelligence expert, when we learned that the intelligence services were passing on intelligence that then disappeared down a black hole and that the people who were supposed to get that intelligence didn't seem to want to receive it? No one was troubled at not having access to the emails the intelligence service had sent.

Isn't that clear evidence of incompetence?

[Dr. Thomas Juneau]

I would use the word “imperfection” rather than “incompetence”. The word “incompetence” applies to persons. I don't think those persons were necessarily incompetent.

The system isn't yet perfect. In the book I co‑wrote with Prof. Stephanie Carvin, we extensively explored these issues and interviewed a lot of people. Senior officials and politicians actually aren't very interested in intelligence issues, which is a problem.

[Luc Berthold, Conservative, Mégantic—L'Érable, QC]

That's serious.

We can provide intelligence services with every possible resource, but it will all be in vain if a piece of intelligence disappears down a black hole and no one knows about it. Incidentally, it can't be denied that politicians are elected by the people—

[Dr. Thomas Juneau]

Absolutely.

[Luc Berthold, Conservative, Mégantic—L'Érable, QC]

We're here. We have a major role to play, and partisanship, as you called it, is nevertheless a healthy thing in a democracy, as a result of which—

[Dr. Thomas Juneau]

Absolutely, and that's why I think your work is necessary.

[Luc Berthold, Conservative, Mégantic—L'Érable, QC]

That's it.

I also think that holding hearings as we're doing in this committee is also absolutely necessary—

[Dr. Thomas Juneau]

It's very useful.

[Luc Berthold, Conservative, Mégantic—L'Érable, QC]

But I digress. So I'll go back to my question.

After all these years and all the studies you've done, how is it that we're still in a situation where a minister receives intelligence without being able to access it and that seems to be normal?

As far as I know, no inquiry has been commissioned to determine what's happened.

[Dr. Thomas Juneau]

Our research with Prof. Carvin has clearly shown that senior officials and politicians have limited interest in national security issues.

I think it's appropriate to note that there has been progress. The system works better now than it did 10 or 20 years ago. So we've seen a progressive trend, but one that started at a very low level and really hasn't risen to the level where it should be.

[Luc Berthold, Conservative, Mégantic—L'Érable, QC]

I understand.

We're discussing Mr. Chong, but we also heard from Mr. O'Toole in the House of Commons this afternoon. He virtually corroborated Sam Cooper's initial article on the influence and efforts orchestrated by the Beijing regime to influence the electoral system. For the first time, we heard an MP testify that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service had informed him that he had been targeted by a systematic voter suppression campaign.

Don't you think that monitoring, analysis and observation have to accompany action? But there hasn't been a lot of that to date.

[Dr. Thomas Juneau]

Yes.