Procedure and House Affairs Committee on May 30th, 2023

[Ryan Turnbull, Liberal, Whitby, ON]

You also said, in the same article, that judicial inquiries “are not meant to be used as an instrument to continue partisan political controversy.” In your view, from your assessment of the current political climate and in relation to this topic, are the motives of the parties pushing for a public inquiry focused on the optimum objectives?

[Dr. Wesley Wark]

Mr. Turnbull, that strikes me as a leading question, slightly, and I'll dodge it, if you don't mind.

We all agree there are high passions raised by this issue, and partisan positions have been taken. That is perhaps inevitable in a democracy. There have been many calls for a reduction in the partisanship around the issue of national security, which I think we would all like to see.

[Ryan Turnbull, Liberal, Whitby, ON]

Do you agree with those calls?

[Dr. Wesley Wark]

I do.

[Ryan Turnbull, Liberal, Whitby, ON]

Okay, good.

For my final question, I'd like to ask you this. You've also said that both objectives could be achieved more expeditiously through public hearings. Can you tell me why, very quickly?

[Dr. Wesley Wark]

As you know, Mr. Johnston's mandate—and it was Mr. Johnston who came up with the idea of public hearings and took many of us by surprise with that idea—ends in October. He has a limited amount of time to come up with recommendations. He's clearly, from his first report, going to rely extensively on those public hearings to give him guidance. I think public hearings can call on a wide range of interested actors across Canadian society and experts overseas to help him with that.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bardish Chagger]

Thank you so much.

I'm going to put on the record that, Mr. Turnbull, you had 20 seconds less than the response that came to Mr. Carrie. I know that we want an additional round, so I will try to complete that and provide that extra time.

Ms. Normandin, you have the floor for two and a half minutes.

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

Thank you very much.

Once again, I'm going to put a question to both witnesses, but perhaps Mr. Wark could answer it first.

One of the reasons we've been given for not proceeding with an independent public inquiry is the delicate nature of the intelligence that might be revealed. However, witnesses told us this morning that, in a foreign interference setting, these are relatively easy problems to solve and that this intelligence may be less sensitive than that associated with spying cases, for example.

I'd like to know how sensitive the information on the foreign interference issue is compared to information on the inquiry into the bombing of Air India flight 182 or the Maher Arar inquiry.

In this context, if we attach too much importance to the national security issue, don't we risk classifying too much intelligence as secret and preventing the public from accessing enough information to gain a little clarity?

[Dr. Wesley Wark]

I agree completely with my colleague, Thomas Juneau, that there are systematic, persistent problems with over-classification. I don't think those are going to be solved solely through a focus on foreign interference issues.

An important question is this: What is the level of sensitivity that we're talking about in holding either a judicial inquiry or public hearings on foreign interference? I think it has to be understood as extremely high. I think it also has to be said that some of the media revelations based on the documents clearly compromise what are often called Canadian sources and methods because they refer, among other things, to the contents of intercepted communications flowing between Chinese diplomatic officials in Canada. There is only one way in which that material can be gathered. There are sources and methods at stake, which is at the heart of the information you have to protect.

It is also important to understand that you cannot hold a judicial inquiry into foreign interference without considering where the trends are going, what's ahead, what the current operations are, what the current investigations are, and what challenges they face. Again, all of that would have to be protected by a very heavy and high curtain of secrecy.

With regard to public hearings, we're going to have to deal with that same issue of secrecy. However, they are not going to try to penetrate it but will try to get at the general issues. I think that is the more valuable proposition for Canadians.

[Dr. Thomas Juneau]

I agree with what Mr. Wark said.

I will simply repeat remarks that I made earlier in my presentation and that I've made several times in the media in recent weeks. I'm don't really find the argument against conducting an independent public inquiry, which is that it would reveal too much sensitive information, very convincing. It's possible to conduct a public inquiry even if important information remains secret. Conclusions may be disclosed. As mentioned earlier, some aspects of communication with the public are very important.

In my view, the strongest argument is that conducting a public inquiry would actually add little value. I think that many of the people in favour of holding a public inquiry overestimate the potential benefits of such an exercise and underestimate the contribution that can be made by the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians, the NSICOP, the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency, the NSIRA, and other agencies. I don't think it would make much of a difference.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bardish Chagger]

Thank you.

Go ahead, Ms. Blaney.

[Rachel Blaney, NDP, North Island—Powell River, BC]

Thank you.

This is so interesting.

I will come back to the part I was talking about: having the general public have a level of awareness and literacy in terms of these issues. I also want to touch on the fact that I represent a rather large rural and remote riding. One of the challenges, of course, is how people get information. I find that, as local news providers are struggling for funding resources, more and more people are just going online and don't necessarily have the ability to decipher what is fact and what is not fact.

What kind of commitment do we need to have in this process around educating the general public to have that ability and that literacy to take information in and process it? How does that benefit our national security as a whole?

[Dr. Thomas Juneau]

I think that's a great question. That's a topic that I've been very interested in working on.

For the last three years, until last year, I co-chaired an advisory body for the intelligence community called the national security transparency advisory group. I stopped doing that role last summer. One of the questions we looked at a lot in our work, in the transparency advisory group, was how to promote engagement with Canadians. A lot of the points I mentioned, such as the importance of sustained engagement and meaningful two-way conversations, as opposed to data dumps, which happen far too often. Those are some of the questions that we looked at a lot and that I'm very interested in.

I mentioned media engagement a few minutes ago. I think it really bears repeating. The national security community at the political level, but also at the bureaucratic level, needs to engage much better with the media, not just in terms of quantity but in terms of quality. It's about national media, but also local media—you mentioned how you are in a remote riding—and ethnic media, to talk about foreign interference.

Speaking to members of the media, I know the frustration they feel in dealing with the bureaucracy. I'll stick to the intelligence side, because I don't really know the rest. It takes days to get answers, and when they get answers, they get meaningless, boilerplate speaking points. That is very counterproductive to national security, ultimately. I get why, in the short term, bureaucracies do that, but it's counterproductive.

The reason why we need to think much more deeply about this is that, as I mentioned, societal resilience is a first line of defence against foreign interference, economic espionage, cyber intrusions and so on. An educated population, with the media playing an important transmission belt role, is part of stronger national defence, so it's deeply counterproductive not to do that.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bardish Chagger]

Thank you.

With a desire from committee members, we are going to go with a quick question for the Conservatives, followed by the Liberals, to wrap up this round, and we'll see you on your way.

Thank you so much.

Go ahead, Mr. Small.

[Clifford Small, Conservative, Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, NL]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

My question is for Mr. Wark. I heard him say that we need a security council chaired by the Prime Minister here in Canada. Given how polarized Canada has become in the last eight years, how do you think that would increase the trust of Canadians in our national security, Mr. Wark?

[Dr. Wesley Wark]

Thank you for the question.

I don't think any of us imagine that any particular institutional change to the machinery of government is going to necessarily solve the larger issue around trust in and understanding of national security threats and responses.

I think the benefit of a cabinet committee chaired by the Prime Minister speaks to the question of raising the culture of intelligence within the federal government at the most senior level to ensure that there is a cabinet committee, chaired by the Prime Minister, seized by these kinds of issues and capable of looking ahead to threats that are on the horizon, as opposed to something like the incident response group, which is a purely emergency committee that is reactive and short-term.

[Clifford Small, Conservative, Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, NL]

Thank you.

I have one more question for Mr. Wark.

You spoke about the hearings by Mr. Johnston. How can those hearings be productive, given the epidemic of over-classification mentioned by Mr. Juneau? Do you agree with Mr. Juneau that there's an epidemic of over-classification?

[Dr. Wesley Wark]

I agree with my colleague, Professor Juneau, that over-classification is a problem. It's not unique to Canada, but we certainly suffer from it. One of the ideas contained in the agenda of the public hearings that Mr. Johnston has proposed, as you know, is to tackle that declassification issue to see if something could be done to—

[Clifford Small, Conservative, Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, NL]

Thank you, Mr. Wark.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bardish Chagger]

Thank you.

Professor Juneau, because your name was said, do you want a quick two seconds? Okay. Excellent.

Mr. Turnbull, you have less than two minutes to do whatever you can.

[Ryan Turnbull, Liberal, Whitby, ON]

Mr. Juneau, I'd like to ask you a couple of quick questions with a bit of a preamble. You mentioned the architecture of the system and a coordination role. Mr. Johnston, in his report, talks about shortcomings in the way intelligence is communicated and processed.

When we had Jenni Byrne come to PROC, despite there being eight CSIS reports identifying foreign interference, she said she wasn't really briefed on it and it basically wasn't a concern during the Harper era. We know that Mr. Fadden in 2010 passed information on to the then national security and intelligence adviser with regard to provincial- and municipal-level foreign interference. Prime Minister Harper said he was unaware of it.

Is it possible that these shortcomings in the intelligence system, in the way that communication is relayed up and down, are long-standing problems that have persisted for quite some time?

[Dr. Thomas Juneau]

Broadly speaking, without going into the details of specific issues, I would say yes. I think the neglect of national security and intelligence issues is years old. It's decades old. There is an overall trend. I think we did see clear improvements during the Conservative years from 2006 to 2015 as a result of Afghanistan, for example, but the trend I was describing of steady improvement starts before that, continues during the Harper years and continues now.

[Ryan Turnbull, Liberal, Whitby, ON]

Okay. Great.

As a last question, in terms of the public hearings that the Right Honourable David Johnston proposed, do you think this topic of coordination and the architecture of the system, combined with the communication shortcomings he's identified, would be a good topic? What could we hope to achieve in a public hearing on that?

You've talked about intelligence and policy literacy. I'm wondering whether that's a topic worth digging into in a public hearing.

[Dr. Thomas Juneau]

The short answer is absolutely yes. As I mentioned briefly in my remarks at the beginning, there is a resistance to change within the national security community. If public hearings can create an impetus, public pressure for change and pressure coming from the political level, I think that can only be a good thing.

[Ryan Turnbull, Liberal, Whitby, ON]

Thank you very much.

Thanks, Madam Chair.