I fully agree.
The last point in my presentation today was to suggest that one of the benefits of a national security strategy review would be raising awareness with the public writ large. There are many ways to do that—in addition to just releasing documents called “strategy speeches”—throughout and after the process on the strategy and review, by politicians but also by senior public servants, the director of CSIS and others. Engagement and consultation with civil society are not things we do nearly as much as we should.
When I say “engagement”, I mean real engagement. There is a tendency in the intelligence community, when it engages with the media, civil society and academics, to view engagement as a bit of an opportunity to “tick a box”, in bureaucratic terms. However, there is a need for serious engagement as a two-way conversation with civil society groups—Chinese Canadians when we're talking about foreign interference, or Iranian Canadians, as we discussed before, and so on.
Engagement with the media is something the national security community does not do well or enough of—the national media, but also local and ethnic media. That's a very important way to get the message out to raise awareness in specific communities. There is a need to ramp up efforts at that level.
The last point, and I really want to emphasize this point, is that the national security community does better today. There is a bit of a theme in what I am saying, but there is an improvement over the last 10 years. I think that's absolutely true, but they still struggle to engage in a meaningful way. Too much engagement is viewed as the offloading of speaking points, which is, at best, not very useful. In some cases, it's actually counterproductive, because it can be offensive. It can convince people that the engagement is not meaningful. Therefore, it reinforces suspicion, mistrust and so on.
It's about engagement throughout a national security review, accompanied by a serious effort to think about how to do meaningful engagement.