Procedure and House Affairs Committee on June 13th, 2023

[David Morrison]

If I could just finish, Madam Chair.

I believe the CSIS Act required the director of CSIS to only respond with unclassified information.

[Michael Cooper, Conservative, St. Albert—Edmonton, AB]

The notion that you would characterize this as merely information, background information, is really, again, astounding.

We're talking about a memo that specifically indicated that a member of Parliament and his family were being targeted by Beijing. I think you're the first witness to come before this committee who has said essentially that in the face of that alarming information, you felt that the information would not be acted upon. I find that just astonishing, Mr. Morrison.

[David Morrison]

The member is confusing two different pieces of paper. The IMU note that was issued in May was acted upon. I characterized the July 2021 memo as for information and awareness raising, which was published afterward.

[Michael Cooper, Conservative, St. Albert—Edmonton, AB]

The July 2021 memo spoke about a member of Parliament being targeted by Beijing because of his support for a motion declaring that the treatment by Beijing of the Uyghurs is tantamount to a genocide.

It further stated that Beijing's intelligence service, the Ministry of State Security, “has taken specific actions to target Canadian MPs” and you think that's information that should be just passed along in your reading materials. You wouldn't bother, upon that coming across your desk, to see that the member of Parliament has been informed, to see that the minister is aware and to see that had been brought up to the Prime Minister.

Really?

[David Morrison]

Madam Chair, if we go back to my introductory statement, I think it's important to note that I tried to suggest that long intelligence assessments...and according to The Globe and Mail, this assessment was nine pages long and mentioned a great number of areas in which China may be trying to interfere in Canada's democracy. Jody Thomas characterized such assessments as—I forget her exact term—nice to read, but not necessary to read instantly, or something like that.

The larger point is that such an assessment is designed to raise awareness within the community.

I was also clear in making a second point, which was that readers of such assessments, which do not include names and which did not include Michael Chong's name, can safely assume that if it shows up in a periodic assessment, the relevant actions have been taken. I made the distinction between something that appears on the front page as a breaking news story and something that appears in a deep dive.

The July 2021 assessment report was a deep dive, and I stand by my comment that it was not intended, in its own preface, to spur any action. That is made clear by The Globe and Mail reporting on it.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bardish Chagger]

Excellent. Thank you.

Mr. Fergus.

[Greg Fergus, Liberal, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

I'd like to welcome Mr. Morrison and thank him again for testifying today.

Mr. Morrison, you gave, I think, a very important contextual statement today. I'd like to just dig a little bit further with regard to that.

You had mentioned that this report was never intended to require action. Could you very briefly say what kind of reports you would receive that call for action? Did you receive those kinds of reports when you served as the acting national security and intelligence adviser?

[David Morrison]

I recall that during my time as acting national security adviser.... To be clear, I was asked to do it around the first of July for six weeks and I ended up doing it for six months, in addition to my day job. I recall during that time one piece of intelligence, which had to do with Afghanistan, required urgent action.

I do not recall any other intel that caused me to rush to my bosses and say, “We need to do something about this.”

[Greg Fergus, Liberal, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

Again, just to provide us with context—I'm just trying to understand how the process works—at the time, in the role you occupied, there are some memos that you would get that would require you to read pretty much for information only. Are there other ones that are designed for action or where they need your input?

[David Morrison]

CSIS has something called an "issues management brief". I don't know why the acronym is IMU, but it's been described as an issues management note.

I've had a number of different jobs and I may have seen such things in my reading packs over the years. None of them, to the best of my knowledge, has ever been directed to me. That's not the nature of the role of the national security and intelligence adviser, and certainly not of the other roles I have occupied over the past number of years.

I'm assuming that if CSIS has such a thing as an IMU for information, it might have an IMU for action, but that would be a question best put to CSIS representatives.

[Greg Fergus, Liberal, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

Let me dig a little further here. For IMUs, without your revealing material that I'm not supposed to receive and that wouldn't make sense to reveal publicly, I would like to have an understanding of, when it listed this particular memo, whether it listed the nature of the interest of Beijing toward a Canadian member of Parliament? Did they talk about particular threats?

[David Morrison]

Do you mean in the IMU memo?

[Greg Fergus, Liberal, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

Yes, in the IMU note.

[David Morrison]

I wouldn't have seen that because at the time I was the foreign and defence policy adviser. I was not yet acting national security adviser. The time frame is May, and I took over in July. I now know what it says. I can't go into that. I don't know to whom it was distributed. The David Johnston report has a list of people whom it was intended to reach. As we know, it does not seem to have reached all of those people. Again, the important point, though, is that it was for information that CSIS was already intending to take these actions.

[Greg Fergus, Liberal, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

Okay, so this was just keeping you abreast of actions—

[David Morrison]

It was keeping the Minister of Public Safety, and up the chain at Public Safety, abreast of action that CSIS was intending to take.

[Greg Fergus, Liberal, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

Again, you indicated that, when you came into the function in July, you don't recall seeing the note right away, but it's clear that a number of weeks later you must have gone through that note, because there were actions that you had asked for a certain amount of follow-up on.

Again, was that borne of your experience? Would your experience or intuition say, “I want to see more of that” or was it in the note itself that requested some information or action be taken?

[David Morrison]

There was nothing in the note that spurred me to take action. I was the national security adviser at that point for an indeterminate amount of time. I didn't know for how long. It would seem to be a week-to-week or month-to-month thing. I was interested enough in the subject matter of the July 2021 memo to have wanted to know more about the overall area of Chinese foreign interference and to have commissioned a group within PCO to provide additional information.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bardish Chagger]

Thank you.

French-speakers may reply in the language of their choice. The time required for interpretation will not be deducted from the time allotted to Ms. Gaudreau and the other MPs.

Ms. Gaudreau, you have the floor.

[Marie-Hélène Gaudreau, Bloc, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

I'd like not only to thank you, but also to tell you that I feel like I'm in The Twelve Tasks of Asterix, as if the situation will finally be crystal clear only when we finally get all the pieces of the puzzle and hear all the testimony.

Thus, we see that what we are doing is essential. We are parliamentarians, not experts. However, we are before the public, who are currently seeing that we are doing our spring cleaning, which should have been done 20 years ago.

I have a host of questions, and it's important for me to ask them, because I'm really not reassured, not by people's expertise, but because of the flaws in communications. Had it not been for these flaws, the alarm would have sounded. Names would have come out. People would have known. When a potential prime minister isn't even made aware of what's happening to him, that's serious.

Actually, we're seeing that there are several chairs, but they all have big cracks in them. So we're going to be constructive, today.

I understand that the witness, whom I greet in passing, has extensive experience, both at the UN, CSIS and as a deputy minister. However, we urgently need this cry from the heart that will really help us shed some light.

If we ask people if they really trust our democracy, they'll probably say that, if they're told about the new measures we're going to take, they'll believe in it.

I'd like to hear your comments on that and then I'll have a few more questions.

You have a great deal of expertise and you're now collaborating with CSIS, as a deputy minister.

I yield the floor to you.

[David Morrison]

I thank the member for raising all these issues.

I think spring cleaning is always a good idea. I think it helps us update things.

I too worry about the threat to our institutions, both from foreign interference but also from lack of comprehensive understanding of the nature of the threat. In that sense, I would point to the fact that a ministerial direction has been issued on May 16. That makes it very clear that the Prime Minister, through the Minister of Public Safety, wishes to be informed rapidly should there be any information or potential threats to members of Parliament.

On top of that, as has been stated by other witnesses before your committee, the government is, I believe, considering legislative changes to some of the key legal frameworks that govern this space. There's a project afoot—I think it's well known—to create an agent registry. There are potential changes to other laws as well.

I think you can look forward and, indeed, Canadians can look forward, to an updating of the cadres or frameworks that govern this area. In addition to that, as Jody Thomas said when she was before you, within the public service we are creating or tweaking some governance mechanisms and some information-sharing mechanisms to try to ensure that we can do the very best we can in terms of providing relevant information to the government.

The final point that I would make, and I'm happy to expand on it later...I do have a sort of varied background, as you indicated or as the member indicated. I'm not a career public servant. I've seen how other organizations work outside of Canada. What I would say is that I think we have a national security set-up that was optimized for terrorism. We had this period in Canada between 1989 and, say, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, where, after 9/11, the primary threat was deemed to come from terrorists. I'm not certain that's any longer the case.

We have geopolitical tensions. We have foreign interference. We have what the Indo-Pacific strategy calls—I might not get the wording right—an increasingly assertive China. The world has changed, and our set-up needs to be able to adapt to that.

[Marie-Hélène Gaudreau, Bloc, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

What I see is that we need to speed up the process as much as possible. I tell people that transparency is important, and that you have to make the right choices. Obviously, together, we'll be able to put in place a process and the means to reassure people. Right now, we're in the process of learning all the facts, but we need to put it all together and get to the bottom of it, and we need to do so in a neutral manner.

I had a lot of questions, but I'll have a chance to come back to them later, during my two-and-a-half-minute speaking turn.

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bardish Chagger]

Ms. Gaudreau, thank you for giving the deputy minister time to respond. It allows us to have the information we need, so I'm very grateful.

Ms. Blaney, you have up to six minutes, please.

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

Thank you so much, Chair.

Thank you to Mr. Morrison for being here today to testify.

The first question I'm going to ask is just a clarifying one. I think what I heard you say was that you were the temporary NSIA for what you thought was going to be six weeks and it became six months, and that during that time you kept your other job. In fact, it sounds like you were doing two full-time jobs at one time. Is that correct?

[David Morrison]

Yes.