What was the word that Elizabeth May used in her press conference following her reading of the classified version of the report on foreign interference from the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliament?
“Performative.”
She was using it to describe Parliamentary (and other) reactions to foreign interference. Performative in the sense of an act of performance, in contrast to substantive thinking and action.
Parliament is at it again, in agreeing to rush through consideration of Bill C-70, an act billed as dealing with foreign interference, but which has many moving and complex parts, some of them only tangentially related to foreign interference itself.
The legislation deserved better than this--both for what it accomplishes and what it fails to do.
I testified on the legislation before the Senate Committee on Monday, June 10. You get five minutes these days before Parliamentary committees to present opening statements, so not much time to cover the ground on C-70.
In my opening statement I made three general points:
1. C-70 takes a piece-meal approach to national security legislation. It is not a comprehensive overhaul, which is much-needed. Even the most extensive amendments, those to the CSIS Act, are not comprehensive.
2. It is mistake to rush consideration of this legislation, given its complexity and importance. The need for rush is pure politics—all parties getting behind a bill to show that they are onboard with doing something about the foreign interference threat. Passing this legislation now will make little difference, in my view, to what everyone assumes is the focus—protecting the next election.
3. Best for last? We are missing the real point about threats and responses. Public discourse has been narrowly focused on one aspect of foreign interference—that posed by foreign political interference in our elections and related democratic processes. There is a much broader constellation of threats posed by hostile state actors. At the head of the list would be foreign espionage, directed at both the state and the private sector. CSIS Director Vigneault once described foreign espionage plus foreign political interference as a “one-two” punch to Canadian national security. Looking more broadly at the threat landscape we would also have to consider threats to economic security, cyber threats, critical infrastructure threats, research security threats. C-70 has some relevance to this broader array of threats and should be considered in that light, not strictly as legislation regarding foreign interference in a traditional political sense.
As for the response, new legislative tools only get you so far. Without the intelligence reporting to back them and without a federal capacity to enforce them, they are just words in statute.
What has been the core message of all the reports on foreign interference since Johnston in May 2023 (I am skipping Hogue because the work is on-going)? Whether Johnston’s report as independent special rapporteur, or the review by the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency (quickly forgotten in the news cycle) or the most recent, ‘bombshell’ report from the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians, the core message is that our intelligence system is not working properly. Sure, the security and intelligence community is producing lots of reports. The problem is not at ground level in terms of collection, but upstream in terms of the all-important art of intelligence assessment, and further upstream still in ensuring that assessed intelligence reaches senior decision-makers in departments and agencies, and their masters at the political level, right up to the Prime Minister.
We have an intelligence assessment problem; we have an intelligence dissemination problem. Lurking in the background we have an intelligence “culture” problem—not enough understanding of intelligence, not enough attention to its products.
So when red lights are meant to be blinking, they are flickering. That’s not good for a power that wants and needs to be smart to defend itself as a complex democracy and project its interests on the world stage.
I said there was lots that was good in C-70 and some that is problematical, including for potential impacts on civil liberties. With more deliberation time, the good bits, such as the expansion of CSIS’s ability under s19 of the CSIS Act to disclose information to entities outside the federal government, the requirement for a regular review of the legislation to keep it up to date, the new offences for foreign interference in the Security of Information Act, the sabotage provisions to address threats to critical infrastructure in the criminal code—the good could have been made better. The bad, including overbreadth in some of these provisions (especially the sabotage clauses), could have been fixed.
I include in the bad side of the equation the proposal in C-70 to create a foreign influence registry (the FITA—or Foreign Influence and Transparency Act). There are certainly elements of vagueness and over-reach in the legislation, including when it comes to making all manner of “communications” a matter requiring registration, which civil liberties groups have called attention to.
I am a contrarian on FITA. My concern with FITA is also on the pragmatic side. Canada can make a heavy investment in FITA (both of resources and expectations). Will there be a pay-off as a response to foreign interference? I am deeply skeptical of that, at least with the current proposal in C-70 which casts far too broad and undifferentiated a net. The country-agnostic approach is pure humbug.
Besides, there is always a bit of a zero-sum game in changes to national security mechanisms, a bit of robbing Peter to pay Paul. More money and resources for FITA may mean less money and resources for intelligence and law enforcement. That’s the reality. What FITA does not do is address the intelligence problem; it probably only deepens it.
In the rush to get this legislation passed before Parliament rises we are actually missing the real story. The real story is the diversity of threats to national security that Canada faces and the problems with our intelligence system.
Rather than rushing to turn off the lights on Parliament hill, we should be rushing to get the intelligence red lights blinking properly.
Produce a really substantive national security strategy, as promised in the recent Defence Policy update. Produce it with lots of public engagement and even consultation on drafts with opposition parties. This will help address the culture of intelligence problem.
Get the National Security Council working as the head Cabinet table for intelligence assessment and related policy decisions. NSICOP has signalled its unease, and that’s a powerful hint.
Review the performance of, and reorient, the very distributed intelligence assessment system, whose parts grew up like weeds after 9/11. Ensure there is a strong capacity for assessment at the centre in PCO that can report on both global and domestic national security threats. Ensure such reports can reach decision-makers without too many gatekeepers.
Publish an annual threat assessment statement. It could even be based on a current product, the PCO Intelligence Assessment Secretariat, “year ahead” report, which is widely distributed within government but never sees public daylight.
Let’s talk about all this, sometime…No rush.