*I want to thank CSIS for making available to me a copy of the Director’s speaking notes.
Year’s end is a time of reckoning and a time for promises. Even for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. The CSIS Director, David Vigneault, joined in the tradition and made a recent public speech at the highly symbolic Human Rights Museum in Winnipeg.
There is no doubt that 2023 has been a difficult year for CSIS and its Director. (See the interview conducted between Vigneault and the CBC’s Catharine Tunney just prior to his speech):
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/csis-vigneault-1.7057656
There were questions about how CSIS leadership handled intelligence on Chinese foreign interference; displays of a national security system that has sprung leaks in multiple directions; an assassination on Canadian soil with the alleged complicity of Indian government officials; stories of a toxic workplace culture. Lots of bad news. But the Canadian practice with regard to CSIS Directors eschews the NHL tradition of firing coaches when the play turns sour. No one left the Human Rights Museum chanting ‘fire D.V.’ (sorry this is an inside joke about the Ottawa Senators)
The Human Rights museum setting provided a unique opportunity for the CSIS Director to try to reassure Canadians that the conduct of its domestic intelligence agency is fully rooted in Canadian values and in their defence. This can be a difficult proposition in a democracy, where understanding of national security challenges can be in short supply, trust in government debased, and skepticism elevated.
https://twitter.com/csiscanada/status/1734354934236094900
Democratic societies are naturally inclined to look askance at their intelligence agencies. Partly this stems from fearing a misuse of intrusive powers. But suspicion of intelligence services can run through other channels, including concerns about effectiveness, and whether the ways intelligence sees a threatening world correspond to the outlook of Canadians. And there is another troubling dimension. Persistent problems with workplace harassment and systemic racism within CSIS have raised questions about whether it has its own house in order.
A big part of the task facing Mr. Vigneault at the public podium was to try to convince Canadians to share the service’s vision of the threats facing Canada. He described those threats as increasingly complex and intensifying. But the challenge is how to convey those threats in ways that demonstrate their impacts on ordinary Canadians and Canadian society. It’s not a matter of scarifying, but of connecting. The idea is not lost on CSIS.
What David Vigneault called the “human” aspect of national security threats emerged as a leitmotif of his address.
Foreign interference, the threat he led off with, can target an individuals’ freedom of speech; intimidate, harass and mislead individuals and communities; and work to undermine society’s democratic processes. Foreign espionage, especially targeting the commercial and research sectors, can rob individual livelihoods and threaten overall economic prosperity.
Vigneault painted China in no uncertain terms as the leading threat actor when it comes to foreign interference and espionage. Vigneault also portrayed the PRC as a growing threat to Canada’s Arctic sovereignty, adopting tactics designed to allow it to gain a foothold in northern infrastructure, influence local administrations and engage in resource extraction. These developments, he suggested, posed a direct threat to the Inuit people and their self-determination and to Canadian sovereignty.
Pivoting to the threat posed by Russia, Vigneault again tried to put this in the frame of its direct impact on Canadians, calling attention to Russian efforts to undermine Canada’s support for Ukraine through its disinformation campaigns aimed, as he put it, “to push us off course.”
If China and Russia menace from afar, what about the threats that bubble up from within our own society (always influenced, of course, by global developments)? The old security lexicon of terrorism threats has been supplanted by a more nuanced spectrum embracing “religiously motivated violent extremism” (RMVE), replacing Islamist terrorism as a catch-all; “ideologically motivated violent extremism,” which can be issues-based and range across the extremes of the political spectrum; rising threats to elected officials, political candidates and journalists; and hate crimes targeting specific ethno-religious communities. The spill-over in that regard from the war between Israel and Hamas has to be apparent to all Canadians. The Vigneault message to Canadians was to be aware of the dangers of getting at each other’s throats and to be concerned about the impacts on targeted communities and individuals.
If the main thrust of the CSIS Director’s speech was a plea to Canadians to understand the “human face” of the threats the country faces, it was joined by an appeal to trust CSIS to serve and protect Canadians interests. The trust message was directed in particular to communities “where intimidation and coercion is taking place.” There was also a signal, something new for CSIS, calling attention to its engagement with indigenous communities. Vigneault spoke of CSIS efforts to provide security clearances and security briefings for indigenous partners, as a contribution to shoring up support for Arctic security and sovereignty.
But the effort to link trust with partnerships was, in my view, less than successful. If Canadians are to trust CSIS and be willing to work with it, they need to know that is a highly capable organization equipped to tackle the diverse threats the country faces. Admittedly, it is difficult for an intelligence service to parade its successes. Also, CSIS does not want to undercut a message that its needs new legislative tools to be fully effective. So these factors put some brakes on a more direct appeal for trust. But a message about threats needs to be accompanied by a message about responses to those threats, rather than leave this behind the secret curtain.
If the Director’s public speech is to become an annual event on the Australian model, as is the current CSIS plan, more needs to be said about the range of missions that CSIS performs under its CSIS Act section 2 mandate, and the tools it has to undertake them. Some of this can be ported from the CSIS annual report, but the Canadian public needs to hear from the Director about how CSIS responds to threats of foreign interference and espionage, about the Service’s work to support economic resilience, about its counter-proliferation mission, about its role in addressing disinformation, about its ability to keep secrets. The speech was notably silent on any efforts that CSIS might be making to stop the leaking of classified intelligence to the media.
For the most recent CSIS public annual report (for 2022), see:
The trust appeal is potentially undermined not just by the lack of concrete information about CSIS responses to threats, but by the persistence of reports of systemic racism, discrimination, and sexual harassment within the organization. This puts CSIS in the unhappy company of the RCMP and DND/CAF. Recent allegations of rape and a toxic workplace in the B.C. office of CSIS, following a Canadian Press investigation, have put CSIS on the hotseat again.
The Prime Minister responded to news stories by stating that the revelations were “devastating” and “absolutely unacceptable.“
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/csis-claims-devastating-pm-1.7045128
The Service, in a news release posted to its website on December 1, 2023, has defended the promptness of its response when it learned of the allegations and indicated it will action recommendations from a third-party investigation which it launched.
David Vigneault, speaking while these revelations remained fresh in the public mind, ate some inevitable humble pie and used the occasion of his Human Rights Museum talk to address the Service’s “shortcomings” and to ensure it provides a “safe and supportive workplace.” He indicated a plan to establish a CSIS ombudsperson as an impartial and confidential avenue for raising workplace complaints. The CSIS Director also stated that going forward CSIS will publish an annual report on wrongdoing, misconduct and harassment. His willingness to be transparent on this issue is very welcome and suggests he believes that CSIS will be able to deal successfully with workplace grievances and clean up its Augean stables in short order.
This takes a leap of faith, as David Vigneault will know. Workplace issues have dogged him from the start. No sooner did he become the Director of CSIS, in June 2017, than he was confronted with an unprecedented $35 million dollar lawsuit from five employees who argued that CSIS officials displayed rampant Islamophobic, racist and homophobic vierws. Vigneault, to his credit, held a meeting with the five, and ordered a workplace assessment of the CSIS regional office in Toronto.
An executive summary of the findings of that workplace assessment was made public by CSIS and did not paint a pretty picture. It featured complaints later aired in the published memoir of Huda Mukbil, one of the CSIS employees involved in the lawsuit, who has become its public face. She charged that CSIS was an organization still dominated by a white male, old boys club. (See Huda Mukbil, Agent of Change: My Life Fighting Terrorists, Spies and Institutional Racism, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023).
The executive summary, drawing on voluntary interviews with CSIS employees, indicated low morale and a pervasive distrust of management, which got low marks for decision-making, with merit calculations absent in decisions on postings and career advancement.
The 2017 lawsuit was settled with the help of a mediator. As the then newly minted CSIS Director, Vigneault promised to improve CSIS to ensure the service was free from harassment, discrimination or bullying.
That was six years ago, and here we are again with the B.C. regional office and its own toxic workplace. Yet another workplace assessment is underway.
Vigneault was not parachuted in to the CSIS Director job in June 2017, as many of his predecessors have been. He is, in many respects a man of the CSIS cloth, having served in Assistant Director capacities at CSIS between 2006 and 2010 before undertaking duties at CBSA and the Privy Council Office. He knows the culture and by all accounts is serious about ensuring change. He is only the second director in the Service’s history to be reappointed for a second five-year term, in June 2022 (the other two-term director was Ward Elcock). He has three and a half years left in his Directorship to really make an internal culture change happen while steering the Service through a turbulent era of security threats.
Without that internal culture change, building trust with Canadians and building partnerships with stakeholder communities will be seriously damaged.
Probably no one was counting, but Director Vigneault’s public speech at the Human Rights Museum in December 2023 marks the fifth anniversary of his first public address after becoming CSIS Director. That first public speech was delivered to an audience in Toronto of the Economic Council of Canada in December 2018. It is interesting to mark the similarities and differences in these two speeches. Different audience of course; a different time. But in many respects similar themes.
In December 2018, the CSIS Director was trying to signal a shift in the Service’s priorities and concerns, with greater prominence being given to two threats in particular—foreign interference and espionage—the same threats that feature prominently in the December 2023 speech. Vigneault took pains to stress the dangers of economic espionage targeted at the private sector and urged companies to increase their security awareness being conducting assessments of competitive advantage, and IP holdings, doing security audits, and putting in place a corporate security plan. He also talked in 2018 about trust and partnerships, arguing that “a dialogue between the business and intelligence worlds should come naturally,” and that working together would better promote Canada’s economic strength. Threats and partnerships, plus ca change
But dialogue does not come “naturally.” It does not spring up organically, certainly not between the business community slowly awakening to economic security threats and an insular Ottawa intelligence system. It has to be built.
Five years on from David Vigneault’s speech in December 2018, a Business Council of Canada paper on economic security makes the case that a partnership is not there, but that the major companies represented by the BCC understand the need and want to see it built, including through two-way exchanges of knowledge about threats and technological advances, and greater attention to economic security issues within government.
https://thebusinesscouncil.ca/report/economic-security-is-national-security/
Hopefully CSIS and other elements of the Canadian national security system will seize on the opening provided by the BCC report and really get down to building partnerships.
So, after the reckoning, what promises? The CSIS Director promised to ensure that CSIS remains “a pillar of national security.” Future speeches need to lean in more.
For my part, here are three things I would like to see in next year’s instalment of the public speech:
Keep the picture of the threat environment robust and the language blunt, but do more to discuss the concrete ways that CSIS is meeting threats.
Don’t talk about partnerships. Show how they are being built--with the business communities, with indigenous groups, with targeted diaspora communities, with Canadians, with experts.
Demonstrate that transparency around toxic workplaces, harassment and discrimination is working to change the CSIS culture.
David Vigneault will have his chance to get the CSIS team back on track culturally, get the message across to Canadians about the “human face” of national security threats, and build the partnerships he has been talking about from the beginning of his tenure. Let’s see what 2024 brings.
Wishing a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you and yours Wesley. Thanks for your excellent work.
I am increasingly concerned with the level of violent talk at these pro-Palestine demonstrations. Should I be worried that talk will turn to action — I.e. suicide bomber in shopping mall or something worse. BBC news recently reported that British intelligence services predict that Canada is ripe for terrorist action. What do you think and what precautions can the ordinary citizen take to protect themselves, especially when we know the Trudeau government has gutted the military and our intelligence agencies (CSIS & RCMP) are in disarray. Trudeau talks a good line about keeping Canadians safe but in reality it’s just hot air !