Economic Security is National Security
But not quite yet
In December 2018, David Vigneault, the CSIS Director, gave his first public speech, following his appointment in June 2017.
This was a rare coming out party for the CSIS Director. The chosen venue and audience was an interesting one—the Economic Club of Canada, in Toronto. Mr. Vigneault had a message he wanted to deliver to Canada’s business community. That message was about the threats posed to Canadian prosperity and national interest by foreign interference and espionage. While he rehearsed the dangers still posed by terrorism, he was clear that foreign interference and espionage posed the greater strategic challenge. The Canadian economy was a clear target of these threats which could be advanced in a variety of ways including malicious foreign takeovers, IP theft, and cyber intrusions. Collectively, he called economic espionage a “long-term threat to Canada’s economy and to our prosperity.”
The CSIS Director cited particularly attractive Canadian targets for economic espionage, including AI, quantum technology, 5G telecommunications, biopharma and clean tech. He had some advice for business enterprises to help better secure themselves against the espionage threat. He proposed a “dialogue” between the business and intelligence worlds, and a partnership with CSIS. Nothing specific, but it was a clear reach-out to the business world and a signal that CSIS was reorienting itself to new threats.
The message was repeated again in a February 2021 public address hosted online by the Centre for International Governance Innovation.
This time around Vigneault referred to the combination of espionage and foreign interference threats as a “one-two punch.” He again cited key high-tech sectors as particular targets for what he described as “severe” threat activity, adding ocean technology and aerospace to the list, alongside AI, quantum computing and biopharma. Vulnerability in these sectors was particularly acute for small start-ups and within research labs in academia, characterised by lower levels of security practice and consciousness. China was singled out as a threat actor.
Mr. Vigneault again called for a partnership with the private sector to advance Canada’s economic security. As before, no specific proposals were made, but the CSIS Director suggested that such partnerships could facilitate information sharing, consultations, pooling of expertise and even “joint actions.” The overall approach indicated that CSIS was ready and waiting to engage.
The February 2021 speech closed with a notable line, in which David Vigneault told his audience, “You may think to yourself…I’m not interested in geopolitics. Well, I can say with some confidence that geopolitics is interested in you.”
The message appears to have finally, if belatedly, sunk in with the Canadian business community.
The Business Council of Canada (BCC), based in Ottawa, has just released a remarkable 75-page report, entitled “Economic Security is National Security: The Case for an Integrated Canadian Strategy.”
https://thebusinesscouncil.ca/report/economic-security-is-national-security/
The BCC describes itself on its website as having 170 members, which collectively employ over two million people and contribute fully 50% of Canada’s private sector GDP.
They expect to be heard and, hopefully, they will. The BCC report deserves to be widely read. It is not a piece of special pleading. What it argues for is the need to consider economic security as a central pillar of national security and it calls on the Canadian government to work with the private sector to develop a new national security strategy. This would be the CSIS Director’s call for partnership in real action.
The BCC is alarmed by the growth of what it calls “mercantilist” and “predatory” practices by adversarial states that are championing their own state-controlled or influenced companies and tilting the economic playing field to their advantage. They paint an alarming picture of Canada as being strategically dependent, especially on China, “for a broad range of commodities vital to Canadians’ safety, security and prosperity.”
In advocating for a new approach to national security with economic security at its core, the BCC makes nearly thirty recommendations across three broad areas: strengthening Canada’s economic security capabilities; bolstering innovation and the high tech sector; and expanding Canada’s international security partnerships.
Recommendations to strengthen economic security include amending the CSIS Act to better allow the Service to deal with economic security threats in partnership with the private sector, tightening up the Investment Canada Act to prevent adverse foreign takeovers, and creating more powerful legal tools to combat economic security threats, including revising the Security of Information Act, introducing new legislation to criminalize interference with critical infrastructure, and establishing the promised foreign influence transparency registry.
To bolster Canada’s innovation economy in pursuit of greater economic security, the BCC backs the Liberal Party’s idea for a Canadian version of the U.S. DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), wants more focus on talent development, including through more targeted immigration policies, stresses the need for greater experiential learning at Canadian academic institutions, and better exchange opportunities between business, academic and government agencies.
The BCC calls Canada’s international security partnerships a great force multiplier for the country. But it worries that we have been cut out of AUKUS, the announced tripartite pact between the US, UK and Australia and wants Canada to join its technology development pillar (we are not yet looking for nuclear-powered submarines as is Australia, but, who knows, we may get there). The BCC presses Canada to meet the NATO 2% spending commitment on defence, and to work more closely with our Five Eyes intelligence partnerships on active countering of malicious cyber threats. It ambitiously calls for the creation of a “NATO for trade” to provide for collective defence against economic threats and wants Canada to engage in more “economic diplomacy” (not sure what that means exactly).
The report also lays out an action plan, starting with the creation of a new national security strategy, written in partnership with Canadian business. It recognizes there are governance weaknesses and wants more powers for the National Security and Intelligence Adviser, the establishment of dedicated economic security units in all the relevant ministries, and prominent reference to economic security goals in Ministerial mandate letters.
These are a lot of demands to level on the federal government, but the BCC indicates it is prepared to do its part. It promises to increase investment in the high tech sector and on cyber security; stresses that it is open to information sharing with the government; wants to invest more in academic research; and promises to better secure supply chains.
This is a very big gift horse that deserves something more than a look in its mouth. It is critical about the failure of past Canadian governments to take economic security seriously. But its proposals are very much in the spirit of an April 2023 speech by Prime Minister Trudeau where he said that “we need to look at the world with a wider understanding that economic policy is security policy is climate policy is social policy.”
Time to forge the economic security partnership between government and business; time get to work on a national security strategy that will serve as the road map. Time to move beyond speeches.
Thanks. I am no economist but the report doesn’t read that way to me. There is a desire for greater support to start-ups and key emerging tech sectors
Thanks for drawing our attention to this document, Wes. I’m going to read it shortly. “Economic security is national security” sounds so obvious that it should go without saying, so it is heartening to see business and government actually getting on the same wavelength. National (and economic) security should be at the heart of the federal government’s purpose. It’s not protectionist, just protective. It’s true common sense. Let’s get on with it!