I have great respect for Elizabeth May, the leader of the Green Party of Canada. She is a consummate MP, as I have experienced on occasions when I have testified before Parliamentary committees that she has participated in. She does her homework, takes the work seriously, is thoughtful and can often drag committees to a higher level of debate—no easy task.
Ms. May gave a press conference on August 18, to announce her return from a near-death health experience and resumption of duties on the public stage.
You can see the press conference here (warning, its one hour long):
She devoted the press conference to her views on the foreign interference problem, having recently acquired a top secret security clearance and been given the opportunity to review the confidential annex to David Johnston’s first (and only) report on foreign interference as special rapporteur, which was released on May 23.
Mr. Johnston had recommended that opposition party leaders be given security clearance so that they could read his full report, including a confidential annex which was not divulged in public. The government accepted that recommendation. Two opposition party leaders—for the Greens and NDP—accepted the invitation (the Bloc and Conservative leaders refused the invitation, on spurious grounds). Ms. May is the first to have gone through the clearance process (clearly on a speeded-up timetable) and the first to have reviewed Mr. Johnston’s special annex in what insider’s call a “SCIF” (sensitive compartmented information facility). You can’t take your ‘smart’ devices into a SCIF (no phones, tablets, computers, not even an Apple Watch) and you can’t take anything out of a SCIF—no notes. For political staffers it is a form of hell. Busy Ministers don’t like it either.
Ms. May seems to have been surprised, not by the security procedures, but by what she was given to read. I am not sure why. The offer was clear—an opportunity to read David Johnston’s classified annex, not to serve as an independent reviewer of a wider range of classified materials. Ms. May suggested she expected to be greeted by “boxes” of materials. This strikes me, I am sorry to say, as disingenuous. What she did see, was a 20 page classified index, complete with citations, and a five page final report (well—there was no public version of this final report, so she is way ahead of ordinary Canadians on that one). The notion that she could have expected to see a larger set of classified documents was completely unfounded.
But Ms. May clearly wants more. She wants to be able to see the actual classified documents and reports that Mr. Johnston’s report refers to in footnotes in the classified annex, so as to be her very own special rapporteur. And I am not sure she would want to stop there, or whether anyone would who did not have a specific terms of reference and was started on the hunt. Maybe she would feel the need to see the underlying intelligence on which the reports and documents were based? Maybe she would need to query intelligence officials about those underlying reports? Where this ends is not clear, but it was not, let me repeat, the offer on the table.
Ms. May said she could not, on the basis of reading the classified annex and short final report, reach a conclusion about whether Mr. Johnston’s findings were “reasonable” (to use a judicial term, possibly inappropriately), or not. But this also was not the point. The point of having access to the confidential parts of the Johnston report were to give opposition leaders the chance to see the full argument that he had compiled and be in a better position to judge for themselves the argument, not the full holdings of the intelligence community.
Ms. May, disappointingly, had virtually nothing to say about the extent to which reading the confidential annex aided her in better understanding Mr. Johnston’s findings, in particular his reading of how the facts weighed up against the media reports. She had nothing to say about her views on the media reporting from Global News and the Globe and Mail.
Ms. May says PCO is considering her request. I hope they say no, frankly. But Ms. May is clearly hoping that her advocacy will bring Mr. Singh on board. At the very least, Mr. Singh will need to stand back and wait to see how the government responds. Once more the government is on a back foot.
If the government now feels under pressure to invite opposition party leaders inside the secret tent to do their own thing as self-made special rapporteurs, the better route would be to declassify some of the key records leaked by anonymous sources and selectively reported by the media and make them widely available publicly. But that won’t happen and probably would not be treated by those who believe there is some scandal underlying the whole business as sufficient.
OK, I have been hard of Ms. May for being disingenuous. I understand what lies behind this. She does want to be her own fact-finder and she does not want to be in a position where she is under pressure to reinforce a controversial report’s findings without more access to the “lake” of records that Mr. Johnston saw. She also doesn’t want to undermine her own party’s position about the need for a full public (judicial) inquiry. But Ms. May knew the deal. She is just being bloody clever about it. There is no basis for believing, as Ms. May suggests, that she thinks Mr. Johnston wanted opposition leaders to see the documents themselves.
On a slightly different front, Ms. May was surprisingly forthright in her denunciation of the anonymous leakers who provided a limited number of CSIS and PCO records to the media for their “review.” She denounced the cloak in which they have wrapped themselves, as “whistleblowers,” and made it clear that leaks damage national security and undermine trust in our intelligence agencies and government. She went so far as to quote Mr. Johnston in saying that “malice could not be ruled out,” in terms of the leakers’ motives. Ms. May is spot on in being concerned that the leakers have a personal political agenda, which their media amplifiers have been little concerned about. She wants them caught.
Don’t hold your breath on that one.
Your comments on Elizabeth May’s dissatisfaction with what she saw only seems to justify the refusal of the Conservatives and Bloc members to take part in this charade.
Say what you want about the ‘leakers’ and the ‘media amplifiers’ without which, it seems to me, we would never have known of this aspect of foreign activity. Or are we to believe that the Government would have revealed these activities on their own? I see no evidence of such openness so far.