From inside and outside the belly of the beast
PROC hears from a former National Security and Intelligence Adviser to the PM
Vincent Rigby, a career civil servant who spent most of his 30 years in the public service in functions directly related to security and intelligence, appeared as a witness before the Committee on Procedures and House Affairs (PROC) on June 8, to talk about foreign interference issues. Mr. Rigby served as the National Security and Intelligence Adviser to the PM during an 18 month period from January 2020 to June 2021. He then retired.
Like his successor, Jody Thomas, Mr. Rigby was feisty in response to questions. In dealing with a Conservative MP’s allegation about why he didn't take action on specific items of intelligence about foreign interference targeting MPs, he suggested that the MP might consider walking a thousand miles in the shoes of any NSIA. What he was referring to was the pace of the job, the volume of intelligence reporting he saw—up to 7,000 reports over an 18 month period—and the judgement calls that need to be made every day about what intelligence deserved special attention. The candour that can be available to retired civil servants was on full display.
The candour extended both to explaining how intelligence flowed at PCO during his time, and more importantly, to what he felt needed to be done to improve the system, which he admitted needs major work.
As issues of intelligence flows have been highlighted in the special rapporteur’s first report, and will likely continue to be a matter of concern, it’s good to have some of the details nailed down. There were some important takeaways from Mr. Rigby’s testimony, which supplement those of the current NSIA Jody Thomas, who appeared before the committee on June 1 (see my previous column on her testimony, “Jody Thomas spills some beans on intelligence”).
One key point is about how intelligence gets to Ministers (or doesn’t). As Mr. Rigby explained, the NSIA is responsible for advising the Prime Minister on intelligence. Other deputy ministers are responsible for briefing their Ministers. There is no Cabinet committee where such advice and briefings can land in a unified way for consideration. Mr. Rigby emphatically thinks there needs to be one, and other experts agree (more on that in a minute).
Turning to his sphere, Mr. Rigby explained that PCO delivers to the PM a weekly intelligence brief (usually on a Friday). This brief is the product of the Intelligence Assessment Secretariat (IAS) and its contents are signed off on by the Assistant Secretary to the Cabinet for Intelligence Assessments.
There are, incidentally, similar practices engaged in by our Five Eyes partners, including the US President’s Daily Brief, which all US commanders-in-chief breakfast on as a first item of business, and the UK Joint Intelligence Committee “Red Book” for the PM and select Ministers.
The NSIA, Mr. Rigby explained, does not get involved in the writing or approval of the IAS reports that go to the PM, but leaves that to the intelligence experts at the PCO unit. The weekly IAS brief is the PM’s regular intelligence package. The PM can also receive intelligence in other ways, including through briefings by the NSIA. Rigby clarified that the IAS also produces a daily intelligence brief (“Foreign Intelligence Brief”), some portions of which have been leaked to the press (to Global News only), but the daily brief is targeted at a wider audience. It’s not for the PM’s eyes only, or for the PM primarily.
Mr. Rigby also explained to Committee members that during his time as NSIA, foreign interference was recognized as a problem, but the number one priority was dealing with the national security implications of the COVID-19 pandemic. (Remember that?)
He talked about some of the reforms he tried to implement around maximizing the value of intelligence reporting. In particular he explained that he had created a new deputy ministers’ committee on intelligence (DMIC) to try to engage senior officials not just with high level strategic intelligence on global developments, but also with more actionable intelligence, including reports relating to the domestic arena. The idea of DMIC was to fashion a more coordinated, action-focused government response. The new DMIC met twice weekly, but Mr. Rigby noted that it was a very nascent effort with only 6 months of practice when he retired.
In response to a suspicion-laced (there we go again) question about why he had retired, he said he had done his thirty years and wanted to be able to walk out of the job with his health intact, but also was torn because he knew there was a lot of work that needed to be done to improve the system.
In the old days, the code was that senior officials, on retiring from jobs in the security and intelligence world, walked away, maintained silence (taking their requirement to be persons “permanently pledged to secrecy” under the Security of Information Act very literally and to the grave), and looked after their gardens, or whatever. That code has been changing in recent years and to the good. Maybe we will even get a memoir literature from these folk (it happens elsewhere!)
People like Vincent Rigby have chosen to remain active in public policy debates around national security and intelligence, and that is to everyone’s benefit. They will bring a point of view, of course, and an understandable desire to defend their life’s work, but they will bring invaluable experience of realities on the ground. He is a lead example, but not alone.
Mr. Rigby called attention to two independent, public reports that predate the current debate on foreign interference, but which contained insights into the nature of national security threats and some of the deficiencies in Canada’s capacity to respond. His point to the committee was that while people express astonishment at issues that have been recently raised in connection with national security practices (Bloc MPs seem particularly good at astonishment), much of the larger landscape had been previously studied and efforts had been made to call attention to problems and suggest remedies well before the media began firing up stories based on selective leaks of classified intelligence.
BTW, Vincent Rigby was stern in his denunciation of the media leaker(s) as threatening national security and fostering an incomplete and misleading picture.
One of the reports he called attention to was a study he helped lead and co-author (along with Thomas Juneau), drawing on a task force of retired senior civil servants. The study, “A National Security Strategy for the 2020s” was published in May 2022 under the auspices of the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa.
https://socialsciences.uottawa.ca/public-international-affairs/sites/socialsciences.uottawa.ca.public-international-affairs/files/natsec_report_gspia_may2022.pdf
The conclusion stated:
“This report is an effort to identify serious threats and suggest ways we might improve our collective ability to address them…We hope it will generate debate not just within government circles but amongst Canadians from coast to coast. This is a topic that deserves attention. It also demands action.”
The other publication was a capstone report that emerged from a year long project conducted by the Centre for International Governance Innovation on Canadian national security strategy. The capstone report was entitled, “Reimagining a Canadian National Security Strategy,” and was released in December 2021. I co-led the project and co-authored the report with Aaron Shull from CIGI. We actually called the report a “cri de coueur.” We stated in the executive summary that:
“We hope that this capstone report and the 10 thematic reports produced by the project will stimulate new thinking and action on national security. This work is urgently needed and a window of opportunity is at hand.”
https://www.cigionline.org/publications/reimagining-a-canadian-national-security-strategy/
As Mr. Rigby noted, the two reports came to very similar conclusions abut the urgent need for change to Canada’s approach to national security. That urgent need included recognizing a broader range of threats to national security, including from challenges posed by pandemics, climate change and threats to economic security, building a stronger governance system to respond, and taking steps to better educate Canadians and enhance transparency. Both reports called on the government to set to work on producing a public-facing national security strategy (the last, and only one, was done in 2004). Both reports called attention to the need for Cabinet to really pay attention to intelligence as a critical component of decision-making—suggesting a Cabinet committee on national security and intelligence chaired by the PM was a necessary fix. Both reports called for far greater transparency.
Those reports are still out there. They might even be of use, if we can ever turn from a highly politicized blame game focused on the past, and on one particular threat, to an effort to better secure the future against a world of threats.
Trudeau Liberals have been in power since 2015 but did nothing to correct the problems and now want to stop any independent probe into the influence of the Chinese govt.
While the leaking by people inside the Beast is not a practice that is to be encouraged at all. Sometimes the handlers of the Beast (the PMO, and Ministers of the Crown and their political staff) need an Iron Mike Tyson type of punch to the face to get them to do anything. If these reports had not of surfaced, I feel that nobody of influence would have done a damn thing to stop foreign interference.