Hats off to NSICOP

Reading the special report on Global Affairs' little known intelligence programs

The National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (or NSICOP) is a special body (not a parliamentary committee) created by legislation in 2017. It was established to follow through on the Liberal party’s commitment to enhance independent review of national security and intelligence activities of the government, in response to new powers provided to the intelligence community in a controversial anti-terrorism bill (C-51) passed by Stephen Harper’s Conservative government in 2015. It represented movement to fill a long-standing and embarrassing gap in the ability of Parliament to scrutinize intelligence issues. Its members are appointed by the Prime Minister after consultation with the leaders of parties with standing in the House of Commons and consists of a mix of MPs and Senators. The governing party does not control a majority of the members, but the Prime Minister appoints the Chair. NSICOP has wide access to sensitive intelligence, based on several protections build into the statute of the Committee, including the fact that Parliamentarians must have high-level security clearances, swear an oath, and surrender their parliamentary privilege which would otherwise protect them from unauthorized disclosure of classified information. The committee takes a non-partisan approach to issues and is assisted by a small professional secretariat which conducts research on its behalf and drafts reports.

I have been critical in the past of some aspects of NSICOP’s work, notably its discussion of national security challenges in its annual report for 2020, which seemed to me to be unimaginative and too closely tied to issues identified for it by government agencies. See:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/opinion-national-security-1.6003674

But it has also produced many praise-worthy reports and opened up significant topics, including on the organization of the intelligence community (an excellent ‘Canadian intelligence 101’ lesson); how intelligence priorities are set; challenges of diversity and inclusion in the intelligence system; the absence of statutory authority for DND/CAF Intelligence activities—a real stinger; foreign interference threats; and most recently the government’s efforts to defend critical information infrastructure (cyber defence). On all these issues it has torn back the curtain of secrecy.

It is also the case that NSICOP has weathered many storms since its start-up in late 2017. It had to be launched from scratch; had to suffer through the COVID-19 pandemic, which initially restricted its ability to hold meetings and access classified documents; it suffers from election cycles when Parliament and the committee is dissolved, which makes work planning difficult and creates inevitable fluctuations in the expertise of its appointed members. It has also faced existential threats, notably over the Conservative party’s dismissal of the committee, during Erin O’Toole’s leadership, as a tool of the executive, which caused the party to withdraw its members for a time.

https://www.cigionline.org/articles/canadas-national-security-and-intelligence-committee-must-get-back-to-work/

This all took place in the context of the heated battle in Parliament over access to classified records regarding potential security breaches at the Winnipeg National Microbiology lab. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed and NSICOP survived. But its fate hung in the balance for a while and it may be fair to say that the committee is not yet fully loved by all political parties. Nor is it much covered or understood by the media. There may be a connection there.

The next step in the evolution of NSICOP will come with a mandatory five year review of its legislation. That review should already have been launched by Parliament—but there are no signs of it yet.

So much for potted history. To business. The purpose of this column is to examine the latest report produced by the Committee, a study of Global Affairs Canada’s Intelligence operations. The committee’s study began in 2020, was provided to the Prime Minister as required by its legislation in June 2022, and tabled in Parliament after going through a redaction process on November 4.

You can find the report on the Committees’s web site, here:

https://www.nsicop-cpsnr.ca/reports/rp-2022-11-04/special-report-global-affairs.pdf

There are three things to note at the outset. One is that the report is a bit of a blockbuster—coming in at over 100 pages. A second, which may excuse the length, is that this is the first-ever comprehensive, public report on the national security and intelligence activities of a department which traces its history back to 1909. Better late than never, I suppose. The third, and most important, is that it is both revealing, and despite the many redactions, hard-hitting.

Global Affairs Canada (GAC) is a core member of the Canadian national security and intelligence community, yet it doesn’t run any covert intelligence collection activities. There is no independent Canadian foreign intelligence service, along the lines of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, that reports to it. So how is it core? The NSICOP report delivers a clear answer—it is a core department because its responsibilities for managing Canada’s foreign policy intersect at many points with the work of the intelligence system. It is described by NSICOP as one of the largest “consumers” of intelligence in the government of Canada. GAC has an important role in facilitating intelligence operations by other departments, engaging with allies, and managing the blow-back risks of clandestine intelligence gathering. It also gathers and uses a lot of diplomatic reporting, which is not intelligence, but a close cousin. GAC also increasingly produces intelligence assessments on international issues.

The NSICOP report lays out the broad strokes of much of this activity and will be an excellent reference tool for anyone wanting to better understand the department’s role and organization. Its a real gold mine for anyone interested in understanding the nexus of Canadian foreign policy, national security and intelligence.

A key issue that emerges in the NSICOP report concerns the lack of detailed engagement by the Minister for Foreign Affairs and the absence of a reporting framework that would keep the Minister fully informed about sensitive intelligence operations launched by agencies like the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) and the Communications Security Establishment. CSIS can engage in foreign intelligence collection within Canada under its section 16 authorities (largely targeted at foreign embassies and missions). Its also has, as of 2015, new powers to engage in threat reduction measures—essentially pre-emptive actions to reduce threats to the security of Canada. CSE has new powers as of the CSE Act, passed in 2019, to undertake what are called active and defensive cyber operations, both of which could have significant foreign policy implications for Canada. A Minister not fully engaged in some of the Department’s most important national security work is not good for the government; a Minister not fully engaged is a Minister not fully accountable, and that is a problem for Parliament and for the Canadian public.

The question not addressed in the NSICOP report is why this state of affairs exists. The suggestion is that tweaking of reporting structures and procedures would solve the problem. But the problem goes deeper than that, I suggest. At heart, the issue is that GAC lacks an intelligence culture, a long-standing issue for the department, which prides itself on its diplomatic reporting but doesn’t give the same attention to other sources of information. A second issue is that Ministers will come into office generally with little understanding of intelligence and amidst a whirlwhind of issues and punishing global travel schedules, may never catch up. Nor would it be surprising that Ministers are inclined to insulate themselves from intelligence matters as bad news files.

There are signs that long-standing intelligence culture problems at GAC may be lifting, not least in the creation of a post 9/11 initiative called the Global Security Reporting Program, which was designed to reinvigorate the department’s ability to report from embassies and missions abroad on critical security threats. GSRP started small but has grown to a cadre of 31 positions in 2021. It is also fair to say that a study of GSRP is a self-inflicted gap on NSICOP’s part. The Committee report notes that it did not want to duplicate a study conducted in 2020 by its sister review body, the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency. What the NSICOP report does not mention is that the NSIRA study was allegedly so sensitive that none of its report could be made public. Secret review is not really review at all.

Another indication that GAC may be strengthening its intelligence culture was the creation of an Intelligence Bureau in 2019, designed to strengthen the ability of the department to produce strategic intelligence assessments. NSICOP has little to say about this development and misrepresents the overall effort of the new bureau. That is another gap in what is otherwise an excellent report.

Amidst all the details of organizational practice within GAC, the NSICOP report does some stand-out work drawing attention to serious deficiencies in the department’s strategic approach to hostage taking incidents. It has long engaged in lessons-learned efforts in the aftermath of such critical incidents, dating back to a 2009 report in the aftermath of the terrorist kidnapping of Canadian diplomats Robert Fowler and Louis Guay in Niger. But the problem the NSICOP report unearths is that few of the lessons learned are actually learned and that no strategic policy framework has ever been set to try to balance competing objectives around an objective of “no ransom/no concessions” and the safe return of the victims. Reading some of the accounts conjures up a picture of bureaucrats racing around trying to manage these critical situations, without sufficient senior political leadership, while the clock literally ticks. In the case of Edith Blais, who was kidnapped in Burkina Faso in December 2018, the clock ticked for 452 days before she escaped her captors.

There are many points around which a stronger culture of intelligence at Global Affairs needs to be built. Being better prepared for hostage taking incidents is one. Enhancing dedicated intelligence collection and assessment is another. Ensuring that Canada’s foreign policy interests are always front and centre in Canada’s intelligence efforts, including the protection of economic security is a third.

One way that a further shift to an intelligence culture might be encouraged would be to develop a foreign policy strategy clearly laying out the role and importance of intelligence. The last one was produced in 2005.

With the Ukraine war and other troubling developments in global geo-politics, the times are a-changing. Global Affairs Canada needs a new approach to intelligence culture, with leadership from the Minister.