More debate on intelligence and the Freedom Convoy
New voices weigh in
It is vitally important that a broader debate about the conduct of intelligence and the nature of national security in Canada flourishes. The extraordinary revelations, pouring out day by day, from the Public Order Emergency Commission (POEC), may ultimately give us one of our greatest opportunities to reflect on how and how well this country’s national security and intelligence agencies function.
I contributed a commissioned research paper for the POEC that explores the federal government’s national security and intelligence apparatus and its responses to the so-called “Freedom Convoy.” This paper was written with access only to publicly available material at the time. The link is here:
No doubt there will be much more we can learn when the Commission begins to hear, later this month, from federal government officials and Cabinet Ministers on the invocation of the Emergencies Act.
In addition to the columns I have written to date for this newsletter, there is a valuable piece just posted on another substack newsletter, The Line, by Jessica Davis on her takeaways about intelligence based on what she has seen from the POEC hearings to date.
If you are not familiar with The Line, you can find it here:
Theline@substack.com
Its full of smart and often funny commentary on political issues of the day.
Jessica Davis’s guest column is here:
If you not familiar with Jessica Davis, the bio on her security consultancy website indicates that she spent 17 years in different positions in the Canadian national security and intelligence community, left CSIS in 2018, and describes herself as an “internationally recognized expert on terrorism indicators, women in terrorism, illicit financing and intelligence analysis.”
In her piece for The Line, Ms. Davis provides some valuable context about the nature of intelligence work performed by law enforcement agencies but also makes the important point that while there might be differences in mandate between law enforcement and security intelligence performed by federal agencies “common standards apply.”
Ms. Davis cites and commends an early OPP intelligence report on the Freedom Convoy, published on January 20 and notes (as I have done earlier) that this “Hendon” report starkly contrasts with the intelligencee reporting conducted by the Ottawa Police Service. She quotes from a January 29 OPS intelligence assessment (the actual date of the assessment was January 28—I mistake I also made on first reading of this document). As she says “there are so many problems here that I don’t really know where to begin.” She notes plagiarism in the assessment and “clear political bias.” Ms. Davis concludes, that the January 28 assessment was “dead wrong.” She is dead right about that.
What she does not note is that this same assessment was then incorporated in the OPS operational plan to deal with the arrival of the Freedom Convoy(s) in Ottawa—an operational plan that was based on a naive best-case scenario of what might transpire, with no contingency planning for any stay by the Convoy protesters beyond the first weekend of their demonstration.
On one point, Ms. Davis makes the claim that what she calls operational financing of the protest “likely occurred primarily through cash donations and email money transfers.” This seems to overlook the enormous amount of money generated by the crowd-sourced platforms (something OPP Intelligence paid attention to from the outset) and the fact, of course, that email money transfers would have been one way to provide funding through those platforms. What goes unsaid is that prior to the enactment of the Emergency Measures regulations, the financial intelligence unit of the government (FINTRAC) had no regulatory authority to receive reports from banking service providers on crowd-sourced money raising and no means to provide reports to the RCMP on any suspicious transactions occurring on such platforms (which are off-shore).
My main reservation about Ms. Davis’ column is that it ultimately mashes together the reporting of the Ottawa Police Service and the Ontario Provincial police, raising questions about the professionalism of intelligence assessment within both law enforcement agencies. This dilutes the importance of the stark contrast that Ms. Davis herself raises earlier in her column. It also seems that Ms. David is unclear about the genesis of the OPP’s “Project Hendon” and the mandate that it provided to itself for intelligence reporting on mass protests in Canada. To place the OPP’s Project Hendon reports on the same pedestal of shame as the Ottawa Police Service’s abysmal intelligence reporting is an error and, frankly, unfair to the OPP effort. The OPS would have greatly benefited from the OPP reporting, if it had paid actual attention to what OPP intelligence was saying.
Despite these reservations, I encourage you to read Ms. Davis’ piece. And I hope for more debate to come
I have updated my column to try to ensure that readers can get to Jessica Davis's piece. We disagree on whether FINTRAC had any regulatory capacity to receive reports on suspicious financial transactions from banking service providers regarding crowd-funding platform activity prior to the enactment of the Emergencies Act regulations . I rely here on testimony provided by the director of intelligence for FINTRAC provided in testimony to the Parliamentary special committee investigating the Emergencies Act (DEDC)--a parliamentary study that is underway in parallel with the judicial Public Order Emergency Commission. Happy to have others wade in on the arcana of FINTRAC. Following the money with regard to the Freedom Convoy might be one thread, but perhaps not the most important one, except to the extent that it might uncover aspects of foreign interference.
Hi Wesley,
I see you featured my piece for The Line in your newsletter this morning - a few folks have reached out indicating that the link doesn’t work, so I thought I’d send you along a correct one (it seems to redirect to an email rather than the website): https://theline.substack.com/p/jessica-davis-im-an-intel-expert
I’ve done extensive analysis on the fundraising for the convoy that you might find interesting. Most of the money raised from the crowdfunding platforms was never distributed. Thus, the main fundraising actually came from cash and email money transfers. https://newsletter.insightthreatintel.com/p/convoy-finance-by-the-numbers. I think you’re confused about how the crowdfunding platforms work - you don’t email money through them, you use your credit card or bank card, and a payment processor completes the transaction on your behalf. The recipients themselves are still governed under the PCMLTFA, so you’re not quite right that there was no coverage either.
Have a good one,
Jessica