NSICOP, the little engine that could

Or, shock and awe, baby

The National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP) consists of a small group of appointed MPs and Senators (currently a Chair plus 6 MPs and 3 Senators), who serve on a part-time basis, and a miniscule professional secretariat (c. 10 staff).  Of the members, only two were present at the creation back in 2017—David McGuinty, a Liberal MP who has ably served throughout as chair, and Senator Francis Lankin. Its engine room is the secretariat, who does the work of document collection, research, arranging classified briefings, and report drafting. The committee members who oversee the process are devoted to some core principles— leaving partisan politics at the door and ensuring unanimity in its reporting. In a Canadian political context where nothing is unanimous and partisanship is everything, NSICOP is an unlikely creation. But it has been meeting behind closed doors since 2017 and, time and time again, has proven its worth in its public reporting.  Those reports often have not received the attention they deserve and NSICOP itself is not very good at pushing them out the door to a wider audience. The Committee has, so far, won few friends in the media.

That may change. Its most recent report on Foreign Interference, tabled in Parliament today, is, well, shocking. ^[1]  It arrives hard on the heels of separate reports from its sister review body, the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency ( NSIRA), tabled in Parliament last week and from the Public Inquiry on Foreign Interference, which published an interim report on May 3. Attention is being paid in the public square.

From the moment it was clear (a year ago, more or less) that there would be three independent reports on foreign interference, the inevitable question was what would distinguish them, or would it be a pile on?  We now have an answer.  Justice Hogue’s inquiry will focus its efforts on the societal impacts of foreign interference, driven by its reliance on public inputs over the summer and public hearings in the Fall, prior to delivering its final report in December. Expect a lot of attention to transnational repression and foreign interference impacts on Canadian communities and individuals.   

As for the two review bodies and their respective reports, there is relatively little daylight between them. Both focus their reporting on governance problems at the federal level in dealing with the foreign interference threat.  Both deploy a narrow and traditional definition of foreign interference targeting elections and related political processes. Both have the ability to work behind the curtain of official secrets, dig into the intelligence reporting, and often come away clearly appalled at what they have discovered. Both make recommendations to try to improve the state of play in national security land.

When review bodies like NSIRA and NSICOP find themselves duplicating each other, that is generally wasteful. In the special, one-off case of the reports on foreign interference, the duplication of effort is excusable, even helpful in getting the message across that THINGS HAVE TO CHANGE.

Things have to change not because traditional foreign interference threats are existential for Canada—they are not by any measure, despite some hyping from CSIS.  Foreign interference is a fact of life in a fractured international system, to be understood, managed, and mitigated.

 Things have to change because a dysfunctional system for dealing with intelligence reporting on foreign interference is the same system that must be relied on to respond to the wider and more dangerous range of threats that confront Canada in this fraught geopolitical era. There are threats of foreign espionage targeting both government assets and increasingly the private sector, cyber threats to “essential” infrastructure, economic security threats which strike at Canadian innovation and prosperity, climate change security threats, the next pandemic threat, extremist threats, threats to the global order, threats, yes, of war. Canada after all stands on the NATO front lines in Latvia in an increasingly tense confrontation with Russia, sails frigates and flies reconnaissance planes in the tense spaces separating China and Taiwan, and has proclaimed a renewed mission to defend the Canadian Arctic, now seen as both vital to Canada’s sovereignty and national interest and increasingly vulnerable.

To adequately cope with all these threats the Canadian state first needs to understand them—that’s the role of intelligence.

Historically, the Canadian national security state is responsive to shocks, and can otherwise be sleepy when the outside world permits. But that permission has been in short supply over the past two decades.  9/11 was a shock; the Afghan mission was a shock; ISIS was a shock; the rise of an aggressive, globally ambitious China was a shock; the Trump administration a shock; the Ukraine war a shock.

Foreign interference is the latest shock.  Shocks move change. This is the hope that underpins the report from NSICOP. If shock is the leitmotif, what does the NSICOP report deliver that distinguishes it from the NSIRA effort? The NSICOP report is twice the length of the NSIRA study, is more granular, often more revealing, and in specific instances more hair-raising.  

NSICOP makes some general findings that the government will not like—that Canada is seen as an easy mark by authoritarian states wishing to meddle in our democracy and that responses to the threat have been too slow in coming. These are matters of interpretation. Whether Canada is an easy mark may matter less than whether it is seen as an interesting mark (it isn’t viewed in that light by Putin’s Russia apparently, but the story is clearly different for the People’s Republic of China and India). The Trudeau government will inevitably contest the portrait of itself as turtle-like in its responses and, arguably, will have some right on its side.

What is really shocking in the NSICOP report are specific instances that take Canadians into the underbelly of foreign interference, revelations of faulty wiring and misconnections between intelligence reports and their intended audience of decision-makers (some repeated from the NSIRA report), and the inability to act on what was known.

The underbelly stories include a nausea-inducing—and heavily redacted—account concerning an unnamed MP who consorted with a foreign intelligence officer, sought to arrange an overseas meeting, and “provided the intelligence officer with information provided in confidence.”  That’s textbook treason.

Less clear cut are instances of what are described as informal, clandestine networks to advance PRC interests during the 2019 election. An informal, clandestine ”network” is probably an oxymoron. We need a better, more precise language to describe what the NSICOP says is a complex web of connections and to distinguish overt from covert activity, legitimate from deceptive.

Also operating in the grey zones are proxies (people acting wittingly on behalf of the interests of a foreign state). CSIS tries to be on their trail, but the trail is challenging and also leads in some alarming directions, to money bagmen and to the work of political staffers. Easy to imagine the access they have and the influence they may exert.

Problems in the interface between the intelligence community and decision-makers appear to be legion, but one telling piece of information in the NSICOP report is that a senior Deputy Minister committee, called DMIC (Deputy Ministers Committee on Intelligence) was created in 2020, disbanded in June 2021 and only reconstituted in March 2023 (hello media reporting). In any event it only held one meeting on foreign interference issues. The NSICOP bottom line is:

“it will not matter how much the intelligence community collects and assesses if its reports are simply read by officials and then ignored.”

When it comes to responses to foreign interference there are deeply worrying stories in the NSICOP report. GAC comes under the spotlight, as does the RCMP.  NSICOP delivers a scalpel dissection of the case of a Chinese diplomat named Zhao Wei, whose interference activities were long known by CSIS, but action to expel him was only taken after he was publicly outed in a Globe and Mail report in May 2023. CSIS had identified him to GAC as a candidate for explusion back in 2019. GAC wasn’t interested. For some reason the department seemed to see declaring a character like Zhao ‘persona non grata,’ was a “nuclear option.”  And so he was allowed to hang around.

Don’t get me started on the non-expulsion of Russian “diplomats.”

The RCMP plays an important role in national security, except when it doesn’t. That the RCMP’s federal policing national security capacities are stretched beyond breaking point is an open secret.  When it comes to dealing with foreign interference, read this:

“The RCMP created a small unit (7 officers) to coordinate investigations of foreign interference and initiated a number of investigations, although it cannot determine exactly how many, nor does it distinguish between those involving democratic processes and institutions and other investigations into foreign interference more generally (e.g. espionage offences). No charges have been laid …”

Elsewhere NSICOP states that the RCMP feels its make-shift “Foreign Actor Interference Team” is unsustainable. 7 officers. Maybe in Lichtenstein.

Overall NSICOP finds a “persistent disconnect between the gravity of the threat and the measures taken to counter it.”  It charges the government with a “slow response to a known threat,” labelling this a “serious failure…from which Canada may feel the consequences for years to come.”  Passion there from a Committee who feels its earlier reporting was simply ignored.

OK, the NSICOP report will be shock and awe for many readers. But identifying problems and finding solutions, winning through shock and awe, if you like, are two different things. NSICOP gets high marks for pinpointing problems, but its recommendations are a mixed bag. Some, such as legislative changes, will be met with a government response that they are on it. Bill C-70, which includes updates to several pieces of national security legislation, including the CSIS Act, plus the creation  of a foreign influence transparency registry, is being considered in committee as we speak.

The committee is strangely silent in transitioning from its own finding that “the government continues to lack an effective approach to engage (on the foreign interference threat) with the Canadian public and other orders of government ” to any recommendations on enhancing engagement.

Nowhere does it suggest any real fixes to the problem of breakdowns between intelligence reporting and decision-making. Not a word on how to ensure the national security and intelligence system has the resources and governance structure it needs.

I do like the recommendation that the National Security Council be brought in from the cold and Canadians given some basic information about its work. But the government will ignore that one, my bet.

To its credit, the NSCIP report makes the threat of foreign interference real to Canadians. It’s our democracy, dammit. Now the government has to fix the intelligence problem—the “intelligence to policy problem.” If that isn’t fixed, we will certainly feel the consequences for years to come.

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^[1] National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians, “Special Report on Foreign Interference in Canada’s Democratic Processes and Institutions,” tabled in Parliament on June 3, 2024, https://www.nsicop-cpsnr.ca/reports/rp-2024-06-03/special-report-foreign-interference.pdf