Public Safety speaks

Act 4 of POEC begins

We have finally arrived at testimony from government officials to the Public Order Emergency Commission, as to how the government understood and responded to the threats posed by the Freedom Convoy protests and blockades. It will be a busy week.

One sign of how the Commission intends to deal with its raft of federal official witnesses this week, was the creation of a panel of the two senior Public Safety department officials, who appeared together on November 14. (I will add a link to the testimony transcript when it is posted)

The panel consisted of Rob Stewart, the former Deputy Minister (DM) of Public Safety, and Dom Rochon, the former senior Assistant Deputy Minister (ADM) at Public Safety in charge of the national security policy directorate. Both men have recently moved to new posts in government. Stewart was appointed DM of International Trade on October 17; Rochon was elevated to Associate DM of Transport Canada on October 31.

The panel gave us important insights into how the federal government national security machinery was mobilized to have situational awareness of developments regarding the “Freedom Convoy.” The machinery involves information and policy advice escalators that descend down (and up) from Cabinet to a complicated committee structure at both the DM and ADM levels.  The key committees involved were, at the DM level, the Deputy Ministers Operations Committee (DMOC), chaired by the National Security Intelligence Adviser (NSIA), and at the ADM level, ADM National Security Operations committee (ADM NS Ops), co-chaired by the Public Safety ADM (Rochon) and his counterpart at the Privy Council Office, Security and Intelligence Secretariat, Mike Macdonald.

Here are a few immediate take-aways from the panel’s testimony regarding the intelligence picture on the Freedom Convoy. There may be more to come as testimony transcripts and documents are released on the Commission website.

One concerns intelligence flows. The Commission heard that intelligence reports from police forces of jurisdiction, including the Ottawa Police Service, and more importantly, the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) did not make their way directly to the relevant federal government committees. Instead, the assumption was that the RCMP would be aware of such intelligence reporting and would, in turn, bring it to any committee table, including to the ADM NS Ops committee.  Both Stewart and Rochon noted that they were not directly aware of OPP Project Hendon reports, one of the most significant series of threat assessments on the Freedom Convoy. (See my previous columns on Hendon reporting). It would appear from their testimony that the RCMP did not directly mention or reference the Hendon reports in briefings to the ADM and DM committees. That is, to say the least, curious.

The lack of direct knowledge of the Hendon reports may have played into the initial perspective adopted by Public Safety officials about the likely duration and nature of the Freedom Convoy protest in Ottawa.  Both Stewart and Rochon indicated that their view at the time was that the Freedom Convoy(s) protest would only last for a weekend. What was not clear from their testimony was the basis for this assessment. It mirrors the testimony of Ottawa Police Services leadership, but as we saw from their testimony earlier, this understanding was not based on any identifiable intelligence reporting.

Another key take-away was that the national security committee structure was engaged and busy in response to the Freedom Convoy, prior to its arrival in Ottawa. This testimony certainly fills in some timeline and activity gaps from the previous public record.

So, we now know that the ADM NS Ops committee first discussed the Freedom Convoy at a regular Tuesday meeting on January 25—three days before Freedom Convoy trucks began to converge in Ottawa, and then held daily meetings after January 25. One step up, the DMOC also held regular meetings, “almost daily,” starting around January 31 (following the first weekend of the protest events in Ottawa). Cabinet was engaged in a variety of ways, including a set of meetings of the standing Cabinet committee on Safety, Security and Emergencies (chaired by Minister Blair) on February 3, 6 and 8. There were also regular briefings of a small Ministerial group after the first weekend of the protests in Ottawa (e.g. the week of January 31).  On February 10, the Cabinet special committee, the Incident Response Group, chaired by the Prime Minister, finally took over.

We also learned that an entity based in Public Safety, The Government Operations Centre (GOC), which is designed to serve as an intelligence fusion centre and to assist in information coordination, was active starting with a first report on January 19.

This is a lot of activity designed to generate situational awareness.  What we don’t yet have a full picture of is what exactly that situational awareness looked like, beyond the first weekend of the Ottawa protests, how it evolved, and how well coordinated and integrated into decision-making it might have been.

Perhaps the most important thing we learned about the intelligence picture came at the very end of the examination-in-chief, when DM Stewart added that one of the underlying factors in the invocation of the Emergencies Act was the lack of what he called good intelligence on the plans and intentions of the Freedom Convoy. He was referring especially to the overall compilation of intelligence, including from open source intelligence. He characterised that compilation as “challenging.” (If you want to review the video, you can find this segment at 3:04 to 3:06)

https://publicorderemergencycommission.ca/public-hearings/day-22-november-14/

But later, during cross-examination, Dom Rochon was unwilling to agree that the intelligence picture was flawed. How do we square this? The obvious implication here is that the lack of good intelligence was somehow inevitable in the circumstances. There are threads here to pull on —including the notion that the Freedom Convoy was an unprecedented event, that intelligence will always be incomplete, and that one chief source of intelligence—open source/social media intelligence—faced a problem of a very high noise to signals ratio, as Deputy Minister Stewart suggested. But it must be admitted these characteristics are endemic to intelligence efforts and cannot be taken as an excuse.

On the face of it, drawing a link between the absence of good intelligence and the invocation of the Emergencies Act, as Rob Stewart did, is a stunning admission. It reinforces points that I raised in my research paper for the Public Order Emergency Commission, written prior to the POEC hearings.  In my paper I said:

“What seems clear in the case of the intelligence assessment of the ‘Freedom Convoy’ is that it was not just partial but that there was a lack of confidence in its findings as a guide to what the future might hold. Left uncertain, the Government may have felt compelled to reach for the powers of the Emergencies Act as a last resort.” (p. 39)

In the paper’s conclusion, I added:

“Intelligence failures always matter…[they] may have driven reactive decision-making and contributed to paving the way for a ‘last resort’ measure.” (p. 61)

https://publicorderemergencycommission.ca/files/documents/Policy-Papers/The-Role-of-Intelligence-in-Public-Order-Emergencies-Wark.pdf

The role played by the absence of good intelligence in the invocation of the Emergencies Act will need to be considered further in the light of other testimony to come.

At issue here is not just the collection of intelligence (which tends to get the most attention), but its assessment, reporting, and sharing. We also have to pay attention to the degree to which the available intelligence provided, in addition to a current snap shot, an assessment of likely future activities associated with the Freedom Convoy protests.

The Commission, in its final report, can assist with answers to the question: what needs to be done to ensure “good” intelligence in the face of national security risks. Arriving at recommendations will not be helped if senior officials are unwilling to admit that the intelligence picture regarding the Freedom Convoy was flawed. Dancing between an admission about the lack of good intelligence, and unwillingness to admit that intelligence was flawed will get us nowhere.