Discover more from Wesley Wark’s National Security and Intelligence Newsletter
There is something slightly off-kilter with the time allotments for witnesses before the Public Order Emergency Commission as it enters its final, rushed phase. The former Ottawa Police Chief, Peter Sloly, spent two days on the stand; we were subjected to nearly a week of the “Freedom Convoy” organizers/disorganizers. The federal official at the centre of the protest storm, the National Security and Intelligence Adviser (NSIA) to the Prime Minister, Jody Thomas, appeared for an afternoon on November 17—about the same amount of time as the mayor of Coutts, Alberta. Don’t get me wrong. I appreciated hearing from the Coutts mayor. I just think we needed to hear more, much more from the NSIA.
Jody Thomas was a very composed figure, living up to her reputation for steeliness. She also had a lot of important reflections stored up from an event that was clearly, for her, a watershed moment.
For background, Jody Thomas is a career civil servant (I think she said 35 years worth). She is the most powerful civil servant you have never heard of. Some of her career was spent in obscurity—seven years at Passport Canada, not a usual breeding ground for government high-flyers. Then she moved to the senior ranks of the Coast Guard, rising to Commissioner from 2015-2017. The next rung up, a steep climb, was the Department of National Defence, where she became Deputy Minister in 2017. She was plucked out of DND to move to the Privy Council Office as National Security and Intelligence Adviser to the Prime Minister on January 11, 2022. She was roughly two weeks into the job when she had her first briefing on the gathering of the “Freedom Convoy.”
I want to convey some initial thoughts on Ms. Thomas’ testimony. There will be more to ponder as the testimony transcript and related documents become available.
Its rare to hear from National Security and Intelligence Advisors, even though the post is nearly twenty years old. Ms. Thomas’s predecessor, Vincent Rigby, broke with tradition by actually delivering a public speech towards the end of his tenure. https://www.cigionline.org/events/national-security-challenges-21st-century-discussion-vincent-rigby-national-security-and/
NSIAs move in the shadow of the Prime Minister, the Cabinet, the intelligence community, the world of secrets. Ms. Thomas’ role is to try to achieve high-level coordination of the many departments and agencies that make up the Canadian national security and intelligence (NSI) system, the core entities being CSIS, ITAC, CBSA and the RCMP from the Public Safety Minister’s portfolio, CSE and the Canadian Forces Intelligence Command under the umbrella of DND, and Global Affairs at the nexus of foreign policy and foreign intelligence. The NSIA is the senior-most Canadian government official to liaise with major counterparts from the intelligence organizations of our allies. She briefs the Prime Minister and Cabinet on threats, principally international but also domestic.
A spider, if you like the image, weaving a web of national security information. But in the case of the “Freedom Convoy,” the informational web was distinctly tattered.
Ms. Thomas testimony pointed to four major tears in the fabric of intelligence knowledge.
The first was a broken information thread to connect law enforcement reporting on the Freedom Convoy to her office. The Ottawa Police Service, the Ontario Provincial Police and the RCMP were all generating intelligence reports on the Freedom Convoy, but the activity was siloed and disconnected from the central command post occupied by the NSIA. Ms. Thomas made it clear where she felt the fault for that state of affairs lay—with the RCMP—who should have served as her conduit. That’s a direct knock against Brenda Lucki, the RCMP Commissioner (I plan to write on her testimony for a future column). While OPS intelligence proved abysmally bad, and the RCMP’s own threat reporting was not stellar either, the NSIA missed out on having any insights into the OPP’s “Project Hendon,” the best stream of law enforcement intelligence reporting on the Freedom Convoy. Ms. Thomas relayed the astounding fact that she only learned about Project Hendon after the Freedom Convoy events. (See my previous columns on intelligence failure at the OPS and on the Project Hendon reports. I discuss the RCMP threat reporting in my research paper for the Public Order Emergency Commission: https://publicorderemergencycommission.ca/files/documents/Policy-Papers/The-Role-of-Intelligence-in-Public-Order-Emergencies-Wark.pdf )
A second major rent was in the inability of the federal NSI community to take full advantage of open source intelligence (OSINT) , particularly from social media collection. Ms. Thomas ascribed that failure to a combination of three factors—the lack of capabilities (OSINT is not easy and requires a combination of technological tools and human analysis), the lack of clear mandate authorities, and, again, a siloed system where all kinds of agencies were conducting limited forms of OSINT gathering largely in isolation from each other.
A third problem that weakened the intelligence web was the fact that the NSIA could not call on any integrated office to produce domestic national security threat assessments. In desperation, Ms. Thomas had to turn, in the final couple of days before the invocation of the Emergencies Act, to a secretariat that reported to her responsible for global threat reporting, the Intelligence Assessment Secretariat.
A fourth problem was that Ms. Thomas and her colleagues in the civil service stratosphere struggled to come to a clear understanding of what was meant by a national security threat. If readers find that a shocking state of affairs—well, it was. They could read the CSIS Act of course, but knew it was narrowly framed and out of date. The real problem was that there was no definition of national security in Canadian law and, more importantly, no guiding policy statement. The last national security policy issued by the Canadian government, “Securing an Open Society,” was published in 2004 (even senior officials have trouble remembering the date). Moreover, the National Security Policy didn't do a great job back then of laying out a vision of national security. Here is a link to the 2004 NSP (digitally dusty):
https://publications.gc.ca/collections/Collection/CP22-77-2004E.pdf
As the National Security and Intelligence Adviser struggled with the concept of national security threat, the nightmare that hovered was the January 6, 2021, insurrection on Capitol Hill—very fresh in everyone’s memory. Especially in the minds of leaders of Canada’s intelligence community who would have been privy to inside knowledge about events in Washington based on conversations with their U.S. counterparts. Ms. Thomas knew that the January 6 scenario could not be the only defining model of a national security threat, but the rest of the spectrum, absent policy, was guesswork. Without a clear concept, where the bright lines lay between national security threat, public disorder, and Charter protected protest was more guesswork. And it was guesswork based on inadequate intelligence and affected by political pressure to bring an end to the Freedom Convoy. As Ms. Thomas put it, the question of when it would end was the daily question that punctuated every senior-level crisis meeting.
One of the outcomes of the Emergencies Act Commission will be recommendations for changes to organizations, laws and practices. The NSIA’s testimony gives us some important suggestions.
But before a new national security web is begun, we had better decide what we mean by national security in the 21st century. That effort will require nothing less than a new national security strategy that defines the concept, places it in a framework of democratic practice and national interest, broadens our understanding of threats (goodbye CSIS Act c. 1984), and analyses the response capabilities needed to meet those threats.
The Centre for International Governance Innovation tried to make the case for the need for such a new strategy in a major project in 2021, prior to the Freedom Convoy (which, I confess, we failed to imagine). It is often said about national security policy in Canada that only a crisis provides for change. Maybe that will prove true yet again.
(See Aaron Shull and Wesley Wark, “Reimagining a Canadian National Security Strategy,” December, 2021, for our effort. https://www.cigionline.org/publications/reimagining-a-canadian-national-security-strategy/ )