Threats to Economic security

Good on threats, not so good on what to do about them

The afternoon policy panel on November 29 dealt with a question raised to the top of the agenda of the Public Order Emergency Commission by the testimony provided by Minister of Finance and Deputy Prime Minister, Chrystia Freeland. Minister Freeland had made it clear that threats to Canada’s economic security were top of mind for her when it came to the invocation of the Emergencies Act.

The panel was charged with considering the importance of “Flows of Essential Goods and Services, Critical Infrastructure and Trade Corridors.” It began with some remarks about our general understanding of critical infrastructure(CI) and the kinds of threats that might impact on the resilience of CI (including, of course, climate change threats). We also heard some pretty well understood points about the significance of trade relations with the United States for the economy as a whole and for workers in key sectors. But these remarks came with some more precise statistics, including around job dependency with regard to trade crossing the Ambassador Bridge in Windsor, Ontario and a fascinating brief history of the Ambassador Bridge as a key trade funnel.

Ambarish Chandra was really the stand-out panelist in terms of his ability to explain the nature of trade flows and in particular the significance of trade by land with the U.S., transported by trucks.

One panelist, Phil Boyle, referenced the 2009 Critical Infrastructure Strategy while missing the opportunity to emphasize just how old it is. He noted that The Critical Infrastructure Strategy is currently under review by Public Safety, including through public consultations with stakeholders, but did not discuss the results of that stakeholder consultation, which are now public. Perhaps he was not aware. You can read the report, “Renewing Canada’s Approach to Critical Infrastructure Resilience: What we heard report,” (2022), here:

https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/rsrcs/pblctns/rnwng-cnd-pprch-crtcl-nfrstrctr-rslnc-2022/rnwng-cnd-pprch-crtcl-nfrstrctr-rslnc-2022-en.pdf

Boyle mentioned provincial statutes (including Alberta) that endeavour to protect critical infrastructure by making it a criminal offence to ‘interfere’ with such infrastructure, but raised a concern about the impacts of such provincial legislation on protest and freedom of assembly. He returned to this general concern later in the panel. His rights concerns are legitimate but don’t seem balanced against the need to provide protection for critical infrastructure. He raised the analogy with the use of the War Measures Act, which didn't seem apropos to me. He also confessed that he doesn't have a good answer to the balancing equation. Fair enough that he doesn’t like the current provincial attempts as being too broad and prone to abuse.

The challenges around providing robust protections for critical infrastructure have to be particularized against the nature of the critical infrastructure itself. We can define government offices as critical infrastructure, but we wouldn’t want to go so far as to prevent protest that target such offices. Other sectors of critical infrastructure, for example nuclear power plants, hospitals, border trade and travel infrastructure, seem to me to be less controversial in terms of requiring protection from interference, in the public interest. Pipelines and indigenous protest rights are at the opposite end of the spectrum—not susceptible to easy solutions.

Some interesting issues were thrown in towards the end of the panel, including questions around the value of list-making when it comes to critical infrastructure and a potential role for the application of a “precautionary principle” to critical infrastructure protection. Whatever the difficulties of making useful “lists” in the past might have been (and one of the panelists, Boyle, is an expert on the Cold War and civil defence), we now have digital and graphic tools that might make this a much more valid and living enterprise.

The precautionary principle became a sore point in discussions of pandemic preparedness, because it essentially argues for the need to base planning on a “reasonable worst case” scenario, which certainly didn't happen in the case of Canada and many of its hard-hit Western counterparts in their early response to COVID-19. But it is not hard to see, in principle, that a precautionary principle might have real applicability to risk management for the most critical of critical infrastructure.

Finally, I was struck by the complete absence of discussion of one of the most significant threats that now exist to critical infrastructure—the threat posed by various forms of cyber attack, including ransonware and the hacking of industrial control mechanisms. This may just have been outside the panelists’ expertise, or it may have reflected the fact that there are, to my knowledge, no known uses of cyber attacks by the Freedom Convoy protestors. A final question was raised, but the panel was largely silent and confessed their ignorance. This was an important gap in the construction of the panel.

But any forward-looking concern about the intersection between mass protest and disruptions to critical infrastructure and Canadian economic security will have to take cyber attacks and the very exposed cyber “attack surface” into account. While the Freedom Convoy either lacked the intent, or more likely the capabilities, to use cyber weapons to advance its cause, we cannot assume that it won’t feature in future anti-authority protests. The Communications Security Establishment (CSE) and its Centre for Cyber Security are certainly alert to this problem, but an opportunity was missed to bring it to public attention during the policy roundtable.

A challenge for all the policy panels this week is to marry academic expertise to applied policy recommendations for the Commission. This panel struggled on that front, as valuable as some of the individual commentary was.