Thomas Juneau is a professor at the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. Stephanie Carvin is an associate professor at Carleton University’s Norman Paterson School of International Affairs. They are the co-authors of Intelligence Analysis and Policymaking: The Canadian Experience.
Is intelligence from Mars and policy from Venus? The latest report on foreign interference in Canadian elections by the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency (NSIRA), an independent review body, suggests so.
While NSIRA’s report includes many important findings and recommendations, it is notable that it calls for improvements to the understanding of what intelligence is, or “intelligence literacy,” among consumers of intelligence products. Our research, which included interviews with more than 60 members of the Canadian intelligence and national security community and their consumers, is consistent with NSIRA’s conclusion that there is low – albeit improving – intelligence literacy in policy circles. Our research, moreover, demonstrated that the reverse problem of low policy literacy in the intelligence community was also true. Unfortunately, both gaps carry many implications.
First, low intelligence literacy contributes to a limited appetite for intelligence, implying that many policymakers are not willing to spend much time, if any, to read and seriously engage with it. This makes sense: using intelligence productively is complex, and if policymakers do not fully understand its benefits, they risk being less willing to spend time incorporating it into their already busy schedules.
Second, low intelligence literacy and a limited appetite for intelligence at the political level and among senior public servants implies that important variables shaping the intelligence community’s performance are outside its control. If demand and literacy are not as high as they could be, it becomes more difficult for the units supplying the analysis to do their job, affecting morale and overall performance.
This is not helped by the relative inaccessibility of intelligence products to their intended consumers. To read highly classified documents, policymakers are often forced to go to secure rooms where they are cut off from their phones and emails, often away from their offices, to read products on archaic computer systems. Scheduling such reading sessions in an often busy and unpredictable job can be difficult.
Importantly, the issues raised in the NSIRA report go further than intelligence literacy, suggesting that the intelligence community itself also struggles with how to present information on foreign interference to the government. In other words, the intelligence community suffers from low policy and political literacy on complex issues such as foreign interference or economic security.
As our research found, many in the intelligence community have a limited understanding of how the rest of the government works: who are the clients of their products, what are their mandates, and what are their requirements. Intelligence officers, analysts, and their managers often struggle to understand how intelligence feeds into broader policy and decision-making processes, acting as one input among many and rarely as the decisive one. This has become even more difficult in recent years as the range of intelligence clients has expanded beyond the federal government to include provincial and municipal governments, the private sector, universities, and civil society. Concretely, this implies that their ability to provide a service – intelligence analysis that improves decision-making – is hindered.
This point can be broadened: there is also in Canada a lack of intelligence literacy beyond small circles in Ottawa. In the media, civil society, the private sector and universities, there too often is a poor understanding of the threat environment and of what can be done about it. In some cases, this extends to a reluctance to recognize the existence of a threat and of the necessity of working with the intelligence community to counter it.
What can be done? For all the weaknesses identified in the new NSIRA report and in our research, it is important to emphasize that the situation has improved: policy and intelligence literacy today are better than they were 10 years ago, even if there remains scope for much improvement.
Nevertheless, several solutions can help to steadily build greater intelligence and policy literacy across government and society. These include better training, as well as more secondments and exchanges (an intelligence officer will best learn about broader government processes by spending two years in another department) and enhancing promotion criteria to require managers in intelligence to better understand policy. Greater transparency in national security and intelligence matters can also help raise awareness at every level.
These are not obscure administrative issues: as the NSIRA report and our research show, low intelligence and policy literacy represent significant obstacles in our collective ability to counter threats such as foreign interference. Reforms at these levels are necessary to improve what has often been a difficult dialogue plagued by misunderstandings and misperceptions between the intelligence and policy worlds.