Liberal member of Parliament David McGuinty, Chair of the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians, responds to questions from reporters before heading into a meeting of the Liberal caucus in Ottawa, on June 5.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
Of all the responses to the bombshell report of the Prime Minister’s national security advisory committee, in which it is alleged some MPs have been conspiring with foreign powers against the national interest, surely the most arresting was that of Professor Wesley Wark.
The revelations, he told the CBC, are “nausea-inducing.” The urge to vomit seemed particularly to overtake him at the story of a former MP who tried “to arrange a meeting in a foreign state with a senior intelligence official” and “proactively provided the intelligence officer with information provided in confidence.” Prof. Wark’s verdict: “textbook treason.”
The response is noteworthy not only for its loamy phrasing – treason! – or for Prof. Wark’s prominence as a commentator on national security, but because until now the professor had been in the habit of accusing others expressing concerns about foreign interference – in far less evocative language – of “McCarthyism.”
Perhaps Prof. Wark would now agree the latter accusation was ill-judged. The lesson of McCarthyism, after all, is that it was wrong to accuse people of being Soviet agents without evidence – not that there were no Soviet agents. After the report of the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians, likewise, I think the professor would no longer dispute that the problem facing Canada is not just foreign interference, but domestic complicity.
Nevertheless, one detects a sharp intake of breath in certain quarters at that word: treason. It cannot be that the charges are not serious enough to merit the description: taking money and favours from a foreign power in exchange for secrets, influence and even information on their colleagues – “knowing,” as the NSICOP report says, “that such information will be used … to inappropriately pressure” them – is about as serious as it gets.
Neither, surely, can it still be maintained that the allegations are not credible. The report is based on 33,000 pages of classified documents, plus dozens of interviews with top intelligence and government officials. The members of the committee, from all parties and both houses of Parliament, would not have endorsed the intelligence agencies’ findings if they were not convinced of their solidity.
Why, then, the disinclination to call this what it is? I think it is less because the allegations are not serious, than because we aren’t. Treason, we feel, is not the sort of thing that happens in Canada. It’s too big, too bad, too real.
That kind of denial would seem to have infected the parliamentarians involved. It would be one thing if it had only occurred to one of them to betray their country in this way. But for several of them to have taken it into their heads at the same time suggests something more systemic. They either didn’t expect to get caught, or they didn’t think they were doing anything wrong.
Several factors might account for this, and for the public’s relative indifference at the news. One is the decline in expectations of public figures. Decades of scandal have taught us not to expect any better.
You can see this in the almost reflexive resort by government ministers to the politician’s favourite dodge: let’s leave this to the RCMP. The dodge here isn’t just that the RCMP are, for various reasons, unlikely to charge anyone.
It’s the implication: short of a criminal conviction, there’s no scandal. But that is not the standard to which public office-holders should be held. We have a right to expect more of the people we elect than that they should not be proven guilty of actual treason.
A second factor is the decline in Parliament. They’re only MPs, after all: it’s not like it was somebody important.
And a third is our declining sense of nationhood. The case of the traitorous parliamentarians raises an intriguing question: Is it possible to commit crimes against the national security of a country that does not believe it is a nation and makes no effort to defend its security?
After decades of entertaining the idea that the whole thing could be wound up at any minute on the vote of a single province, and after years of being told that the Canadian experience was, from the start, a crime against humanity, it’s hard to get too worked up about a little light treason.
If, what is more, we cannot be bothered to defend ourselves, preferring, as we have for generations, to free-ride on the Americans, can we blame other countries for drawing the appropriate conclusions?
If we think so little of ourselves, if we ask so little of ourselves, if there is so little here here, is it any wonder that we should ultimately come to see this reflected in the people who represent us?