Canada’s national security considerations are [redacted], meaning the foreign interference inquiry is [redacted]. More important, such unnecessary secrecy will leave Canadians in the dark about [redacted].
If the above sentences are a little mystifying, just wait until you get a look at the 13 documents released last week by the Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference in Federal Electoral Processes and Democratic Institutions. There was a dry run – a very dry run – last week on disclosing classified information to the public as part of the inquiry’s work. It did not go well.
For one, the level of redaction approached the ridiculous, vaulted over ridiculous and continued on briskly from that point of ridiculousness. One page contained the word “China” with whited-out blanks beside three subtitles: synopsis, sources and information. Most of the documents were from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, and those pages were almost completely redacted.
On Thursday, the Department of Justice warned in a letter to the inquiry that the exercise had been terribly time consuming. It had taken the department 200 hours to screen 13 documents. “This level of national security confidentiality review is not sustainable if replicated over a longer term,” officials wrote.
At the risk of appearing unsympathetic, too bad. China’s meddling in the 2019 and 2021 elections has raised questions about the integrity of Canada’s electoral system. The ultimate outcome of the elections – who formed government – was not affected, but the Conservatives say that the races in several ridings in the 2021 vote may have been.
So, it is completely understandable that Canadians’ faith in the integrity of the electoral system may have wobbled a bit. Transparency is the key to restoring that faith and if that results in some overtime at the Justice Department, so be it.
The department is dropping the not-so-subtle hint that perhaps matters could be more easily settled behind closed doors. That would be a mistake, even if the inquiry had not decided to exclude key players (most notably the Conservative Party) by denying them full standing.
A decision by the inquiry to accept that level of secrecy would be a significant second error, one that would further raise doubts about its ability to fulfill its mandate.
Canadians deserve the widest possible disclosure, within the bounds of not betraying intelligence sources or methods. Since The Globe first published revelations about China’s meddling nearly a year ago, the federal government has waved the talisman of classified information repeatedly, as if this were an immutable law of physics preventing disclosure. But the government can un-classify that which it has classified. If it so wishes.
Part of the problem, as former CSIS director Richard Fadden pointed out, is the deep-seated culture of secrecy in such organizations. There are no institutional advocates for openness, and scant instinct for disclosure. And the government is, to an extent, a victim of that zeal for excessive secrecy. If there had been a practice of more vigorous disclosure, there would be far fewer documents to review and to eviscerate.
On the surface, the Liberals appear to understand the need for transparency. On Friday, Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc spoke to the inquiry about the desirability of openness. “People need to understand the nature of foreign interference, the threat is real,” he said. “We do absolutely accept the need to maximize public understanding of these issues. That is one of the best ways to detect and disrupt attempts to interfere in electoral processes.”
Those are fine words; the Liberals need to back them up with action, starting with retracting the Justice Department’s letter complaining about the burden of declassification. The government can lighten that workload by making it clear that it expects exclusions on narrow grounds: a demonstrable threat to revealing sources and methods, or a disclosure that would demonstrably imperil a security-sharing arrangement with an ally. Short of that, material should be disclosed. (Presumably, China is already well aware of the details of its malfeasance.)
And in reality, the most important questions for the inquiry centre less on the intelligence received than how Ottawa responded.
What did the Liberal government know? When did it know it? And what did it do about it? The answers to that question should never be [redacted].