Zita Astravas, former chief of staff to the minister of public safety, arrives to appear as a witness at the Foreign Interference Commission in Ottawa on Oct. 8.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
The chief of staff to former public safety minister Bill Blair expressed concern to CSIS in 2021 about who else might be overheard through surveillance of Liberal powerbroker Michael Chan after Canada’s spy service sought approval from the minister of an electronic and entry warrant.
Zita Astravas was summoned to testify at the public inquiry into foreign interference on Wednesday to explain why the eavesdropping warrant application sat for 54 days in Mr. Blair’s office before the minister signed it, just three months before the federal election was called.
She did not offer a clear explanation. She had numerous memory lapses about how she handled the warrant, including when exactly she first informed Mr. Blair about the electronic surveillance of Mr. Chan, a former Ontario cabinet minister and key Liberal organizer and fundraiser in the Chinese-Canadian community.
Ms. Astravas, who was a senior adviser in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s office before later becoming Mr. Blair’s chief of staff, said she never informed the PMO about the warrant, which Canadian Security Intelligence Service director David Vigneault had requested a six-day turnaround for authorization. CSIS warrants normally take four to 10 days for ministerial sign-off.
Mr. Blair has previously denied that he delayed approving the warrant. He told the inquiry in April that he signed the Chan warrant on May 11, 2021, some three hours after it landed on his desk. He has blamed Ms. Astravas for not informing him of the warrant that was presented to his office in mid-March.
Campbell Clark: What happened in Bill Blair’s office during unexplained 54-day gap?
Thirteen days after the warrant application arrived in the minister’s office, Ms. Astravas asked for a briefing with CSIS about who might be picked up on the bugs, known as the Vanweenan list, she acknowledged in both an interview before the hearing and in testimony Wednesday.
The Vanweenan list included all individuals CSIS believed could also be intercepted talking to the target during the surveillance period – one that presumably could have included Liberals, both elected and not. Ms. Astravas wanted to know “what impact the warrant would have on the individuals listed,” according to the summary transcript of an in-camera interview.
The inquiry heard that a day after that briefing, an internal CSIS e-mail was sent to Mr. Vigneault in which a spy service official “expressed concern that the warrant application was in danger of not being approved by the minister.”
“I’ve never stated that the minister might not approve the warrant,” Ms. Astravas testified.
The inquiry heard that a CSIS officer also testified in camera that the delay was “unusual.”
Ms. Astravas could not recall when she informed the minister about the warrant, saying it was sometime between the day of the CSIS briefing and when Mr. Blair saw and signed the warrant on May 11.
“There would have been an awareness of a warrant within our office at some point between day 13 and day 54 but the first time he saw that document is accurate in his statement,” she said. ‘He was aware of a warrant but I do not have specific recollection if the name [Mr. Chan] was included in that.”
Ms. Astravas tried to shift the onus on to the CSIS director, who she said should have made it a priority with Mr. Blair. On Tuesday, Rob Stewart, who was then deputy minister of public safety, testified it was Ms. Astravas’s job to inform the minister about the warrant.
“At no point was it raised as matter of urgency,” she told the public inquiry.
Asked again why she waited so long, she said it was difficult to speak to the minister in a classified setting because he was often in Toronto during the pandemic.
Under intense questioning from lawyers representing Conservative and NDP MPs, Ms. Astravas was pressed repeatedly to say whether she sat on the warrant to protect her Liberal friends.
“That is false,” she insisted.
Gib van Ert, the lawyer for Conservative MP Michael Chong, suggested that Ms. Astravas slow-walked the warrant because “it was deeply concerned with the operations of your party and your government…and also people you had known for years.”
“Your assumptions are categorically false,” Ms. Astravas said.
Sujit Choudhry, the lawyer for NDP MP Jenny Kwan, said it was her duty to inform the minister about any highly sensitive warrant when they landed on her desk.
“Why did you not tell him? It was your job,” he asked, to which she replied the CSIS director and deputy minister should have told him.
Mr. Choudhry also noted that two other warrants during that period were signed within four days. Did the CSIS director say those warrants were urgent, he asked.
“I do not recall,” she replied.
The inquiry also heard that Mr. Blair and the CSIS director discussed the case of Mr. Chan several months before the application was sent to his office. Ms. Astravas also had a heads-up from CSIS that the warrant was coming.
But Ms. Astravas could not recall whether she attended the meeting with Mr. Blair and the spy chief when the Chan matter was discussed.
“The subject of the warrant had been a matter of discussion with the service outside of a warrant process for some time. And so there was an awareness of an individual and awareness of a warrant, but we did not discuss the specific document,” she said.
Mr. Vigneault testified on Sept. 27 that approximately five weeks after the warrant was sent to Mr. Blair’s office, he raised the issue directly with the minister. A week later, Mr. Blair signed the warrant at CSIS’s Toronto office.
Ms. Astravas, who had served as communications director to former Ontario premier Kathleen Wynne, was asked why she described Mr. Chan as a “sterling character” after The Globe and Mail reported in 2015 that he was a CSIS target. She said the statement was not her personal opinion but the view of Ms. Wynne.
Mr. Chan, has for years been a national-security target of CSIS because of alleged links to China’s consulate in Toronto and association with proxies of Beijing.
On Wednesday, Mr. Chan released a statement on X, decrying the way he has been treated. After 14 years of CSIS surveillance, he asked: “What did they find? What have I done wrong?”
He added: “Nothing has been found and neither has one shred of evidence that I had done anything improper been produced.”
Mr. Chan currently is deputy mayor of Markham, Ont.