Liberal MP Marco Mendicino, former Minister of Public Safety, appears as a witness at the Foreign Interference Commission in Ottawa on Oct. 10.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
Former public safety minister Marco Mendicino said he always acted quickly to review CSIS electronic and entry warrants, a practice that stands in stark contrast to the 54 days his predecessor took to authorize the surveillance of influential Liberal power broker Michael Chan.
A former head of CSIS also expressed surprise at the long delay while a retired senior spy service official said he found it shocking that then-public safety minister Bill Blair’s chief of staff, Zita Astravas, had oversight of the 2021 warrant request when she personally knew Mr. Chan.
“If she knows the principal of the warrant, you would want to recuse yourself,” said Dan Stanton, a former senior executive at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service who has been involved in numerous warrant requests.
Testifying before the public inquiry into foreign interference Thursday, Mr. Mendicino said he never would have allowed a senior political staffer to review CSIS surveillance warrants if they knew the target.
This approach differs from that of Mr. Blair, a former police chief who is now the Defence Minister. The inquiry has heard that when Mr. Blair was public safety minister, the warrant on Mr. Chan sat in his office for 54 days in 2021 before he signed it to authorize the surveillance of the former Ontario cabinet minister and key fundraiser and organizer in the Chinese-Canadian community.
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Mr. Blair has been called to testify Friday about the 54-day delay in authorizing the warrant and why his chief of staff was given responsibility for overseeing the surveillance request.
In recent days, Mr. Blair has blamed Ms. Astravas for failing to immediately inform him of the warrant, which was presented to his office in mid-March. He testified that he signed the warrant when it was placed on his desk on May 11, 2021, just three months before a federal election.
The inquiry also heard that Ms. Astravas handled the warrant despite knowing Mr. Chan, who is now the deputy mayor of Markham, Ont. Ms. Astravas had worked as a senior aide to former Ontario premier Kathleen Wynne when Mr. Chan served in her cabinet.
Mr. Mendicino confirmed that the usual practice at the Department of Public Safety was to review warrants within four to 10 days. He considered ministerial authorization of CSIS warrants to be a top priority.
“We prioritized CSIS warrants during my tenure. When they came up, they were put on my desk without any undue delay,” he said. “I made sure to take the time that was necessary to read them.”
The Liberal MP told the inquiry that no member of his staff would have been permitted to review a CSIS warrant if they had a personal relationship with the target of the electronic warrant.
“I do think there needs to be a constant vigilance around any potential abuses from the elected side of government when taking decisions around foreign interference and political actors,” he said.
Mr. Mendicino, who was dropped from cabinet in July, 2023, said CSIS surveillance warrants are highly sensitive because they involve wiretapping, eavesdropping and intercepting mail. The minister must first sign off on warrants before they are sent to a federal judge for final approval.
“This was, in my opinion, one of the most serious and solemn responsibilities that I had because of the sensitivity of the information and the threats we were trying to mitigate through the authorization of these warrants,” he said. “So I took this part of my assignment extremely seriously.”
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Richard Fadden, a former CSIS director and national-security adviser to prime ministers Justin Trudeau and Stephen Harper, said he’s astounded by what transpired. Warrants are usually only requested when CSIS considers it vital, he said.
“It seems to me that no director of CSIS would ever ask the minister to sign a warrant unless it was at least relatively urgent and important. So I think the 54-day delay is very, very difficult to understand.”
At the same, he’s puzzled why the head of CSIS didn’t press Mr. Blair’s office to hurry up.
“On the other hand, it is unclear to me why, if what I just said is true, the director didn’t jump up and down with the minister, with the chief of staff, with the deputy minister, with the national-security and intelligence adviser, and with the clerk of the Privy Council Office,” Mr. Fadden said
“You do not ask for highly intrusive warrants against Canadians, or somebody else, unless it’s really important – and leaving it sitting for anything more than a few days, I find it very difficult to understand,” he said.
Ms. Astravas was summoned to testify at the public inquiry Wednesday to explain why the eavesdropping warrant application sat for nearly eight weeks in Mr. Blair’s office before he signed it.
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 it.
The inquiry heard that Ms. Astravas asked for a CSIS briefing 13 days after the warrant application arrived in the minister’s office. She wanted to know who else besides the target might be picked up on the surveillance, known as the Vanweenan list.
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 e-mail was sent to then CSIS director David 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 Wednesday.
Ms. Astravas, who was a senior adviser to Mr. Trudeau before becoming Mr. Blair’s chief of staff, said she never informed the Prime Minister’s Office about the warrant, for which Mr. Vigneault had requested a six-day turnaround.
She could not recall when she informed Mr. Blair about the warrant, saying it was sometime between the day of the CSIS briefing and when the minister saw and signed the warrant.
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 she could not recall whether she attended the meeting with Mr. Blair and the spy chief when the matter of Mr. Chan was discussed.
Mr. Stanton, now director of the National Security Program at the University of Ottawa Professional Development Institute, said the warrant process is rigorous and “it is pretty close to being a done deal” when it gets to the public safety minister’s office.
“It is not like you open a box and there is a surprise and here is a warrant process,” he said. “They know it’s coming, especially if it is sensitive like this.”
He added: “The fact that this warrant had a political dimension to it, you would want to expedite it more so there are not funny optics afterwards.”
Asked why he thought there could a 54-day delay, Mr. Stanton said: “It could be something funny, or it could be a matter of pure incompetence. Is that possible?”