David Vigneault, Director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, prepares to appear before the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, on June 13, 2023.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
A special national-security cabinet committee set up by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau amid a growing controversy over foreign interference has met only a handful of times as critics accuse the government of not taking seriously threats posed by China and other rival states.
In the months before Mr. Trudeau bowed to opposition demands to call a public inquiry into foreign interference in September, he set up a National Security Council in July to “address issues of pressing concern to Canada’s domestic and international security.” The committee of senior ministers, chaired by the Prime Minister, has met only four times, two sources say.
The Globe and Mail is not identifying the sources who were not authorized to discuss the matter.
Richard Fadden, a former national-security adviser to Mr. Trudeau who also headed the Canadian Security Intelligence Service from 2009 to 2013, said he was hopeful that the newly established National Security Council would meet more often given revelations of Chinese state interference in elections and the alleged role India played in the killing of a Canadian Sikh separatist leader last summer.
“I think four is rather a small number, given what’s happened over the course of the last year. And I was hopeful that this meant that ministers would spend more time on the subject matter,” Mr. Fadden said in an interview. “So I am a bit disappointed, but I never thought, for example, that it would meet once a week or twice a month.”
Mr. Trudeau is also facing criticism for naming Nathalie Drouin as his new national-security and intelligence adviser. Ms. Drouin had served as deputy minister of justice, but she has little national-security and foreign-policy experience. As well, she is starting her new role while keeping her title as deputy clerk of the Privy Council, the agency that oversees the federal bureaucracy.
“I am disappointed that we are not seeing figures who have much more expertise in this area of national security and knowledge of Chinese Communist Party’s overall international strategy to try to influence governments around the world,” said China expert Charles Burton, senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
“I am also concerned about whether this inquiry will really get at enough information to be able to make it clear to Canadians the nature of the Chinese operations in Canada,” Mr. Burton said about the public inquiry headed by Quebec Court of Appeal Justice Marie-Josée Hogue.
Alan Jones, a former CSIS assistant director who testified at the inquiry on Wednesday, said Ms. Drouin is “very able” and was likely chosen because, as a former deputy minister of justice, she can shepherd long-promised reforms to the CSIS Act through the machinery of government.
Canada’s spy agency is proposing that it be given the legal authority to disclose intelligence to entities such as universities, provinces and municipalities to help combat foreign interference. CSIS is also seeking the power to collect electronic and digital information located outside the country that is tied to an investigation of a foreign national residing in Canada.
“[Mr. Trudeau] is not interested in getting advice on how to deal with Beijing or Moscow,” Mr. Jones said. “What he wants is for her to help him fix this problem, which is the CSIS Act.”
Mr. Jones acknowledged there is a lack of seriousness about national security that stands in stark contrast to how the issue is handled in Washington, London, Paris and Canberra.
Deputy Conservative leader Melissa Lantsman accused the government of failing to take concrete action to combat foreign interference.
“It’s clear that Canada’s national security is under grave threat,” Ms. Lantsman said. “Despite this going on for years, and despite the warnings and advice from our intelligence community, the Trudeau government continues to ignore these threats.”
She noted that China set up illegal police stations in Canada, intimidated human-rights activists, meddled in elections and targeted MPs, while Indian agents allegedly played a role in the slaying of a Canadian Sikh leader and Iran has targeted the Persian community.
“It’s failed to introduce a foreign-agent registry. It’s failed to list the IRGC (Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) as a terrorist entity. It’s failed to introduce reforms to the RCMP to strengthen federal law enforcement in national security,” Ms. Lantsman said. “It’s failed to stop the rise of money laundering and organized crime in Canada, involved in everything from auto theft to foreign interference. And it’s failed to be transparent with Canadians about what is going on.”
The inquiry heard Thursday from CSIS director David Vigneault, who promised to provide all classified information on foreign interference to the commission, but stressed that much of the intelligence cannot be shared with the public.
“The commission has received all the documentation with zero redactions,” Mr. Vigneault said. “They are able to read everything.”
How much can be released publicly remains unclear. More than a dozen classified documents, most from CSIS, that the commission had asked to be cleared for public disclosure were released Thursday, with nearly all of the information removed. It served as a test of what could be released.
”We note that the result of the exercise is that the CSIS documents are redacted almost in their entirety,” said an accompanying letter from Department of Justice lawyers.
The lawyers said disclosure of CSIS details of foreign interference would cause damage. “It is reasonable to assume that foreign officials are following the Inquiry such that disclosure of sensitive information would become known to them. This will likely lead to an immediate loss of access to the intelligence that Canada has deemed to be of the highest priority.”
They said government personnel devoted more than 200 person hours in reviewing and censoring these documents. They also warned this level of national-security confidentiality review “is not sustainable if replicated over a longer term” and said it’s “clear that redactions of documents on a large scale will not be a productive way forward within the timeframe allotted.”
This suggests the inquiry will face difficulty in getting the public release of significant amounts of confidential information from CSIS and will have to find other means, such as obtaining security-cleared summaries of information or leaving deliberations to behind-closed-door hearings with summaries produced for the public
The government set up the inquiry into foreign interference under political pressure from all the opposition parties after The Globe obtained secret and top-secret CSIS documents that outlined a sophisticated campaign by China to influence the 2019 and 2021 elections.
Meanwhile, the World Sikh Organization of Canada has asked Justice Hogue to have full standing at the public inquiry so it can cross-examine witnesses and view confidential testimony. The WSO request comes after Justice Hogue asked the government to provide the inquiry with all documents relating to India’s possible involvement in the past two federal elections.