Minister of National Defence Bill Blair speaks with reporters as he arrives for a meeting of the federal cabinet in Ottawa, on Oct. 7.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
Bill Blair knows how to be a witness. The career cop and former Toronto police chief has even trained other officers on how to testify. He knows how to stick to facts and not let lawyers entice him into speculative testimony in areas where he doesn’t want to go.
And the place he didn’t want to go to when he testified at the foreign-interference inquiry on Friday was inside his own office.
That was the place where, in the spring of 2021, CSIS’ application for a warrant to conduct surveillance on an influential Toronto Liberal, Michael Chan, languished for seven weeks.
Why did it take so long? Mr. Blair does not know. But he’s not upset. Information on what happened in the minister’s office was available on a need-to-know basis, and Mr. Blair feels like he did not need to know.
At the time, Mr. Blair was the minister of public safety, and CSIS had sent up the warrant application to be approved by him before it was submitted to Federal Court. It took 54 days before it was signed by the minister. Mr. Blair insisted he signed it within hours of receiving it.
What happened in the meantime? A timeline prepared by the inquiry indicates it took four days for the senior bureaucrat in the Department of Public Safety, then-deputy minister Rob Stewart, to sign off. It was sent to Mr. Blair’s then-chief of staff, Zita Astravas, his senior political aide. On Day 13, CSIS briefed Ms. Astravas. She asked some other questions at some unspecified point. Apart from that, Ms. Astravas didn’t recall much.
Bill Blair’s former aide can’t explain warrant delay in Michael Chan surveillance request from CSIS
In the meantime, according to evidence presented at the inquiry, CSIS agents were becoming frustrated and concerned about the unusual delay.
Both Ms. Astravas and Mr. Blair denied in their testimony that there was any attempt to stall because of the political sensitivity of the warrant. So perhaps that suspicion grew from the fact that no other plausible explanation was offered.
Still, Mr. Blair’s just-the-facts-ma’am testimony was surprising. His own chief of staff didn’t explain why she took seven weeks to bring a warrant application to him. And he doesn’t seem bothered by that.
After all, Mr. Blair testified that he is diligent about reviewing warrant applications. He approved a pair of other warrants in the same period which, according to evidence at the inquiry, only took four to eight days.
In this case, Mr. Blair has from the start bristled at any suggestion he caused a delay and insisted he signed the warrant application within hours of learning of it for the first time. When inquiry lawyers referred to that as Day 54, Mr. Blair kept saying it was Day One for him.
So you would think Mr. Blair would be hopping mad that his own aide didn’t even show him a warrant application for seven weeks. At the very least, you’d think he’d be expecting Ms. Astravas to have a darn good explanation for it.
Yet Mr. Blair was not perturbed. Gib van Ert, the lawyer for Conservative MP Michael Chong, asked if he thought 54 days was longer than it should have been, but Mr. Blair would not say yes or no.
“I have no basis to come to that determination, but I didn’t know what was transpiring during that interval,” Mr. Blair said.
The minister noted repeatedly that senior public servants, such as then-CSIS director David Vigneault, didn’t raise it with him in the meantime. But he had no criticism for Ms. Astravas. It’s not like he thought she messed up or went rogue.
That makes one thing clear: The seven-week delay is all Mr. Blair’s responsibility.
It happened within his office and, according to Mr. Blair, his office was acting the way it was supposed to.
The concept of ministerial responsibility doesn’t make a minister responsible for knowing everything that happens in the big bureaucracy in their portfolio – which in Mr. Blair’s case included five large agencies. But they have a great level of responsibility for what happens in their own office, and their own assistants.
Instead, Mr. Blair testified as though his own office is a separate thing. He doesn’t know what happened there, or why it delayed the discharge of his own duties – and that’s fine with him.