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
Former Liberal aide Zita Astravas was called to the foreign-interference inquiry to explain the mysterious 54-day delay before a politically sensitive CSIS warrant application was approved. She did anything but.
Her answers went round in circles. They referred back to previous responses, which hadn’t answered the question, anyway. If anything, the mystery is bigger now.
There were no real explanations for why the warrant application sat in the office of then-public safety minister Bill Blair for 54 days in the spring of 2021.
At the time, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service was seeking a warrant to conduct surveillance on Michael Chan, an influential Toronto Liberal and former provincial cabinet minister in Ontario.
But it took 54 days from the time CSIS sent the warrant application for Mr. Blair’s approval to the day it was signed. And Mr. Blair has said that he signed it mere hours after he first saw it.
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It was Ms. Astravas, as Mr. Blair’s chief of staff, who was in charge of getting the document to him for signature. And she told the inquiry – according to a public summary of her in-camera testimony – that she usually arranged a secure location for Mr. Blair to review such applications.
But when Sujit Choudhry, the lawyer for New Democratic MP Jenny Kwan, asked straight out why she didn’t do that this time for 54 days, Ms. Astravas dodged.
She said the then-director of CSIS, David Vigneault, and the then-deputy minister of public safety, Rob Stewart, met with Mr. Blair many times in that period, and could have raised the outstanding warrant application with him. But both of those individuals had testified that it was Ms. Astravas who was responsible for bringing the document to Mr. Blair.
“Why did you not tell him? It was your job,” Mr. Choudhry said in his cross-examination. Again, no real answer.
Ms. Astravas did talk about some things she had not done.
Lawyers asked if she had sat on the warrant application because it raised concerns for the Liberal Party and the Liberal government, and the veteran Liberal staffer denied it each time. Ms. Astravas testified that she never spoke of the warrant with anyone in the Prime Minister’s Office, or outside the Public Safety Department, out of strict observance of security protocols.
But why hadn’t she acted sooner? There was no indication. The inquiry has heard that it usually takes around 10 days for such national-security warrant applications to be approved. So why did this one take 54?
Inquiry lawyers even produced a bare-bones timeline as aide-mémoire to accompany Ms. Astravas’s testimony. On Day Zero, CSIS sent in the application. On Day 4, Mr. Stewart signed off, and sent it to the minister’s office. On Day 13, Ms. Astravas was briefed by CSIS, so she could be informed. Then nothing till Day 54, when Mr. Blair was briefed, and signed it.
In between, there’s not much.
There is an indication that Ms. Astravas asked questions about what is referred to as the Vanweenan list of third parties who might also be captured in surveillance of the target, Mr. Chan. But not that those inquiries were holding things up.
CSIS officials have previously testified that there was no back and forth of questions being posed by Ms. Astravas or the minister’s staff – and that they can’t explain the delay.
In the same period, the inquiry heard, Mr. Blair approved two other warrants, in four to eight days.
Ms. Astravas said that she couldn’t remember the specifics but said, in general, renewals of warrants often took less time because the minister might not need as much review, and approval of applications for new or novel warrants might take the minister longer. But in the case of the warrant regarding Mr. Chan, the record suggests that she wasn’t asking CSIS a bunch of questions during the delay to deal with complexities – and hadn’t even told Mr. Blair about the application.
This was remarkable testimony in that there was nothing to fill in the blank.
There was no assertion, or even serious suggestion, that there was an explanation for the delay that had to be kept behind the shield of national-security confidentiality. There wasn’t an assertion that the application got lost in work-from-home COVID-19 chaos of the spring of 2021. Or that Ms. Astravas screwed up, or that someone else did.
It’s just a blank. Still.
Those questions will bounce back to Mr. Blair, now the Defence Minister, who is slated to testify Friday. Presumably, he’ll be asked if a CSIS warrant application can bounce around his office for weeks and weeks without an explanation. Someone has to have an answer.