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
Things went missing in Bill Blair’s office in the spring of 2021. Important things.
Mr. Blair was, after all, the public safety minister, responsible for the intelligence agencies, the RCMP and the border agency, among other things.
Yet a CSIS intelligence note addressed to the minister didn’t make it to Mr. Blair’s eyes. And when CSIS sent a warrant application to the minister’s office seeking to conduct surveillance on an influential Ontario Liberal and former provincial cabinet minister, Michael Chan, it took 54 days before it got to Mr. Blair’s desk.
That gap of nearly eight weeks, leaving CSIS agents waiting before the minister signed off, has gone unexplained, despite questions at the foreign-interference public inquiry.
Now, Mr. Blair’s former chief of staff, Zita Astravas, has been belatedly added to the witness list, set to testify Wednesday, as the inquiry tries to fill in the 54-day gap.
The question hanging in the air is whether the warrant application was slowed because it went through some kind of political vetting inside the Liberal government – while CSIS agents waited with frustration for the application to be brought to a judge so they could start surveillance.
It was sensitive. Mr. Chan had been an Ontario cabinet minister for 11 years under Liberal premiers Dalton McGuinty and Kathleen Wynne, and was still influential in Toronto Liberal circles. Ms. Astravas, a former spokesperson for Ms. Wynne and a politically savvy senior aide close to Mr. Trudeau’s inner circle, would have understood the sensitivity.
In April, in his first appearance at the inquiry, Mr. Blair bristled at the suggestion he had delayed signing off on the warrant application, insisting he did so on the very day it was brought to him – May 11, 2021.
But officials have testified they sent the warrant application to Mr. Blair’s office nearly eight weeks earlier, and there’s almost no information about what happened in the meantime. That raises the question of whether political staffers kept the warrant application away from the eyes of the minister for weeks.
On Tuesday, the deputy minister of the Public Safety department at the time, Rob Stewart, said it would have been Mr. Blair’s chief of staff, Ms. Astravas, who would have received the warrant application when it was delivered to the minister’s office, and that she was responsible for bringing it to the minister.
Apparently, she already knew it was coming: Michelle Tessier, deputy director of CSIS at the time, testified on Sept. 27 that she had given Ms. Astravas a heads-up before the warrant application was sent to the minister’s office.
Of course, it’s possible there were concerns or issues with the warrant application that caused the delay. A summary of a preinterview with Mr. Stewart, released publicly Tuesday, indicated he believed it would take time for Mr. Blair and his staff to get “comfortable” with the warrant request.
Yet if there were legal or technical concerns, they don’t seem to have been addressed through the obvious channels. Ms. Tessier testified that she can’t explain why approval of the warrant took so long, so presumably CSIS wasn’t being grilled about a lot of details. And the minister in charge of review applications, Mr. Blair, said he didn’t even know about it for weeks.
All this was happening in the spring of 2021, when a lot of things were happening. There were still COVID restrictions as Canadians were getting first and second vaccine shots. And Mr. Trudeau’s Liberals were eyeing the prospect of an early election that was eventually triggered in August.
Still, it would be nice if national-security documents didn’t go missing.
It wasn’t just the warrant application. CSIS sent a memo for Mr. Blair indicating that Chinese officials were targeting two Conservative MPs, Michael Chong and Kenny Chiu, but Mr. Blair never saw it.
A lawyer for the inquiry indicated that Ms. Astravas had said in a preinterview that Mr. Stewart had told her the minister’s regular binders of intelligence wouldn’t be produced during the pandemic – but Mr. Stewart said that was not so. The binders kept being sent, and he assumed they had been locked up in the minister’s office, waiting to be read.
Mr. Blair has till now suggested intelligence officials failed to get information to him. But the bureaucrats have a different answer about that – and no answers at all about the 54-day delay. Now the inquiry can ask Ms. Astravas to fill in the gaps.