Reducing the demanding role to part-time is a recipe for more critical intelligence to be overlooked
When he testified before a House of Commons committee on foreign interference in Canadian elections last year, David Morrison, the deputy minister of foreign affairs, said that in his experience no item of intelligence paints “a full or concrete or actionable picture.”
“Intelligence is not truth,” he said, referring to his time as the acting national security and intelligence advisor (NSIA) in 2019, the person responsible for making recommendations on security and intelligence policy to the prime minister.
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He cautioned against putting too much emphasis on any information taken out of context, such as the leaked classified records from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) that said China worked to help ensure a Liberal minority victory in the 2021 general election.
“Intelligence is much more a game of disparate pieces of information, many of which don’t seem to fit together, at least initially,” he said.
Morrison left the impression that it takes years of experience to decipher and interpret the great tides of often conflicting information that beat against the walls of the federal government every day.
Jody Thomas, who is retiring as NSIA at the end of this month, told a separate parliamentary committee that on any given day she received a reading package comprising 50 to 100 pieces of intelligence. “We collect a lot of intelligence and assess a lot of intelligence but what we don’t do a good job of is giving advice to the government,” she said.
Thomas was explaining how Conservative MP Michael Chong was not told that Chinese diplomats were discussing surveillance of his family, even though CSIS informed senior public servants two years earlier.
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The demands of a job that would seem to require more than a passing acquaintance with the tradecraft of intelligence gathering make it curious that Justin Trudeau has just announced that Thomas’ replacement will be the former deputy minister of justice, Nathalie Drouin, who has no obvious security experience in her background.
The announcement has raised eyebrows in the intelligence community. Drouin has been deputy clerk of the Privy Council since 2021, a role she will retain, as well as associate secretary to cabinet, a job which she’ll relinquish to senior bureaucrat Christiane Fox, who will also now be deputy to clerk John Hannaford.
Wesley Wark, senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation think tank, said Drouin has spent the bulk of her career in the halls of justice in Ottawa and Quebec City.
He said there are two potential problems with her appointment: one is that the dual role of deputy clerk and NSIA fails to recognize the time demands of the intelligence job.
He said the other is that a security and intelligence adviser without experience heading a department or agency from the core national security community will face difficulties providing the support that Justin Trudeau’s new National Security Council (NSC) will need. Last summer, the prime minister announced the NSC, a new forum for ministers that he will chair, will be in charge of setting the strategic direction for security and intelligence challenges. It remains unclear what the NSC will do, given the government does not have a national security strategy or even a legislative definition of what constitutes intelligence.
While Drouin’s appointment may be less than ideal from the perspective of piecing together the intelligence picture, her justice experience will be useful to the Liberal government when it comes to responding to any legislative changes it is forced to make after the foreign interference public inquiry releases its report at the end of the year. The government faces other potential demands for legislative changes from another report by the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP), which is expected to deliver its own verdict on the foreign interference issue this year.
Drouin is, by all accounts, an able and dedicated public servant.
She will essentially be a conduit for recommendations coming from other government departments and intelligence agencies — a job which does not demand a specific skill set.
But the appointment is indicative of a broader lack of seriousness and urgency about national security issues. The government’s cyber-security bill, C-26, has languished at second reading in Parliament since last March. The CSIS Act has not been amended since 1984, when computer viruses were spread on floppy disks. And while the U.K. has introduced legislation that creates a legal definition for foreign interference, making it an offence to influence an election and is creating a foreign agent registry, the Liberals have decided to wait for the inquiry on foreign interference to report before acting.
Experts such as former clerk of the Privy Council, Michael Wernick, have urged the government and opposition to act immediately by copying the British legislation, even as the public inquiry is sitting, so that a new law can be in place before the next election.
But this is a government that does not appear to consider national security to be a priority. Drouin will be the seventh NSIA to serve the Trudeau government since it was elected in 2015. None of her predecessors have lasted more than two years.
Part of the problem is that the NSIA does indeed serve the prime minister of the day. It is a Governor-in-Council appointment, which means the incumbent has to maintain a relationship with the prime minister and his office on some tough issues. Some of the NSIAs who have stepped down in recent years were at the end of their careers, but others were frustrated that important issues did not receive sufficient attention or resources.
The Rouleau commission into the 2022 public order emergency in Ottawa noted that the National Security and Intelligence Advisor is the logical person to improve co-ordination of intelligence-sharing within the federal government but said that the office was not established by statute, so any expansion of its role should be carried out in conjunction with a broader examination of its mandate, structure, and role within the security community. The intelligence committee of parliamentarians (NSICOP) has also called for the office of the NSIA to be strengthened.
Instead, it seems to have been downgraded to a part-time position, which is a recipe for another CSIS memo to be overlooked.
National Post
jivison@criffel.ca
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