Foreign interference and Canadian intelligence: An FAQ

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Jordan Heath-Rawlings So I really don’t know very much about how Canada’s intelligence community works or doesn’t work. I guess like most of us, I have spent the past month growing increasingly concerned as more and more leaks from that community seem to confirm Chinese attempts to medal in Canadian elections and as politicians. Over who knew what and when, and who is to blame and what comes next. I find myself without a framework to understand the information I’m getting beyond the acronyms. Who are the agencies that make up this community? What does each of them do? Who do they report to? Why would this stuff all of a sudden begin to leak to multiple reporters, who is investigating this now, and what will they actually tell us? Why isn’t this whole process more transparent, or at least as transparent as it can be? So in an effort to provide us all with a solid baseline to understand what we’ll learn, in the months to come. I asked for a primer. I am Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is the big story. Stephanie Carvin is an associate professor of international relations at the Norman Patterson School of International Affairs. She’s also the author of Stand On Guard, reassessing Threats to Canada’s National Security, which includes China, and she is a person we often go to for clarity on intelligence issues. Hi Stephanie. I just wanna start by saying I’m not sure the average Canadian, and I’m including myself in this, understands how our intelligence system actually works. So maybe we could start there.

Stephanie Carvin Right? It is actually a good place to start. So, I mean, I can’t talk about the entire community. It is pretty large, but let’s, let’s talk about our main cast of characters and CSIS, is probably the first thing people think about when they think about the Canadian intelligence community, which I’m gonna shorten to Canadian IC because often how we talk about it.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Mm-hmm.

Stephanie Carvin So CSIS is our National Security Intelligence Agency. They’re, they’re not the Canadian CIA, a, we, there is actually no Canadian CIA a, we have no foreign human intelligence agency. Right. So they only can collect information that relates to the security of Canada, and sometimes that involves going overseas, but by and large, they have to collect intelligence related to its mandate, which includes terrorism, espionage, and of course foreign interference. And they gather intelligence or information through using human sources. And sometimes these are recruited and sometimes it’s just talking to average people who may have information they want, but they can also get warrants to collect information through, say, wire, or what they call information through the global information infrastructure, which is kind of a fancy way of saying emails, and text messages, and any kind of electronic communications.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Right, right.

Stephanie Carvin Then you have the R C M P. Right now, this is our National Police Force. They also do provincial policing. That’s the different story, the R C M P, at the federal level collects criminal intelligence that can be used in prosecution. So whereas CIS gathers intelligence, the R C M P gathers evidence.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Okay.

Stephanie Carvin The other important actor here is the Privy Council Office, which I’m not sure most people have heard of, but it’s effectively the executive arm of cabinet.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Right.

Stephanie Carvin Cabinet says we are going to do. And the Privy Council office works with other departments and agencies to make it so they have their own intelligence assessment secretariats. They importantly, they don’t gather intelligence, they just receive intelligence often from, um, the other Canadian agencies, say like the Department of Defense, CSIS. Okay. They also have access to foreign intelligence from the Americans, the Brits, and the Australians. And they’ve been in the news because they brief the Prime Minister’s office. Usually on two issues. And they also write a product called the Daily Foreign Intelligence Brief, which is, you know, usually provides an eight line summary of intelligence issues. And this is one of the documents that has been in the news and has leaked and has been, uh, a prominent part of the reporting.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings That’s a great overview and I want to turn it towards what we’re discussing today, which is the allegations of Chinese interference into our elections. So when you look at what’s been in the news lately, um, and I know it’s a lot, but maybe you could just kind of assess like what kind of intelligence has been leaked and, and how would we know where it’s coming from?

Stephanie Carvin This is a good question. No, for the most part we know, um, you know, sometimes these documents are referred to as reports, sometimes as summaries, sometimes as briefs, and that’s not a very helpful description, uh, for, for me, because, right, that’s not normally how we would talk about particular documents. The one document I have mentioned, the Daily Foreign Intelligence brief was one of the documents that was mentioned, and I think there’s a little bit of misunderstanding about that document. You know, it’s been kind of portrayed as a brief that went to the Prime Minister. That’s, that’s not really true. The daily Foreign Intelligence brief, I think is sometimes confused with, you know, the Presidential Daily Brief.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings That’s what I thought it was.

Stephanie Carvin Yeah, like, like on the West Wing. Yeah. No, and, and I, this is where, you know, a lot of our misunderstanding about the intelligence community in Canada comes from the movies or comes from trying to understand our own community through the United States.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Right.

Stephanie Carvin Which, which is much more transparent than ours, right? So fair. But no, the daily foreign intelligence brief, honestly, like I’m gonna compare it to like a sub you subscribe to and don’t really read, and it just kind of collects in your inbox. Like it’s important if you just kind of need a quick summary. You know, I, I did a, a study, um, involving, um, 70 individuals in the intelligence community with my colleague, uh, Tama Juno from the University of Ottawa. And we found that the daily foreign intelligence brief is useful to encourage officials to pull more products. You’re like, if you wanna know more, click here, kind of thing. It’s not really the thing you use to brief yourself on a particular issue. Right. It’s kind of like a heads up. Here are some interesting things you may wanna know about.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Okay.

Stephanie Carvin And so we don’t know necessarily exactly which documents reporters got their hands on and are being cited with a couple of exceptions.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings But just in general then. When the Globe Mail and Global News and others began to report on, again, I’m just gonna call them like CSIS documents, what was your first reaction?

Stephanie Carvin It was a surprise, honestly. Um, generally speaking, CSIS and the Canadian intelligence community don’t leak, uh, when I was in the intelligence community, we used to say, if you wanna know what the CIA is thinking, wait three days and it will be in the New York Times.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Right.

Stephanie Carvin That is a place that leaks. CSIS, Canada does not, and there are some concerns here for the intelligence community because if sensitive information leaks, you can put sources and methods at risk. Right?

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Right.

Stephanie Carvin But also, and maybe this is a little bit more controversial, I, I was also not that surprised in the sense that I think foreign interference has been an issue that has been causing a lot of concern in the Canadian intelligence community for some years. There’s a sense, I think that the government doesn’t really want to move on this issue and that, you know, this is a problem that’s been building for a number of years. And I guess what concerns me is I’m worried it’s boiled over into a series of multiple leaks from multiple sources across the government of Canada. And while this has brought the issue to the forefront, there are a number of risks associated with that kind of behaviour.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings In a moment we can talk more about, um, what this means for the intelligence community in Canada at large, but just to drill down a little bit on the substance of what’s come out so far. As somebody who tries to parse this stuff, what do the leaks tell you and what don’t they tell you?

Stephanie Carvin So I guess what the leaks tell us is that this is something that these service has clearly been gathering information on for a number of years, a number of times, and actually relates to our democratic institutions.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Right.

Stephanie Carvin And I guess what it reports is the kinds of activities that states may be engaging in particularly. Which in some cases may be simply just trying to encourage and round up people to go to nomination meetings. Uh, where candidates for, uh, say provincial parliament or, um, the federal government are being nominated right, to perhaps sway it for candidates that, are, tend to be more pro-China than, say, not pro-China, but in other cases that, you know, there’s allegations here of very specific things that are very concerning if they are taking place like, um, undeclared cash donations or where businesses hire individuals and then have them quote unquote “volunteer” for a particular campaign, like none of this is really good. What we don’t know is, the strength of that information.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Right?

Stephanie Carvin This, so this is information that was reported to the community. We don’t know if this was gathered from one human source that is known and trustworthy, or multiple human sources.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Mm-hmm.

Stephanie Carvin Or was it a wire tap, right. Or was it some kind of email or text message that was captured? We don’t know the nature of the information. We don’t know if it’s been corroborated, and we also don’t know the level of that the community has in that particular information.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Right.

Stephanie Carvin Sources, you know, they’re not always accurate. They can misunderstand a situation, they can exaggerate, they can lie. Uh, they have different motivations for why they provide information, and we don’t have any of that context.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Hmm.

Stephanie Carvin It’s something more than rumour, but it’s much less than evidence. And, and that’s a real.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings It sure seems to a layperson, like the sheer quantity of information would indicate that, you know, this is more than, uh, one human filed a report and somebody within the intelligence community decided to leak it. Like, these are multiple people, multiple alleged crimes, multiple, uh, candidates involved, et cetera, et cetera.

Stephanie Carvin Yeah. But at the same time, you know, because we don’t know who leaks this information for, for very good reasons, and we don’t know what their motivations are. We, we have to look at this with a little bit of skepticism. I agree with the premise of the question. I mean, this is a very real problem and I would never say it’s not. But when it comes to very specific allegations about people, I just think we need to take a deep breath and hold on and let, um, some of these investigations that are now in place do their work. To look at it from, uh, and I guess this is one of the lines going around mostly from, to be fair, liberal government supporters. Should anybody be surprised that China was trying to influence our elections?

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Right.

Stephanie Carvin This is what they say. Of course they try. Of course they’re doing that. It’s not a big deal as long as it doesn’t work.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings What do you say to that?

Stephanie Carvin Yeah, I mean, it, it, it matters, uh, that they try actually, and it matters. I think that we haven’t done a very good job, I think of counter,a lot of this foreign interference, right? And again, like what concerns me about the reports is the various specific allegations of crimes taking place. And they’re not being subsequent follow up to that. Now, I don’t know if that’s because those allegations were just simply allegations and there, there just wasn’t any evidence. But I mean, like any kind of financial crime, there should be a paper trail that you can follow, right? So, you know, foreign interference was largely seen as a Russia thing, particularly after 2016. It’s also not even just a China thing, you know, there’s been reports release indicating that the, um, privy council office has been worried about India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Venezuela as well.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Hmm.

Stephanie Carvin I think that, you know, sometimes this issue is presented like a giant octopus with tentacles everywhere and everything is coordinated and well done. It’s not, it’s a spaghetti on the wall approach. Right, right. They’re trying many different things and trying to see what sticks. And eventually something may stick, and that is a problem. So we need to take a much more serious approach. And hard questions need to be asked about not just electoral interference, but the fact that people within the Chinese community itself, uh, Uyghurs, uh, Hong Kong activists, Tibetans, uh, Taiwanese, they’ve been talking about this stuff for years and we’ve never taken it seriously.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Mm-hmm. So why is it that the government has dragged its feet so much?

Stephanie Carvin We’re gonna have an investigation from the National Security Committee, and that’s instead of a public inquiry, who or what makes up the National Security Committee and, and how arm’s length and unbiased are they likely to be. Right. So what we’re talking about here is, A series of investigations that’s been launched, and there’s actually two, um, and, and a special repertoire that yet we don’t know much about yet. Uh, maybe that’ll be coming. So the first year is the National Security Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians. This has been a fairly controversial committee because a lot of people say this committee doesn’t report to parliament, it reports to the Prime Minister. I think this is an unfair characterization for a number of reasons. The first is that the committee was created in 2019. Canada was one of the very few western democracies to not have any parliamentary oversight. over its national security community whatsoever.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Huh? So it’s a fairly new body.

Stephanie Carvin It’s not a committee that reports to parliament. Like some of the committee hearings we’ve been seeing in recent weeks where, where this has been discussed, it meets in secret. All of the members are have top secret clearance. So it’s a committee that’s staffed by parliamentarians, not a parliamentary committee that also is staffed by parliamentarians. It’s a, it’s a little bit different. There’s nuances there, but, okay. I guess the controversy has been that, you know, oh, well, you know, they just give the reports to the Prime Minister and he redacts whatever he wants. And that’s not how this committee works. The committee in law has the power to set its own agenda. It can look at whatever it wants, however. With the exception of ongoing investigations. And while it does ultimately send reports to the Prime Minister’s office, the Prime Minister’s office does not itself do the redactions. That’s actually done by the Canadian Intelligence community itself. Right. Okay. And as a side note, um, one of the reports that Global News had actually had an, a leaked copy of an unredacted report. And I’m wondering if the, the community itself actually may have been the source of that rather than the NSI cop. What also can be redacted from this report is defined in law and it they can only take out things that are injurious to national security, international relations or defense or anything that would violate solicitor client privilege. So it’s actually a really small amount of information that can be taken out of the these particular reports. Nsi Cop, as I call it, um, they’re going to basically look into what the Prime Minister knew and when did he know it.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Mm-hmm. I think, to answer some of the big questions that have come out of this, but this isn’t even the first time the committee has studied for an interference, right? They did a report in 2021, um, that looked at this issue and made very specific recommendations, and the prime minister’s actually recently been asked why haven’t those recommendations been put in place?

Stephanie Carvin Right. So, yeah. Um, they, they actually do good. The other agency that I think even is lesser known but is important here is the National Security Intelligence Review Agency. And what they tend to look at is the legality and propriety of the community and, and how well it’s doing its job and is doing it legally, essentially. And it’s gonna be looking at how well the Canadian IC did its job in collecting and reporting, um, information on foreign interference in terms of elections. And it may also make recommendations in policy and. To address any of the perceived gaps. And I think actually, you know, all the focuses on nsi cop, and I think cuz that’s the, the sexy political angle of all this.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Mm-hmm. I’m actually more interested in how the community did its job and did it do it well and what are the frustrations that it has? Do we actually have the proper laws and authorities in place to counter this threat?

Stephanie Carvin And so in some ways it’s, it’s the more nerdy response. But you know that, that’s where, that’s where my bread and butter. Taking aside the fact that there are obviously sensitive security details involved in this, why can’t we have a public inquiry, not necessarily into all the secret intelligence, but into, as you put it, what did the Prime Minister know and when did he know it? Because I think that is the key political question here, and we just had one public inquiry that came out and benefited the Prime Minister, which is great.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings We’ve talked a lot on this show with you and others about the lack of transparency in Canada. This. Like a good time to keep that transparent standard going. I mean, on the electoral interference question.

Stephanie Carvin It’s gonna be hard, I think, just because so much of the information is highly classified, it’s not gonna get out. And, you know, the, the Frank, quite frankly, our national security officials will not, you know, wanna jeopardize their sources and methods right. On these particular and probably ongoing investigations.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings That makes sense.

Stephanie Carvin But just the political side of it seems ripe for digging in to what happened here. So this is just it. So if we, if we widen the question about foreign interference beyond this kind of narrow slice of electoral interference, I actually think there’s a good reason to have an inquiry, right? There’s a broad issue here that has really impacted not just the Chinese community, but other communities as well with regards to foreign interference who have been at the brunt of harassment and covert activities for decades.It’s a very real problem where activists have been talking about how they’ve been targeted for. And we do need to investigate this and provide a place for these communities to tell their stories. And I know these communities themselves, they’re frustrated at the lack of coordination that we’ve seen.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Just as an example, like if you’re speaking out, say against China because you want democracy in Hong Kong and you suddenly get threatening phone calls and you’re being followed, you report that to the police, but they don’t really have a wider understanding of the problem, right?

Stephanie Carvin They’re kind of concerned about their local district and, uh, you know, their chances are if this person’s in China, there’s not much they can do. So then you call CSIS and you tell them all about all the harassment you’re, you’re getting. And they say, well, this is really interesting. Thanks for this information, but you know, there’s nothing we can do. We’re not a law enforcement agency. Hmm. And then the RCMP is generally unable and unwilling to investigate these crimes.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Right.

Stephanie Carvin We’ve never seen a prosecution. So I think an inquiry that looked at the very, very fractured system, dysfunctional system, really, uh, on how we deal with foreign interference and protect people who are here in Canada from foreign interference would be very useful, and I would highly encourage the government to do something like that.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings I know that there has been talk of a foreign agent registry. What is that? Would that help? Like what’s on the table here?

Stephanie Carvin So the government is looking at creating a foreign agency registry act, and this would basically require anyone who’s lobbying on behalf of a state to publicly declare themselves. It’s not clear to me if it would just be individuals or companies as well. So for example, there’s a lot of law firms that do work for China and Canada. So it’d be interesting to see if they would have to actually, uh, register their, their efforts as a result of this. It’s something we have seen in Australia as well as the United States. And I mean, it’s a fairly basic step you can take, but I, I think it’s also somewhat limited, right, in the sense that. A lot of the activities we’ve been hearing about in recent media reporting are not about lobbying, right. They’re not about overt activities, it’s about covert activities and sometimes even illegal activities. Right?

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Right.

Stephanie Carvin And so if we’re an agency registry act, well, it’ll give us a better understanding of who’s lobbying, who and where, and why, and for what. But I don’t really think it’s gonna stop, uh, most of the activity in Canada, which is very much, uh, a covert. So what do we need to do then? I think one of the challenges that we have is that our laws in this area are very old. If you talk to people from csis, they’ll often say, you know, the, our act is written in 1984, and the most sophisticated technology of that era was a fax machine.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Yeah.

Stephanie Carvin We now live on digital devices. We leave digital trails everywhere. Uh, the capacity for states to gather information, Substantial. And we need to take a hard look and think about, you know, how do we wanna modernize the authorities that the Canadian IC has to investigate and prosecute these threats? And to be clear, I don’t think we should just give CSIS whatever powers it actually wants, but it’s a conversation that the, you know, multiple governments, not just the liberal party, but also, uh, the conservative party when it was in power, just aren’t that interested in. And then finally, I think, you know, even as a e, just an even more basic step, a mechanism, say within Public Safety Canada or a Privy Council office, that would do a better job of gathering up the very fragmented pieces of information that we have. And putting them together in some kind of way that can help inform communities, inform businesses, inform uh, politicians even about the nature of the threat that Canada’s facing, and try and find best practices to try and encounter some of these threats. No one knows this issue better than, um, the Chinese community itself.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Mm-hmm.

Stephanie Carvin And I think we have to be really careful in, in how we respond to this. We don’t need another red.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings This is my last question then, if, and until we take those steps. How worried are you, how worried should Canadians be that we are currently dealing with significant foreign interference that we, that we can’t counter and that, you know, I know the liberal government says their attempts at election interference failed. How would we know that they actually failed?

Stephanie Carvin Well, exactly that. And I think, you know, just insurances from the government that was elected, Hey, look, we were totally elected. Legitimately, we don’t have to worry about any of this. Right? It may not be as reassuring, um, for perhaps some members of the opposition or members of opposition parties that everything is just fine and dandy. I think we need to be concerned. We can’t lose our minds. We have to be really careful about this. I do worry that, you know, we’re now seeing politicians step down because of unsubstantiated allegations that are in intelligence. You know, there maybe there is something out there that I haven’t seen yet that you haven’t seen yet. And also I worry, I’m seeing on social media, pictures of politicians that may have, you know, been at a public event and may have appeared with someone who is now being alleged as some kind of agent for the government.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Mm-hmm.

Stephanie Carvin And we don’t want this, right? We don’t want this to turn into a witch hunt, but we have to acknowledge that this problem does exist, and I think we can counter it right with, uh, maybe some tweaks to legislation with a more robust, coordinated approach. Why aren’t we supporting the communities that have been asking us to support them for years and decades? Why have we been gathering this information but seemingly not acting on it? These are some really important questions and it is my hope that in the next couple of months we’ll, we’ll get some answers to that as well as hopefully some paths forward, and I hope we get those answers publicly.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Stephanie, thank you as always, uh, for explaining some really complex stuff.

Stephanie Carvin Thanks for having me.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Stephanie Carvin is the author of Stand On Guard, reassessing threats to Canada’s National Security. She’s been worried about this for longer than we have. That was the big story for more, including previous episodes featuring Stephanie. Discussing threats from China, you can head to the big story podcast.ca. You can find us on Twitter at the big story fp n. You can always email us that’s hello at the big story podcast.ca, and you can always pick up the phone and call (416) 935-5935 and leave us a voicemail. Rich. The big story is available everywhere you get your podcasts, even on smart speakers if you ask them to play The Big Story podcast. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.