Bad Summer For Top Ottawa Secureaucrats

It’s been a bad summer for top Ottawa ‘secureaucrats’ – senior public servants in charge of the agencies with lead responsibilities for national security. First, CSIS Director Richard Fadden jumped recklessly into a media and political firestorm with comments about foreign infiltration of Canadian political institutions, leading to calls for his resignation. Then William Elliott, the first civilian Commissioner of the RCMP, was caught in an ambush set by his senior officers, who publicly denigrated his administrative capacities, leading to calls for his resignation.

In the background was the release in June of the long-awaited report of the Air India inquiry headed by retired Supreme Court Justice John Major, which excoriated the shortcomings of both CSIS and the RCMP in the intelligence failure that led to the 1985 tragedy that took 331 lives; condemned the senseless RCMP-CSIS turf wars that botched the post-bombing criminal investigation; and called for the establishment of a security intelligence ‘czar’ to command and coordinate both agencies as well as others with national security responsibilities in a new, more unified structure.

Not a good summer for CSIS or the RCMP. But let’s take a look at the issues that have led to calls for the resignation of the heads of both agencies. Is it time for “off with their heads”? We can start with CSIS Director Fadden.

In June Fadden took the opportunity of a major story on CSIS for the CBC TV national news to refurbish the CSIS image – and then promptly shot himself in the foot. Offering the seemingly awe-struck CBC ‘unprecedented’ camera access to CSIS headquarters and an ‘exclusive’ interview with the Director, CSIS thought it could shape the narrative. Fadden indicated that state-sponsored economic espionage is a very major but under resourced problem on CSIS’s plate. If he had left it at that, his remarks might have elicited little new attention. But he went much further when he cited a different kind of threat: foreign influenced covert infiltration of the Canadian political process. In an extraordinary public pronouncement, Fadden indicated that CSIS was worried about at least two unnamed provincial cabinet ministers from ‘diaspora’ communities, along with some public servants and municipal politicians in British Columbia (and federal MPs) who were agents of influence for unspecified foreign governments. Fadden coyly implied but did not spell out that China might be one of these, a sensitive allusion given an impending state visit of the Chinese president the next day.

It turned out that Fadden had not contacted the governments in question when he went public. Provincial and municipal officials, especially in British Columbia, were irate, as were spokespersons of Chinese Canadian associations. Despite an initial claim, soon retracted, that the warning had gone to the Privy Council Office, the Prime Minister’s Office was quick to indicate that it had ‘no knowledge’ of the issue. Faced with a firestorm of criticism from all sides, Fadden backed down the next day, withdrawing his earlier insistence on the importance of the alleged foreign infiltration, and then, bizarrely, stating that there would be no more comments on this ‘operational matter’ (that he himself had divulged the day before for a national television audience). The question of the truth behind the allegations was overshadowed by criticism of the manner in which the CSIS Director had brought the issue forward, and calls were heard for his resignation or sacking by the Prime Minister. A special sitting of a parliamentary committee during summer recess was hastily convened with MPs rushing back from their constituencies to grill Fadden, who flatly refused to consider resignation.

It is hard to know what to make of this incident. There is a real possibility that Canadian officials may be covertly advancing the interests of foreign powers (not limited to China), which would be a legitimate concern for CSIS, within its mandate. But a public accusation couched in vague and unspecific terms on national TV by the Director of CSIS that spreads a net of suspicion over a whole group of elected and unelected officials, not to speak of entire ethnic communities, could be interpreted as a kind of officially sanctioned McCarthyism. That it was so quickly retracted seems to imply that the claim never had substance. In either case, the political judgment of Director Fadden must be seriously questioned. His defenders have suggested that he has been stymied by government indifference to a serious threat to security, and sought to break the story in the public interest. An unfortunate byproduct of his inept intervention is that calm, objective evaluation of the threat of covert foreign influenced activity has now been rendered more, rather than less, difficult.

Is this a hanging offence? It has impaired the public image of CSIS, but there is no reason to draw from this one incident the lesson that the Director is not otherwise doing his job. Perhaps the problem is that bureaucrats like Dick Fadden who habitually toil in the shadows, behind the scenes, are not practiced in the arts of public communications and political spin, and would be advised not to try their amateur hand at using the media, which have a nasty habit of turning the tables: it was Fadden who ended up being used by the media.

But there is a deeper issue here of the proper focus for CSIS threat assessments. In the CSIS Act, the definition of threats to the security of Canada includes espionage, but a second, more contentious, threat definition follows:

s. 2(b) foreign influenced activities within or relating to Canada that are detrimental to the interests of Canada and are clandestine or deceptive or involve a threat to any person.

When the CSIS Act was reviewed in 1989, the Security Intelligence Review Committee and a special parliamentary committee offered recommendations on amendments aimed at improvement. One point they drew attention to was the loose language of 2(b). ‘Foreign influenced’ is very ambiguous. ‘Lawful advocacy, protest and dissent’ are exempted from CSIS scrutiny, yet legitimate dissent could be tarred with the ‘foreign influenced’ brush. SIRC and Parliament, as well as the Canadian Bar Association, recommended that 2(b) be repealed and replaced by ‘foreign directed activities within or directly relating to Canada that are surreptitious or deceptive and that are detrimental to the interests of Canada or involve a serious threat to any person.’ The government was unmoved, however, and 2(b) remains on the books, unrevised – and asking for trouble.

What does it mean to call someone an ‘agent of influence’, as opposed to an espionage agent? During the Cold War, this was an ideologically charged term. The Soviet KGB sought to cultivate ideologically sympathetic persons in sensitive positions in Western countries to advance views that were friendly toward Soviet interests. But what if the person simply held views that happened to coincide with this or that aspect of Soviet policy? ‘Agent of influence’ was a charge that almost always issued from the right wing of the ideological spectrum, directed against those with more left-wing views. The search for agents of influence looked much more like a witch hunt than a spy hunt.

In the post-Cold War era, the hunt for agents of influence raises a different can of worms, very unsettling for a multicultural country like Canada. If foreign influence is seen as being primarily directed towards members of diaspora communities in Canada from their ethnic homelands, is there not a danger of the official construction of ‘suspect communities’? If members of diaspora communities advance views that happen to be favourable to the policies of their country of national origin, are they thereby acting as agents of foreign influence? If Canadian citizens of a certain ethnicity are to be investigated for their views on public policy, does this not amount to a form of ethnic profiling? None of these questions deny the serious nature of foreign directed activities in Canada that deceptively advance the interests of foreign countries at Canada’s expense – these ought to be the legitimate object of CSIS attention. But casting too wide a net creates more problems.

Some communities seem more vulnerable to suspicion than others. Many are ready to jump on the Chinese Canadian community as suspect in its relations with a widely distrusted Chinese government. What of other communities? Senator Colin Kenny has drawn attention to parliamentary junkets organized and paid for by the Israelis. Are pro-Israeli views expressed by participating MPs an example of foreign-influenced activities? What of Jewish organizations with close links to Israel that seek to influence Canadian policy on the Middle East? Any suggestion of applying Section 2(b) of the CSIS Act to the Canadian Jewish Congress would be met with outraged cries of anti-Semitism – perhaps rightly so. But if Jewish Canadians can advance pro-Israeli views without suspicion of being agents of foreign influence, why cannot Chinese Canadians, some of them in public office, advance views that might happen from time to time to coincide with Chinese government positions, without falling under suspicion of being threats to the security of Canada?

This is indeed a can of worms and puts ‘foreign influenced’ uncomfortably close to the discredited category of subversion that got the old RCMP security service into such difficulties in the 1970s, and forced the closure of the Counter Subversion Branch of CSIS in the 1980s. If the language of the CSIS Act was cleaned up to speak only of ‘clandestine and deceptive foreign directed activities’, CSIS and its Director could be on firmer ground.

Turning to RCMP Commissioner Bill Elliott, national security issues did not immediately figure in the storm that has broken over his head. The inevitable difficulties of a civilian Commissioner in the paramilitary Mounties, and a clash of managerial styles were invoked to explain the revolt of the top brass. Elliott had been appointed at a time when the top Mounties were so bitterly divided among themselves that no Commissioner from within the ranks could have been appointed without splitting the force. Hence Elliott, career civil servant. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before the Mounties regrouped and tried to spit out the ‘suit’ forced upon the ‘uniforms’. Or perhaps Elliott is indeed the poor administrator and dysfunctional team leader the Mountie brass have described. Ironically, in light of the history between the RCMP and CSIS, Elliott’s fate lies in the hands of Reid Morden, former CSIS Director, tasked by the government to report on the situation at the top of the RCMP and make recommendations for the future.

It should be kept in mind that the RCMP shares responsibility for national security with CSIS; the Mounties as a law enforcement agency investigate national security offences, while CSIS the security intelligence agency prepares threat assessments for the government. Elliott, after all, succeeded Giuliano Zaccardelli, forced out as a result of the RCMP’s Maher Arar scandal. Elliott’s current difficulties and uncertain future cloud a debate that Elliott himself had joined with CSIS over which agency should have the lead role in counter-terrorism. Both Dick Fadden and Bill Elliott addressed the Canadian Association for Security and Intelligence Studies in the fall of 2009.

Fadden decried the relative lack of informed debate on national security in Canada, but did not help his cause by going on to hit out at critics in the legal profession, the media, NGOs and ‘elites’ in general for supposedly romanticizing those accused of terrorism while demonizing CSIS. Predictably, these charges grabbed the headlines, but coverage tended to ignore more serious points Fadden made about the difficulties CSIS faces in dealing with terrorism, especially the problems caused by the use of CSIS intelligence in court proceedings.

He received little sympathy on this score the next day when Elliott threw back a direct challenge, suggesting that security intelligence (i.e., CSIS) may have received too large a chunk of the expanded resources devoted to national security post-9/11. In his view, ‘counter-terrorism measures based exclusively on intelligence that falls short of the evidentiary threshold [for criminal prosecution] are fraught with danger and difficulty. I believe that law enforcement and criminal prosecution will be the new paradigm of national security in democratic nations the world over.’

This could have been a serious debate, posing the question of how best to re-balance security intelligence with law enforcement – and how to re-balance the roles of the two agencies representing these functions. But both protagonists having been seriously wounded over the summer, debate has petered out into side issues and irrelevancies. Whether Fadden and Elliott survive, or not, will not change the basic issues at stake.

Reg Whitaker is Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus at York University, and Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the University of Victoria. He has published extensively about Canadian politics; security, intelligence, and politics of information issues.