Who will police Canada’s spies?
Last month, three teenage girls flew from London to Istanbul, en route to Raqqa, headquarters of Islamic State, also known as ISIL or ISIS, to begin new lives as “jihadi brides.”
Turkish intelligence says the man who smuggled them across the border was a Canadian agent, Mohammed al-Rashid, a Syrian dentist who fled to Jordan to escape the civil war.
The Turks say after al-Rashid came to the attention of the Canadian embassy in Amman, the Canadians brought him to Canada, offered him the hope of citizenship and set him to work smuggling foreigners into the clutches of the homicidal maniacs of ISIS.
The Turks, who are under pressure from the West to block the flow of foreign fighters and jihadi brides, picked him up and questioned him. They released a video he took, showing him putting the deluded British teenagers into a vehicle for their trip to hell.
By their count, al-Rashid has helped 140 Britons get to ISIS, all the while reporting to someone named “Matt” at the Canadian embassy, where the ambassador is Bruno Saccomani, former head of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s bodyguards.
The Canadian government, of course, won’t say whether any of this is true.
If it is, we have been paying someone to smuggle fighters to ISIS. Never mind we might have been able to rescue the three girls, instead of handing them over to killers and rapists.
Perhaps the battle against ISIS is so important spies have to make that kind of ruthless calculation — balancing the lives of teenagers against the intelligence value gained from delivering them — but Canadians have not given a mandate to our government for this kind of thing.
It’s also not clear we are, as a nation, the best equipped to make those calculations.
The former director of the Security Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC), the body in charge of reviewing the activities of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, came to the same conclusion.
In his memoir, he warned we should only create a true foreign intelligence service “if we had the right backup, structure and support.”
Some in the Canadian intelligence community wanted CSIS to become a legitimate foreign service, to get a “seat at the bigboy table,” he wrote.
“Did we have the stomach for it? Could the Canadian government, and indeed citizens at large, accept having a foreign service that breaks the laws of other countries? Such activities were commonplace among other agencies at the big-boy table. I remember discussing this point with Harper face to face. The problem with Canada is that if is full of Canadians. We are not like the Americans, Russians or Israelis. If our agents are caught and executed, can we handle that? Can we deny knowledge of them?”
Arthur Porter concluded Canada was not big enough, did not have the “financial and philosophical commitment,” and didn’t face “impending threats” to warrant taking such risks.
I would add we lumberjacks might not be guileful enough for this kind for thing.
Porter is a good example of our guilelessness. The immigrant from Sierra Leone parlayed his connections with senior Conservatives into the job as SIRC head, a post he gave up when the National Post reported on a shady business deal he put together with Russians in Africa. He is now in a Panamanian prison, awaiting extradition to Canada on fraud charges.
I suspect Canada is leaving him to rot there, rather than testify in Canada.
The same government that put him in charge of SIRC is now seeking to massively expand the powers of our spies with Bill C-51, with no improved oversight. The law will give spies licence to engage in a wide variety of threat-disruption activities against any threat to Canada’s security, requiring warrants only when they believe their activities would break the law.
It will allow judges to issue warrants to violate the charter rights of Canadians, which doesn’t even make sense. This week, Ron Atkey, the SIRC’s first chairman, told the Commons studying the bill it is clearly unconstitutional.
Privacy commissioner Daniel Therrien has warned the “loss of privacy is clearly excessive” and “all Canadians would be caught in this web,” but the Conservatives have refused to let him testify.
At the committee Thursday, after National Council of Canadian Muslims executive director Ihsaan Gardee testified, Conservative MP Diane Ablonczy attacked the group, shamefully making flimsy allegations behind parliamentary privilege.
The government should be working closely with the council to defuse security threats, not smearing them through guilt by association.
In Britain that same day, the parliamentary intelligence and security committee released a 150-page report, the result of an eight-month study, concluding the British intelligence laws require a total overhaul in the era of mass surveillance.
In Canada, we don’t even have an intelligence and security committee to conduct such a study.
We don’t belong at the big boy table.