A government too attached to secrecy
One year ago, the federal government marked Valentine’s Day with a declaration of emergency.
This year, Canada stands on guard against unidentified flying objects.
I can’t be the only one to joke that after successive crises — from Donald Trump to a global pandemic, from a convoy occupation to war in Europe — of course the federal government’s next big challenge would come from outer space. All the other crisis possibilities on Earth have been used up.
Kidding aside, this is the week when Canadians will get a chance to see how Justin Trudeau’s government measured up when faced with what it believed to be a real and present threat to national security.
Justice Paul Rouleau’s commission of inquiry into the convoy protest — and the government response — is due to make its report public as soon as Friday. Its findings will not be just a backward look into whether the emergency declaration last February was justified, but also a forward glance into how national-security challenges should be handled in the future.
This is where one might be able to draw some lines between last year’s convoy and the current mystery over the flying objects invading North American air space. Specifically, is there any sign the government is acting today on what was learned about security threat and response through the Rouleau inquiry last fall? Is the Trudeau government being any more transparent this time around?
On the face of it, the two incidents couldn’t be any more different, apart from the fact that the threats are vehiclebased; trucks last year, flying contraptions this year. The balloons, or whatever they are, have not arrived with any stated political agenda or grievance. On Tuesday, the White House even indicated that three of the latest objects shot down could well be “benign.”
But both controversies have put Canada and the United States on security alert because of the cross-border nature of the perceived threats. Last February, Trudeau and U.S. President Joe Biden were on the phone talking about the convoy’s threatened damage to Canada-U.S. trade at the border. Last weekend, Trudeau and Biden were on the phone talking about shooting down unidentified shapes in the skies over their two countries, posing a threat to civil aviation.
One thing we learned during the Rouleau inquiry was that when things got very serious last winter, Trudeau eventually convened a meeting of what’s known as the “incident response group” — an ad hoc group of ministers tasked with finding solutions across government to urgent problems.
On Tuesday, my colleague Stephanie Levitz asked Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino why the government hadn’t convened a special cabinet meeting of this type, given how Trudeau and other ministers have been framing this as a national security issue.
Mendicino’s nonanswer seemed to be an indication that the government is dealing with something that can’t quite be defined as an incident, at least not yet.
It is worth noting in the case of the Chinese weather balloon the Canadian government was accused of being too casual about the object. We’ll remember there was lots of criticism on those same lines about the convoy in the early weeks last February; that governments at all levels weren’t taking the protest seriously enough.
One hallmark of Rouleau’s inquiry was the transparency it pulled out of governments and security officials. Many wondered why it took a full-fledged commission to get straight information on how the system works in a tense time.
The flying objects haven’t ratcheted up the national tension to convoy levels yet, but they do show a government still very attached to secrecy when it comes to security issues.
Rouleau may have something to say in his report about how transparent the government needs to be when national-security questions are in the air — as they are now, literally. His advice might be a good guide for how to handle a crisis that, yet again, no one saw coming.