Why aren’t there more security leaks?

When information about China’s interference in Canadian politics was leaked to the news media more than a year ago, the federal government snapped into action. Not so much against the interference itself, mind you, but against whoever leaked that confidential information.

The hunt for the leaker or leakers is still underway, as far as I know, and they’ve been condemned far and wide for betraying their oath of secrecy. But after listening to this week’s testimony at the foreign interference inquiry, I’m only surprised that more security insiders didn’t succumb to the temptation to blow the whistle on how poorly the government handles such sensitive intelligence.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is being widely mocked for admitting he doesn’t actually read security documents but prefers to get information through oral briefings. In itself that doesn’t bother me. Leaders operate in different ways, including how they manage the torrent of information coming their way every day on every imaginable subject.

But the testimony of Trudeau and other senior officials leaves a clear impression that the issue isn’t just how the PM chooses to get information on national security, but exactly what information reaches him and how seriously he treats it.

We learned this week, for example, that the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) included a very serious warning in a briefing note in February 2023 for the prime minister about Chinese interference. Among other things, it said “we know” that China “clandestinely and deceptively interfered” in the 2019 and 2021 elections. And it concluded that “until foreign interference is viewed as an existential threat to Canadian democracy and governments forcefully and actively respond, these threats will persist.”

Strong stuff. But according to Trudeau, the oral briefing he received at the time didn’t include any such warning. The words on the page didn’t make it out of CSIS Director David Vigneault’s mouth into the PM’s ear. (Vigneault is back at the inquiry on Friday and surely he’ll be asked about that.)

At the same time, Trudeau and his aides made clear they were skeptical about CSIS intelligence on foreign interference. “Intelligence isn’t evidence” is the mantra, and no doubt the information presented by CSIS fell well short of something that could be submitted to a court of law.

But it isn’t nothing, either, and it seems the government deliberately set a very high bar for deciding whether to make anything public or to take any action in particular cases of possible interference (such as Han Dong’s controversial Liberal nomination in 2019). So high, in fact, that you have to wonder why the government was so reluctant to do anything when presented with credible information about Chinese meddling.

It’s not impossible. In 2017, as has been widely noted, the French government issued a public warning about Russian misinformation being spread about its presidential election. The foreign interference inquiry would do a useful service by setting out criteria for how to alert voters about possible outside meddling without betraying intelligence secrets or calling into question the integrity of the whole electoral process.

Add to all this the conclusion in last year’s report by David Johnston (remember him?) in his short-lived role as “special rapporteur” on foreign interference about how the government handles (or more accurately mishandles) security information.

Johnston outlined how security reports are distributed to agencies and departments, but no one has any idea if they actually get read. In 2021, he discovered, CSIS sent a briefing note about Chinese threats to Conservative MP Michael Chong and his extended family to thenpublic safety minister Bill Blair, but Blair never got the information because it was sent through a “Top Secret Network email” that the minister himself didn’t have access to.

No wonder someone in the security establishment finally got fed up with this massively dysfunctional system and decided to break the logjam by leaking to the media. Only then was the government forced to get serious — first by appointing Johnston and then by agreeing to the public inquiry.

It shouldn’t work like that, but sometimes it’s the only way to get the attention of a government and bureaucracy that won’t do the right thing.

After listening to this week’s testimony at the foreign interference inquiry, I’m only surprised that more security insiders didn’t succumb to the temptation to blow the whistle on how poorly the government handles sensitive intelligence