Monitoring Canadian spies a part- time job for pipeline lobbyist
Dual duties: Some wonder if former Tory MP Strahl straddles fine line between watchdog and promoter
OIt’s hard to ask those pipeline opponents, who may have been sinned against by their government, to trust Chuck Strahl’s organization to look into whether their rights have been violated.
n Dec. 6, former Indian Affairs minister Chuck Strahl filed a registration with the British Columbia registrar of lobbyists to set up a meeting for his client — the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline — with Rich Coleman, the B. C. energy minister.
As a former federal cabinet minister, Strahl is prohibited from lobbying Ottawa on behalf of his client, but it’s legal for him to take Enbridge’s money to make representations to the B. C. government.
It’s the kind of lucrative work that former cabinet ministers such as Jay Hill, Stockwell Day and Monte Solberg all do as similar consultants.
But since 2012, Strahl has been chairman of the Security Intelligence Review Committee, the organization that keeps an eye on Canada’s spies, so his registration as a pipeline lobbyist raises some funny questions.
There is no straight- up conflict of interest here. Strahl — who was widely admired as an ethical, effective politician — is not likely to review Canadian Security Intelligence Service ( CSIS) files related to Enbridge, and if such a file does cross his desk, he can recuse himself and let another member of committee handle it.
On the other hand, it looks terrible.
The Security Intelligence Review Committee ( SIRC) is the only organization with the legal authority to make sure that CSIS is obeying the law and respecting the rights of Canadians.
As chairman, Strahl must look over the shoulder of the spies, making sure they aren’t violating the privacy rights of law- abiding opponents of pipeline projects, for example. Can he do that effectively if his income depends on promoting a pipeline?
Last year, the National Energy Board called in CSIS and the RCMP to investigate possible security threats from opponents of the Enbridge pipeline on dubious grounds.
It’s hard to ask those pipeline opponents, who may have been sinned against by their government, to trust Strahl’s organization to look into whether their rights have been violated. Fellow committee member Denis Losier also works for Enbridge and Yves Fortier was on the board of TransCanada Pipelines.
When Strahl was appointed, he told the National Post that he wouldn’t lobby governments, and promised to “double make sure” to avoid conflicts and ethical issues.
This week, though, he told the Post that he has no reason to drop his Enbridge work.
“I’m not independently wealthy,” he said, and went on to attack the Vancouver Observer, the online paper that revealed his registration, and the NDP, which has objected to his lobbying.
The man in charge of providing legal oversight of our spies is behaving like a partisan, elbows up, rather than like a judge.
SIRC was established in 1984 to provide civilian oversight of CSIS, one of the recommendations of the McDonald Commission, which was established after the Mounties were caught breaking the law in a dirty tricks campaign against Quebec separatists.
The five panelists — usually former politicians, respected lawyers and businesspeople — are given security clearance and the power to review CSIS’s files, to make sure the spies aren’t stealing Parti Québécois membership lists or burning down barns, which is what the Mounties had been doing.
Intelligence oversight has never been more important. As Edward Snowden showed the world, electronic eavesdroppers have unprecedented power to poke into our private lives using accumulated storehouses of metadata.
The only thing stopping Canadian spies from doing crazy things — like snooping on their love interests — is SIRC.
There used to be another layer of oversight: the CSIS inspector general, who was the minister of Public Safety’s eyes and ears in the spy agency, poking around and making sure that the spooks did their snooping by the book.
In 2012, the government shut that eight- member office as a cost- saving measure, leaving intelligence oversight entirely in the part- time hands of Strahl and his colleagues at SIRC.
Strahl is doing much better than Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s last spy watchdog, Arthur Porter.
In 2008, Harper appointed Porter to SIRC, ignoring a letter from the Bloc Quebecois warning about questionable business dealings in Porter’s past. Porter is now in prison in Panama awaiting extradition to Canada, where he faces charges for allegedly defrauding the McGill University Health Centre by taking bribes from former executives at engineering firm SNC Lavalin as part of a $ 22.5- million kickback scheme.
In 2012, the government tabled C- 30, a bill that would have required Internet service providers and cellphone companies to hand over personal information to police and spies without warrants.
Then- Public Safety minister Vic Toews stood in the House and said that opponents of that bill were standing with child pornographers.
The government eventually dropped that bill, but in November Justice Minister Peter MacKay introduced C- 13, which would make it easier for police and spies to get wiretaps, allowing ISPs to hand private data to police and spies without penalty.
There’s starting to be a pattern here.