CSIS' Leaking Ship A National, Not Political, Crisis

Can We Take This Fucking Seriously?

What part of “It’s not known whether elected officials in Canada gained access to the report” does Canada’s political press not understand?

For those who don’t know why I’m losing my everloving mind, the Globe has reported that China is targeting the Hong Kong-based family of Michael Chong, news that is both unsurprising and horrific. What is more surprising is why a story that explicitly doesn’t draw political conclusions is being treated as yet another story about Justin Trudeau.

More to the point, why is nobody else able to see what has been obvious for the last two months, which is that the real story here is a RCMP-CSIS war?

…

What we have from the Globe is (in contrast to Sam Cooper’s usual fare) a well-reported story that doesn’t make allegations it can’t stand up and reveals a crucial piece of information that seems to stand up (in this case, that Chong’s family are targets and that Chong didn’t know until the Globe ran the story.

What isn’t alleged in the story – and what led this piece – is that the Liberals/Trudeau/the PMO knew about it. Chong has accused the Liberals of knowing about it and doing nothing, but again, the Globe’s own reporting casts doubt on whether anyone elected knew about it. And that’s a very key distinction in all of this that everyone is glossing over.

Now, Trudeau has on camera said that he first found out about this Monday morning when the Globe reported it, but even without this, think about any of this for more than 3 seconds. It takes a very specifically crass view of Justin Trudeau to think he’d sit on information that Michael Chong’s family was at risk and they did nothing to stop it, and one that I think when painted in this light does not stand up to scrutiny. Be it the reporting on Trudeau’s relationship with Jagmeet Singh to the way Erin O’Toole talks about Trudeau now that he’s no longer leader, the idea that Trudeau is personally vindictive and hurtful enough to do this merely on a personal level seems absurd.

Also, let’s be honest here – “Trudeau Acts To Protect Family Of Opposition Politician” would be a much better headline for the government, because it would make him look benevolent and caring and bipartisan. So, somehow, we’ve ended up in a situation where to believe the allegation made by Chong (and repeated by Conservatives in the House) is to believe that the Liberals are both political idiots who are capable of looking gifthorses in the mouth and genuinely terrible people. Maybe you believe that, but I don’t.

So, what’s the other alternative? CSIS has something of some value – and I suspect this is of higher value than the Han Dong stuff, since the Globe declined to write that and did write this – but it was deemed not actionable by somebody, either higherups at CSIS or by the RCMP, who are massively undercovered in this story. The RCMP have arrest powers, and therefore are the arbiters of whether this CSIS information qualifies as actionable. So far, nothing they’ve seen has risen to the level of action.

Is that because of RCMP failure or CSIS ones? No idea, I’m not a journalist, I’m a commenter. I don’t have national security sources who can clue me in on this shit, but what I do have is a bullshit detector and a functioning brain, and this is the only theory of this story that adds up. CSIS, or elements within it, are mad at the lack of action that’s been taken on foreign interference and they’d like it to change. The RCMP has not listened to them, for reasons unclear. And now there’s a turf war.

There is a very real problem at the core of this issue – or, even, two very clear issues, because the matter of China being genuine threats to our democracy is real and should not be overstated. But the matter at hand when it comes to CSIS is not why is the Prime Minister sitting on all of this incredibly important intelligence but why isn’t CSIS acting on this information if it’s as valuable and credible as the way it’s reported out suggests? Why can’t CSIS persuade the RCMP to do something about any of this if it is credible, and if it’s not credible enough for the RCMP to do anything why is it being given to Bob Fife?

Why do we have our security services focusing more on leaking to the press than in convincing the people who actually have any power to do anything about these incredibly important issues to use them? Because at some point, the answer stops being that people care about our national security or Michael Chong’s family and more about fighting an internecine war with either our political class or with the RCMP.

Plainly, it’s unacceptable that Chong didn’t know, and it’s unacceptable that the PM didn’t, but the answer to this isn’t that we blame Trudeau because he “should have” known, but to have the proper, important conversation about how to handle a spy agency that is so febrile that our national police don’t take them seriously.

Trudeau said today that the reason Chong wasn’t told, and implicitly why he wasn’t told, was that CSIS made the determination that it did not rise to a sufficient level for it to be disseminated broadly. Maybe that call was right, maybe it wasn’t, argue with a rock for all I care. But what matters in that is that CSIS doesn’t get to have their cake and eat it too. Either these leaks are justified by the truly important nature of the information disclosed, or the information disclosed wasn’t important enough to disclose to the PMO or to Chong.

“Ah, but CSIS didn’t determine that this was important, someone at CSIS did,” I can already hear my mentions say, to which I say I know. But at some point, if CSIS is not actively trying to plug their leaks, they are implicitly endorsing more leaks. Organizations that don’t want to leak don’t, and if CSIS is going to continue to allow more junior staffers to leak shit to the paper of record and be fine with it, then they have to own the responsibilities for it.

We have an unserious spy agency at war with either our political government, our national police force, or both. We have a spy agency willing to leak things to the press they deemed insufficiently important to brief the PMO about. We have a pundit class eager to make the Prime Minister to blame for things he did not know about. And we have an opposition accusing the Prime Minister of knowingly holding back information when the PM never had it.

We can all forgive Michael Chong for imprecision in his language given the understandably emotional period of time he’s had this week, but we have an institution with real problems on display that are being ignored because it’s easier and sexier to revert the story back to the PMO. You know why the RCMP is in the state of disrepair and disgrace it’s in? In part, it’s because our media cannot keep their eyes on the ball for more than 3 fucking seconds about any issue of serious policy without getting distracted by the politics of it all.

Unless we can all appreciate that something is important even if Justin Trudeau’s name isn’t in the headline, we’re going to let CSIS wither on the vine. Having a spy agency whose decisions aren’t insanely terrible, that doesn’t leak constantly, and that doesn’t risk our ability to defend ourselves by getting us left out of rooms is a national priority for both this government and the next Conservative government, whether it’s Poilievre who leads it or whoever comes after.

But no, we won’t get answers to any of the questions we need answers to, I’m sure we’ll just move on to the next until there’s another story in the Globe later this month and we do all of this shit over again. We need to have a national conversation about our intelligence agency and why they aren’t able to get any outcomes from their incendiary reports, because without one we’ll never actually get any answers on how to fix any of this.