Leaks, Op-Eds, And The Great CSIS-RCMP War

On The Ottawa War

What if the foreign interference story has nothing to do with the Liberals or party politics?

I’m not saying the Liberals are off the hook, and I’m certainly not moving off my position that the Liberals could have and probably should have done more when the public, anecdotal allegations of interference in heavily Chinese seats in 2021 started coming out. But a lot of the intrigue and hype around this story stems from the idea all of this has to be political. But, what if it’s not?

We know from Thursday that Kennedy Stewart was interviewed by/met with/warned by CSIS agents in May 2022 and warned that there was Chinese interference (or, intent to interfere) against Stewart, and that nobody “up the chain” cares (Stewart’s recollection of their verbiage). We know that the CSIS whistleblower to Bob Fife and the Globe And Mail wrote in their anonymous Op-Ed that he or she (but let’s be honest, only a man could be vain enough to write that steaming pile of dogshit) that “evidence of senior public officials ignoring interference was beginning to mount.” And we know that it’s been 3 years since CSIS or some elements within came to the conclusion that Han Dong was a security threat sufficient to ask the Liberal Party not to allow him to be their candidate, and there was no successful investigation into their allegations.

What we can be fairly confident in is that CSIS is not getting what they want, because they want someone “up the chain” to do undefined things and they’re not getting it done. That was the justification for the leak from the Globe’s whistleblower – this is a big enough problem that justifies breaking my oath and the law. Put aside whether you think it’s true, his logic is simple – people aren’t listening to us, just like they’re not listening to CSIS on Vancouver municipal interference, or Han Dong.

And I’m pretty sure the only people up the chain would be the RCMP, which makes this less of a political crisis and much more an Ottawa crisis, where our spy agency and national police are at war.

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I think at this point there’s one of three possible outcomes that explains why all of this spilled out into the  public sphere, and why it did so now. The first is that elements within CSIS are trying to take down the Liberals, which was my default position up to now even though the motive never really made sense. The second is that the RCMP are being given good, usable information and intelligence from CSIS and not using it to arrest security risks and those found to have illegally funneled foreign cash in violation of campaign finance law, and so CSIS is sick of it. The third is that CSIS is handing the RCMP crap intelligence, the RCMP is laughing at them for the weakness of it and the fact they can’t do anything with it, and so CSIS is sick of it.

The latter two scenarios are much more likely, now, for a few reasons. One, nobody would refer to the PM or government ministers as “public officials”, as the anonymous Op-Ed does. They might technically be public officials in the sense that their salaries are paid by the public, but that wording suggests someone who is part of the institutional public service – aka, a government lifer, not a Liberal staffer or member. Two, I fail to understand how the org chart would work for CSIS to brief the Federal Government about the interference in Vancouver as opposed to either Vancouver Police or the RCMP, since those would be the relevant agencies to, you know, do something about it (if true).

(This isn’t strictly relevant but I have to fucking complain about this Op-Ed, man. You went to the extreme step of giving this person anonymity, and what you got was about 100 words of useful information, 500 words of self aggrandizing bullshit, and you made it fucking boring too. You didn’t even get anything out of this, committing the grave sin of being both dubious journalism but also heinously boring journalism. You couldn’t have gotten the leaker to give us the fucking name of the people or agency ignoring interference, really? That was a step too far, despite being the most interesting open question about this investigation? Vraiment?)

So, if I’m right that this is a glorified pissing contest, then what’s all of this mean for the next days, weeks, and months of this? It’s possible that there is still a political ramification for the Liberals, in that there still is something there in all of this that when released will hurt them, but this increasing likelihood really posits the real crisis here as not being Liberal or Conservative failure, but the sort of departmental and institutional failures that can cripple a country. It’s not good for the security services and the national police to be at war, and if CSIS is always moaning about the fact that nobody’s listening to them, something needs fixing.

Whether what needs to be fixed is CSIS needs to be better at their jobs or the RCMP needs to take CSIS warnings more seriously is up for debate amongst substantially smarter people than myself, but the rush to declare Justin Trudeau and David Johnston traitors, as one very prominent national columnist has done, will look increasingly stupid if the actual answer to the question of why China ever managed any form of influence is because CSIS and/or the RCMP weren’t doing their jobs properly.

Whether it’s a failure of intelligence or a failure by police, there’s a very real risk that the true scandal here isn’t political, but institutional. It’s sexy if the answer is Justin Trudeau turned a blind eye to interference as a precondition of better trade relations, but the real answer is likely to be substantially less likely than that. There’s a reason people want to believe that the US Government was in on 9/11, but the real answer as far as we can actually tell is a much more basic, but much scarier story of bad intelligence sharing and turf wars getting in the way of the common goal of people not dying.

There’s two very different ways this story will almost assuredly have to be covered from this point on – either as an actual security threat, or as a political problem for the government. If this is to be covered as a security threat to our country and our democracy, at some point we’re going to need answers to basic questions like what representations has CSIS made to the RCMP on the swathe of allegations in the public eye and if the RCMP didn’t investigate Han Dong or the Vancouver stuff or the risks in the 2021 general election, then why didn’t they?

CSIS is clearly sick of the RCMP getting in the way of doing something about what they believe to be serious and substantial security threats, and elements of it have decided to go around them. That’s a huge, fundamental story about how this country exists and how we govern ourselves, and it’s high time we figure out whether the RCMP are sitting on their asses, or whether these CSIS documents aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on.