Trudeau’s decision on national security file promising and risky, experts say

Justin Trudeau’s decision to take charge of a new cabinet committee on Intelligence and Emergency Management was described by security experts as a bold but risky move that could put the prime minister on the hook if there is a security intelligence failure.

Thestar.com
Nov. 11, 2015
Tonda MacCharles

Justin Trudeau’s decision to take charge of a new cabinet committee on Intelligence and Emergency Management was described by security experts as a bold but risky move that could put the prime minister on the hook if there is a security intelligence failure.

Trudeau and Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale have a big to-do list to improve Canada’s national security system as the Liberal campaign platform promised, however vaguely. But the Liberal government’s first steps are promising, a panel discussion at the University of Ottawa heard Tuesday.

Goodale, a past cabinet minister under former prime ministers Paul Martin and Jean Chrétien, chairs another cabinet committee on Canada in the World and Public Security, and Trudeau took charge of the even smaller group of trusted ministers to oversee intelligence matters.

Law professors Craig Forcese and University of Toronto’s Kent Roach, and Wesley Wark, a visiting professor from the University of Toronto, said Trudeau’s decision signals that security is a priority but if all his committee does is meet once a year to rubber-stamp the national security agencies’ priorities, “it will be useless,” as were previous iterations of similar committees.

“I think he is exposing himself, to be honest, by saying, ‘I’m in charge of intelligence and emergency management, if things go wrong, it’s my problem. If I didn’t get the intelligence right, it’s my problem. If we didn’t respond to an emergency it’s my problem as prime minister.’ That’s a kind of statement which reflects a political reality but which we’ve never heard from any prime minister in a long time,” said Wark.

Roach said with the positioning of Trudeau and Goodale on the file, the government may actually be “inching towards” the kind of accountability envisaged by the Air India inquiry, which was that “at the end of the day, someone has to be in charge, and we can’t exist in this environment of bureaucratic defensiveness and plausible deniability.”

“One of the concerns we have about the way we manage national security and anti-terrorism in our country is that no one’s in charge, or on some issues everyone’s in charge,” said Forcese.

Roach served as an adviser on judicial inquiries into two national security system failures - the American rendition to torture of Syrian-Canadian Maher Arar, and the 1985 bombing of Air India Flight 182. Both urged stronger review of spy and policing agencies.

The latter inquiry recommended the federal government create a more powerful national security adviser to the prime minister to monitor and serve as a referee in disputes between federal agencies, principally CSIS and RCMP, on the exchange of intelligence - a recommendation the Conservatives dismissed as creating unnecessary bureaucracy.

Forcese and Roach argue that an enhanced national security adviser could be the key to resolving the conundrum of when secretly collected intelligence should be converted to evidence, open to public scrutiny, in criminal prosecutions. The two academics, who co-authored False Security, a massive analysis of Canada’s anti-terrorism laws published amid the federal election campaign, said if those disputes are more readily resolved there would be less need for controversially broad powers of “disruption” or “threat reduction” granted to CSIS.

Overall, the three academics argued Tuesday for a broad and open discussion about many of the security law reforms that the Conservatives rushed in last year in the wake of court defeats and the October 2014 attacks on Canadian soldiers by ISIS-inspired assailants in St-Jean-sur-Richelieu and Ottawa. Wark called for a formal public cross-country consultations on Canada’s national security system.

They said it is unfathomable that the federal government has never conducted a public “lessons learned” exercise into the security and intelligence failures that led up to those events and which led to such a transformation of the legal system.