Secure Line Podcast Episode 11 - Signal and the (FI) Noise: Catching up with the news

Canada’s NatSec landscape is shifting—fast. In this episode, the Secure Line trio reunite to break down the cacophony of news, rumors, and threats shaping the political and intelligence environment.

From foreign interference in Canada’s early election days to China’s digital whispers on WeChat, from annexation talk on X to a government that still hasn't figured out how to talk to diaspora communities—there’s signal, and then there’s a lot of noise. We dive into SignalGate, the explosive leak from a U.S. government group chat that compromised Israeli HUMINT and rattled Five Eyes trust, and what it means for Canada’s intelligence relationships. Then, we confront a decades-old debate with new urgency: is it finally time for Canada to launch its own foreign intelligence service? Along the way, we tackle Trudeau’s surprise RCMP white paper, how national security got sidelined in the election, and why the Mounties might be winning a bureaucratic battle they shouldn’t even be fighting.

It’s a jam-packed episode on interference, intelligence, institutional inertia—and the future of Canada’s security in a very noisy world, listen to the episode below!

Read the episode transcript below:

Intro: Steph, Leah, Jess. Is this line secure?

Leah: Hello and welcome to Secure Line. I'm Leah West.

Jessica: I'm Jessica Davis.

Stephanie: And I'm Stephanie Carvin.

Leah: It is been a long four years since the three of us were all together for our podmergency episode in February where we talked through the first round of Trump's threatened, so-called Fentanyl tariffs, and Canada's promised action with respect to the fentanyl crisis in this country to avert them.

Much has happened since then that has had major implications for Canadian national security some of which we've discussed with other guests, like last week's episode in defense policy with Phil Lagasse, but there have been many other developments since Mark Carney won the Liberal leadership and started making the rounds with allies.

We had the parting shot of a white paper from Prime Minister Trudeau about RCMP reform. We've seen Canadians, increasingly stopped and some detained at the US border, not because they have committed, any alleged crime, but in some cases because of their political views on social media. We have of course all got to see our worst fears about security of intelligence in an administration that has no respect for the national security community play out over Signal.

That plus the whole, we want to own Greenland and annex Canada has us reevaluating our reliance and integration within the US National security apparatus. Oh, and there is an election and people are attempting to interfere with it.

So it's been a lot, some of it's signal, some of it noise. How much?

Stephanie: Some of it on Signal.

Leah: laughing Some of it on signal. How much of each is still TBD. But the landscape we live in has without a doubt shifted and instead of therapy, we're going to try and work through it together. Could not think of two better people to talk through all of this.

Steph, I'm going to start with where I ended first, which is the election. Partially because we had some interesting news today from the Security To Elections Task Force which revealed that they have identified foreign interference on the part of the PRC on WeChat platforms, but this isn't the only headline that we've seen with respect to foreign interference and this two week old election.

So, Steph, do you want to dive in and talk us through it and, and what is bothering you or concerning you about what you're seeing with respect to foreign interference.

Stephanie: You know, it's so interesting and Leah, I, to a large extent, I bowed your expertise on foreign interference because you lived and breathed that for well over a year. So, interested in all, and both of your thoughts on this as well.

It's interesting. So far I think there have been five, possibly six instances of foreign interference that have come up in some way in the first, what half of this campaign? And that is even, or even before the campaign if you think the SITE Task Force, which is the Security and Intelligence To Elections task force, they monitor or they work with the various departments and agencies of course in order to monitor for foreign interference in our elections, particularly online although not exclusively, I think we should make that clear.

And they actually had said during the nomination race. For the liberal leadership that there was a campaign targeting Christia Freeland, and the campaign that you talked about today was done by the same group of actors, which are people's Republic of China or PRC linked.

And it's weird because in the February one, it was pretty clear that they said that this was negative information about Christia Freeland. And in this one they were a little bit more ambiguous. And to be fair, the examples that they gave were really odd. This was a social media post by supposed to be one of China's most popular news accounts, which said, “Oh look Canada's Prime Minister Carney stood up to Trump.” Seems good. You know, That was it. It wasn't like some kind of ringing endorsement. It was almost like a factual observational statement. It's very odd. And to be clear, I don't speak Chinese.

Leah: The allegation wasn't that it was misinformation necessarily. It was a targeted influence or interference campaign as I understood it.

Stephanie: Yeah, exactly. So it was really, yeah. And this is the point that they're, I think they're trying to make, they're like the thing that, the reason they brought it forward was that it was artificially augmented, right? It was artificially brought forward.

There is an inauthentic campaign as they would describe it, that so like for some reason PRC backed actors decided to really amplify these kind of very mid statements, and again I think we have to be really careful on what this means, right?

You're right. It's not misinformation, it's not disinformation. It's not even necessarily praise. And I think we have to be careful there. There's a whole range of possibilities on this particular case. Like the first one could be that this could just be an experiment, right? Like this the actors who engage in this space may simply be engaging in experimentation, they may be trying out narratives, they may be trying to see how much they can make something spread. So there's a whole bunch of reasons why they may have picked this particular post. It's not necessarily something they agreed with.

The second thing is, again I'm not sure how much China actually understands our democracy, right? So this statement, which is, mildly positive towards Mark Carney and it just, it's really baffling, it may have been that, this could have been seen as glowing praise maybe or, it's not clear why they would've picked this phrase. So again, it's not that they're trying to be reluctant to interpret it, they've just noticed that the campaign around it is inauthentic and they want to raise that as a possibility.

Jessica: So the real point here is that SITE telling Canadians that there is inauthentic activity happening in some sort of communications targeting particular diaspora communities, the what they're trying to achieve, we actually don't know. They may not know what they're trying to achieve.

Leah: I thought the most interesting element of that briefing for all of you who didn't turn into CPAC online at 11 o'clock on a Monday morning was

Stephanie: And honestly, how dare you. You're fired.

Leah: And to that point, a journalist saying how hard, essentially, are you actually trying to make sure that this warning or this announcement reaches the target audience of that inauthentic activity? And that seems like a very natural question to me, especially given all of the recommendations around that very issue in the recommendations of the commissioner. And their answers were not even mid, they were pretty poor. They hadn't given any thought to that answer very clearly. They referred to the democratic institution's website of Canada and said, oh,

Stephanie: That's what I check, right after I check CPAC. That's exactly where I go every Monday morning.

Jessica: So they haven't set up a WeChat to disseminate this.

Leah: Yeah, exactly.

Stephanie: I don't think they'd be allowed to be fair.

Leah: But still, and also refer to some civil society organizations who have funding to engage with people who only access foreign language media.

But did they say we're going to send our press releases to Chinese language media? We're going to start talking with Chinese language media again, we're trying social media campaigns to target these. No. And it was almost like they hadn't even given that question any thought before they stepped into the room. And to me, as someone who read the recommendations of Commissioner Hogue very closely, I found that very disappointing.

Stephanie: Yeah, I don't wanna defend the government here. So I did ask a journalist and I asked someone at, in the government, what about that question, right? And I said did you invite any Chinese language media to this or any other language, frankly, like Hindi, Arabic, like all Persian, all different kinds of - Farsi language media to this and it, so this is where it breaks down and I think, this is one of these things where we may have to learn something every election. So the Parliamentary Press Gallery building, where these press conferences are held, is technically, I don't know if it's an agency of parliament, but it's at arms length to the parliament, it self governs, and so who gets access to that building is determined by the gallery itself.

So the government effectively announces that it's going to have this press conference at the Parliamentary Press Gallery, but then they have to register with the Parliamentary Press Gallery, in order to get in. And then I asked the journalist and I asked the government, I said has anyone reached out to these or do they know that they have to do this? I'm assuming a lot of these, like newspapers and things like that, that are Chinese language, they may be one or two person operations. Have they thought about simulcasting in another language? It doesn't appear to have been the case.

So A) I think it's good that we're having these conversations in public, but I, this is, this raises a good point of where we need to take the next steps and those recommendations, we're going to do a better job of those recommendations and bringing this out because this is one of these areas where the kind of, the old way of doing things I think is preventing us from potentially being as effective as we could in, in getting some of that messaging out.

Jessica: Yeah, and I'm old enough to remember there was a time when the government of Canada says stuff like this and pretty much everybody in Canada paid attention. But that's a long time ago now. That's, that's a good 20 years.

Leah: I think everyone's watching their stock fall, Jess.

Jessica: That's certainly what I'm doing.

Stephanie: But can I just say so, I mean, this is the kind of stuff I thought we would be talking about more in the election, but we've seen foreign interference in other really weird ways I hadn't anticipated.

So there was a story in the Globe and Mail right at the outset of the campaign where basically it said that India had helped Pierre Poilievre to secure the nomination, or at least tried to. And to be clear the Poilievre campaign did not know anything about this, and there's no indication that there was any kind of coordination or whatever. But this is something that they wanted, India apparently wanted and worked to that end, or at least they really just didn't like Patrick Brown who was the, one of the main competitors.

What's interesting about that is I don't think it was a news story, I think anyone who had read the foreign interference report saw that there was some discussion about the Conservative nomination race that took place in 2022. And so I think there was the assumption that it, this had happened. But this was, I think, the first confirmation publicly that it was the Poilievre campaign.

And then there was the case of the MP, the Liberal MP, who is running for re-election, I should say uh, Paul Chiang. And he made a joke about his Conservative rival or the Conservative nominee who has been targeted in a very real way as a form of transnational repression by the Hong Kong authorities, almost certainly on behalf of Beijing, and said that, oh, they should turn him in and collect the reward. And kind of said that as a joke, which is you know, deeply inappropriate. And it took days for the campaign to, to make a decision to, to drop them.

There's been campaigns in southwestern Ontario last year in January, 2024. For press Progress wrote a story that CSIS was investigating Indian foreign interference into some of the conservative nomination race.

I think in the Oxford riding that some of the questions there have resurfaced recently with regards to the various nomination races, but it's hard to know, again, is this real? Is this like just infighting among people who want a chance of being an MP.

And then finally I would say there was a story that's interesting today that was also put up by Marty Patrick Quinn for The Logic, and basically he talked about a think tank report, which identified 73 accounts, but possibly hundreds more that are amplifying far right content about Canada around the election on Twitter/X. Maybe it's not breaking news that this is Twitter's assessment for this kind of stuff.

But all this to say is like there have been a number of foreign interference stories in this particular election.

Leah: Like my understanding is that it's not clear that it's foreign interference per se, but the platform itself is now linked obviously to the US administration and is friendly to US administration's wants and needs, and they've been playing up this 51st state, Canada's in decline, the US should annex Canada. So it's not really pro one candidate, but it's just this amplification of this narrative that we're seeing and noise from the White House on X.

Jessica: And I think that also brings us to the other piece of this conversation, which isn't necessarily foreign interference, but it's foreign influence. So when you see things coming out of the United States with what the President says, and even some Canadians seeking influence from US politicians or US media personalities in terms of influencing the Canadian election and the Canadian election outcomes. Again, not necessarily foreign interference, a lot of this stuff is being done overtly.

But it does broaden the whole conversation around foreign influence in our elections and in our electoral processes and our democratic processes, which I think is really interesting and really in the aftermath of the commission and the inquiry, Canadians are really sensitive to it, so we saw it actually during the convoy as well, there was a lot of concern about foreign influence and foreign interference during the convoy, but I think even more so now after the commission, people are really up in arms about the US interfering or being seen to interfere or influence Canadian politics and Canadians going and trying to exert some of that influence.

Stephanie: But this is something I do worry about. The, you know, the foreign interference, interference story, which is where I worry that if one party or the other gets elected the opponents won't necessarily accept it because they're going to be, “oh, this is foreign interference.” So and then this isn't any kind of endorsement, but if Poilievre gets elected it's “the US and Elon Musk” and stuff like this, or if Carney gets elected, “hey, it was China, there was, it was all intervention from China.”

So I do worry that, I don't want us to take the wrong lessons away from the Foreign Interference Commission. I'm really happy that we're more aware of it, we're more sensitive to it than we've ever been that's I think a net positive. But it could also, there, there are negative elements to that as well.

Leah: Besides all of that let's turn to Signal Gate. This is an American story, but it has implications for the Canadian intelligence community. It has implications for anyone who routinely shares intelligence with the United States. But given our close information sharing relationship with the US I'm sure it sent shockwaves throughout the intelligence community in Canada.

Jess, you wanna walk us through that?

Jessica: Yeah, this is a gift that keeps on giving really from a intelligent scandal perspective. So for any of our listeners who have somehow managed to avoid this, first of all, kudos to you. Amazing job. But second of all, here's the rundown of what happened. So like about two weeks ago, The Atlantic published a story saying that they had accidentally got access to a group chat of a bunch of US government officials, basically planning a strike on the Houthis in Yemen. And the thing that we've since learned that's so amazing about this is that this, the journalist got access to this group chat on Signal because one of the individuals involved his iPhone accidentally updated the contact information, so Jeffrey Goldberg has access to this group chat with a series of US officials, and there's about 20 of them in the group chat, but the content of the group chat is the thing that's obviously the problem, because in their defense, these US government officials said that they weren't sharing any classified information, but it actually turns out that they were in fact talking about very operational details for strikes against some Houthis, including the location of the individual, one of the targets before the strike occurred, and that was also based on Israeli intelligence specifically from a human source. So the Israelis have gotten very mad about this, as you can probably imagine, because this has directly compromised, one of their human sources. These US officials have said that none of this information was classified, which is, it defies belief because there's no chance that wasn't true, this is all very operational, very classified information. Potentially put US service men and women at risk. It defies the logic that any of this information wasn't classified.

And of course, now all of the allies, everybody who's sharing intelligence with the US is probably doing now they're double and third take on sharing intelligence. The first couple would've been with their nomination of the DNI, Trump's election in general and now this to say that this is possibly having a chilling effect on intelligence. This is like a culmination of multiple different incidents that I think I know if I was in the intelligence business, I would be giving very serious thought to what was being shared with our US counterparts.

Stephanie: Yeah. And it's not just that. It's also the fact that like every day we're hearing now, there seems to be some kind of purge going on of basically non-partisan national security authorities. The most recent is an official at NATO which was just announced today. As well as, of course, the head, I believe of a national security agency where basically top officials all seem to have been removed and possibly because known conspiracy theorists, Laura Loomer, marched into the White House and basically demanded that or suggested that these individuals were somehow disloyal and they were subsequently fired.

Jessica: On our earlier conversation about US media personalities trying to influence Canadian politics, because on her podcast last week, she was actually talking about how the US should be interfering in the Canadian election to get their desired political outcomes.

Stephanie: Yeah, I mean it, it's not great. It's not great on, on how these things are working.

And then finally the NSC officials, the National Security Council officials also have been removed. You know, Thomas Juneau, a friend of the podcast, he and I wrote this book called ‘Intelligence and Policy Making: The Canadian Experience’ available at all good bookstores if you want it, it is the worst title. It's so boring. But all this to say is we went down to the United States and we were interviewing Canadian and American officials, and it was very clear that in Trump 1, the relationship, the intelligence sharing relationship largely remain, remained the same, there may have been some frictions here and there, there may have been some threats here and there, but by and large, it largely did remain the same. And I think going into this particular administration, the assumption of Canadian officials was, “this is going to be the same, right? Hey we managed this last time. It's going to be the same this time. So we're not too worried and, we have to make this work.” All this kind of stuff. But everything that's happened in the last six weeks, if it's not setting the hair on fire near Ogilvie Road I, I don't know what's going on.

Leah: So this second guessing of our intelligence relationship. So there's not just the element of should we be sharing, it's the, there's the flip side of do we want to rely on the United States for intelligence? And Steph, you were recently quoted, I think actually both of you were recently quoted in an article that brought up the perennial issue of should Canada have an its own foreign intelligence agency, which I think is coming back up now because the question is can we really rely on the United States, A) if they're annexing us, but also just in general, can we rely on the United States national security apparatus? Should we be going out and looking after our own interests? And one thinks that our argument is self-evident even before this, you would want to think that a sovereign nation would be out there doing its own foreign intelligence collection and not relying on intelligence partnerships to that end, but we largely have, when it comes to human intelligence, and the question of should we have a human intelligence capability that focuses on foreign intelligence is one that's come up repeatedly over the last several decades since we had CSIS and the decision was very clearly made to not have a foreign intelligence, foreign human intelligence capability, but it's coming back up again. Do you think we're just going to have the same conversations over and over again, or do you think the geopolitical dynamic is such now that we really have to stop and reopen this debate more fulsomely than we've had in the past. Jess, I'll start with you.

Jessica: Yeah. If you'd asked me this question three years ago, I would've said, a foreign intelligence service is nice to have, this is not at the top of the list of things that I think are super important for Canada. We were getting great value from our relationship with the United States. Our interests were so closely aligned and the US intelligence collection capacity was so great that there was really no good argument in my view, for us to really duplicate a lot of that. I would've said maybe, there's some particular areas where we could have used additional foreign intelligence collection, but we were not, we did not necessarily need it to meet our goals.

That has changed completely, I would say, in the last two months. And the thing that I think is so interesting about it is I do think that has changed somewhat for the Canadian population as well. You could not explain this concept to Canadians three years ago and have them understand it in a way that would have them not look askance at the price tag that would at be attached to this. Like the price tag for this is big. We're talking probably a billion, not hundreds of millions at this point. And the Canadians that I've spoken to about this have not flinched when I've said that it, I think it's so interesting to me because, we're such a fiscally conservative country, we don't wanna spend money on anything and to hear Canadians say, “you know what? The time has come for us to spend big, to protect our interests, to get intelligence, to drive our economic and security interests” is to me, it's revolutionary, this idea that Canadians might actually get on board with this kind of investment.

But I think ultimately the time has really come for Canada to think about this because we cannot rely on the United States to be collecting this kind of intelligence for us to be doing it consistently and reliably and to be giving us everything without biasing it. There's a fun saying in the intelligence business that, and we share to influence and to inform. I think now for the long time, the United States was doing a lot to inform, and I think now anything that we're getting from them would have to be looked at from more of an influence perspective.

Stephanie: Yeah, I would echo a lot of that. I would, the only thing I might disagree on is that I think most Canadians already think we have a Canadian CIA and I'm dead serious. Like when I talk to

Leah: What do they think it's called, do you think?

Stephanie: I think they think it's CSIS. They think CSIS is the CIA, right? And it's not. And just for people who don't know out there, and that is fine if you don't know. So CSIS collects security intelligence. And security intelligence is really like defending the realm, right? Like it's the information that you need in order to protect Canada.

Whereas foreign intelligence is, information really kind of about other things. That may be out there that are also important to the security of the state, like what are the intentions of the Houthis with regards to the Red Sea or what is, what are people in Russia thinking about leadership succession going forward. It's that's really the foreign intelligence and we've decided -

Leah: It's more than that though. It can have a direct link to Canada. Economic interests, for example. Yes. Or how states are gonna vote on a UN security resolution that Canada brings forward,

Stephanie: All that stuff yes. It's just stuff outside of the CSIS Act, which would be terrorism, espionage and foreign interference.

Jessica: Subversion. I feel like subversion is coming back around.

Stephanie: Ever since the convoy.

Leah: Bringing it back.

Stephanie: Haven't touched it since 1986.

Jessica: I also think about foreign and, and security intelligence as being more defensive, looking at those threats to security and reacting to them and foreign intelligence being more offensive or forward-leaning, trying to be proactive against some of those threats and their nexus to Canada.

Stephanie: So it's like that's the kind of stuff we don't have and we've depended entirely on our foreign allies to give us that information.

Leah: Human sources.

Stephanie: From human sources, correct.

Leah: To be clear though, human intelligence we do in Canada collect foreign intelligence through the Communication Security Establishment. That's their primary mandate. That's their historical raison d'etre. Although they do a lot more things than that now. We do get signals intelligence to forward our foreign intelligence aims, but we don't have human agents, we don't have intelligence officers running agents abroad to gather that kind of intelligence.

Stephanie: Yeah. And I'm really glad you said that because again, if you say that Canada doesn't do foreign intelligence, the CSE does get very mad. And we don't want them being mad at us.

Jessica: Yeah. And then there's also a part of the CSIS Act, section 16 that allows for the collection of foreign intelligence in Canada.

Leah: But you can't target Canadians. It's only non-Canadians within Canada.

So if we had a foreign diplomats in this country, although technically unlawful at international law, CSIS could, per se, intercept their communications in order to gather foreign intelligence on them in Canada.

Jessica: Leah, I want to ask you, what are the legal restrictions if we were thinking about setting up a foreign intelligence service, like what does that look like in Canadian law and international law too?

Leah: Steph asked me this question the other day about, would this just be crown prerogative? So does the executive have the power to just do foreign intelligence without legislation and the argument could be made that they do, but I would argue that the fact that we have a specific human source driven intelligence agency that specifically delineates that you could only do foreign intel foreign intelligence collection in very specific spaces means that you can't then create a whole new agency that does it elsewhere, right? Like parliament has spoken so far in relation to where Canadian officers can do foreign intelligence collections. They've narrowed that field, and so I would say it would be a harder legal argument to make, to suggest that we could just start doing it under the authority vested in the crown, even if it does engage the elements of foreign affairs that are largely arrested with the executive. I don't think we could do that.

Not to mention it would run against how we run our security and intelligence community in Canada, which is that we very clearly are in a space of positive law. So we write on paper what they're allowed to do, and that's all they're allowed to do.

That is different, however in the space of defense intelligence, that is the complete opposite in the space of defense intelligence, which arguably also engages in foreign intelligence collection but for very specific purposes having to do with national defense. And again, Phil Lagasse and I have had all kinds of debates about the merits of that, but I think if we were looking at a foreign intelligence agency in this country, I don't think you would get anything passed go unless we were introducing legislative authorities for that and spelling out very clearly who the minister was that was responsible for its activities and whatnot. And who could be the target of foreign intelligence collection. All of the pieces of legislation that we have now very clearly say that you can't do foreign intelligence collection against Canadians. So there would be those kinds of limitations within it, even if it, was very bland in terms of the authorities it gave them, I still think that it would very clearly delineate what the agency could do and could not do, who could be the targets. And then that element of ministerial accountability and review would all be something that we would need to see in a piece of legislation.

Stephanie: Yeah, I thank you for clarifying that. I've always believed like even if you could do it under Crown, and I think someone like Phil Lagasse would say, yes, you could positively do this under Crown Prerogative, I think you just wanna tie the bow, let's just cross the t's and dot the i's on this legislation. Let's do it right and let's, make sure that if we do go down this road, we do it in a way that is compatible with our domestic institutions and our democratic traditions quite frankly. Even if most Canadians, I believe, already think we do foreign intelligence, foreign human intelligence, sorry, CSE then we have to

Leah: Arguably GSRP at GAC does.

Stephanie: It depends on what day you're asking.

Leah: Yes. I know, and I've gotten in trouble with this before, but if you're collecting intelligence from humans to advance our foreign interest, that is not related to our security interests by definition, that is foreign intelligence. But they would say that they do not do it overtly, or sorry, excuse me, but they would say they do not do it covertly and they're not intelligence officers engaged in this practice, and therefore, somehow it's not foreign intelligence.

Who's doing it and how you're doing it doesn't change what information you're bringing in. So we always get into this fight. But I would say that anything more than that kind of collection would need to be done through legislation, especially if you're starting to engage in practices that do run afoul of international law.

Stephanie: Which spying does.

Leah: Right. You can't do anything per the Crown immunity that violates Canadian law and arguably international law because we have to interpret everything that the executive can do as being compliant with international law. So I don't know how you get around that in the Crown prerogative, that's part of why I think defense intelligence should also be legislated to an extent because otherwise you have to do things that are compliant with international law and espionage is not always compliant with international law.

Stephanie: So I think this also raises some questions about where such an organization would go, this is the other thing we'd have to decide. So in the UK for example, they have it under their Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office. So I think it's now the FCDO Minister is responsible, there's also been arguments made that if Canada did the step that it should also go to CSIS, you could just create a new branch of CSIS. I've never been for that idea. I think that the kind of legislation you have to run a security intelligence service is markedly different from that which is required to run a foreign human intelligence outfit and for the reasons you just specified Leah, it's a different kind of framework and with a different kind of skills and different kind of objectives. Potentially you could put under PCO. I don't know. There's a lot of, these are all decisions you'd have to make. But I would just say, this is something that I think. Our allies have been pushing us to do for some time.

Jessica: Steph, let me stop you here. I wanna ask you a question. What do you think Canada would get from a foreign intelligence service, like a foreign human intelligence service that we're not getting now. What's the big argument here?

Stephanie: I love this question. So there's the issue that I think, was brought up at the beginning here with Leah when we talked, when we entered this segment which is that we may be cut off from some US intelligence. I don't think they can cut us off completely. I think this idea that we're gonna be kicked out of the Five Eyes is ridiculous. The Five Eyes is not a birthday party. That you can just, that you just get uninvited from

Jessica: They can leave, but they can't kick us out.

Stephanie: Yeah, exactly. So I think it would just be reduced cooperation.

Leah: I’m taking my balloons and leaving!

Stephanie: Exactly. That's kind of it.

Jessica: I'm taking my toys and I'm going home!

Stephanie: I'm just worried about the Chinese space balloons.

But so these are the kinds of of things. At the same time there is the concern that there could be reduced cooperation. And the example I always point to is that in 2003 when Canada decided not to support the war in Iraq at NORAD, there was a reduction in cooperation between Canada and the United States, particularly on intelligence showing that actually ended after I think a few weeks or a few months, just simply because you can't actually defend North America without us, you need that big hat America that's sitting on top of you, that is called Canada to do these things.

So let's set that aside. What I think we would get out of it is the following, is that we don't have a shortage of information, right? It's not like there's gaps. But the way that information is collected, when it's collected by the UK, the US particularly right now and our other allies, is that it's collected with their interests in mind, not our interests, their interests. And sometimes they have to think that the way, a country like the US, the way they see the world, the way they collect intelligence is gonna be shaped by their capabilities, their interests, which are very different from Canada. So that would be the one thing that we would get out of this, is that we would get intelligence about things that we care about from our own perspective. I think that is a real thing.

And then the second thing we are gonna get out of it is, and I don't wanna be too transactional about this, but it's transactional, right? Jess. You said earlier that intelligence can shape, inform and influence. The influence here is important. It would be us being able to bring tactical, granular information to the table and that is the currency with which intelligence works, right? And if we can bring that information to the table, that is gonna be able to enable us to work with our allies more effectively. And I'm thinking here the French, the Dutch, other European partners potentially in the Indo-Pacific, right? That is going to allow us to broaden our relationships out much further in ways that are going to hopefully enable us to, to cooperate. I don't know. I don't know what you think about that.

Jessica: Yeah, I definitely agree with that. I also like, when I think about foreign intelligence, I really think about it from an economic security perspective again, trying always to make this an an economics podcast, but I love that for us. The one place where I think Canada's interests don't necessarily diverge, but are a bit different than the other allies in the Five Eyes are on economic things. And I think this is the kind of place where foreign intelligence could really inform that.

And one of the things that I wanted to talk about today that I don't necessarily know that we want to get into in too much detail is this issue of sort of state threats using non-state actors and one of the examples I wanted to bring up was the role of the UAE in Sudan and funding the RSF in that sort of overall conflict and we're not gonna get into that, but one of the issues that's happening there is that those forces are being funded in part by illicit gold sales. Now, one of the things that Canada does really well and does internationally is extractives. So we have a lot of extractive companies that are going around the world and setting up shop, getting mines and stuff and this is the kind of place where I think that foreign intelligence and really granular, specific and detailed intelligence could really help Canada/Canadian businesses, because there is, I think there should be a mandate for sharing some of this intelligence with Canadian businesses as you're contemplating, moving into a particular area that you should understand the details of what are happening there, but also our sanctions. So right now our sanctions are informed by a lot of different things, but not at a very granular level in terms of Canadian interest. They're really responding to what our allies are doing.

So I think it would be really useful for Canada to be able to say look, these six companies in Sudan are exporting illicit gold. We're going to sanction those because that's actually to the benefit of Canada in a lot of ways and also global security. So I think there's a number of things on the economic security front that it could really advance.

Stephanie: I endorse.

Leah: I just want to add one of the other historical arguments against just adding a foreign intelligence component abroad for CSIS, has always been this idea that you do intelligence, there are different rules for intelligence collection at home and abroad, right? You play by very different rules when you're dealing with your own citizens and the need to comply with the charter, for example that we know definitely applies in Canada and I make the argument that applies to what the state agents do, even when they're abroad, legal arguments aside there. So you know, you don't want to have people who play by two sets of rules working in the same agency because they will cross-pollinate like inevitably. Like nobody in Canadian government ever stays inside their own agency for very long or in their one little silo. Like you can't move up in Canadian, any Canadian agency without being multi-hatted. So you would have these people going across, kind of jurisdictions, going from security intelligence in Canada to foreign intelligence abroad. The rules get convoluted and you start seeing practices from one inform the other. And the concerns about that. And again, when you think back to the creation of CSIS and what the purpose was to constrain and have a very professionalized regulated organization, right? Not having Canadians literally quote, “doing God knows what, God knows where”, right? Like when you start to have that in the same organization, then things can get tricky. That's always been one of the core arguments for not having a single agency do both missions, but there are states like New Zealand for example, who do that. So it's not that it doesn't happen, it's just always been something that people have really rejected.

Jessica: I would also make a pitch for not creating a mega organization. I've spent the last year looking at the RCMP and the RCMP's mandate, and let me tell you, we don't want another organization that has two different mandates reporting up through the same chain of command because that has created nothing but problems within the RCMP and doing the same thing here would just be not learning lessons from that big mistake.

Stephanie: We need to have a whole group therapy session on the RCMP, I think this needs to happen

Leah: But I do want us to maybe as a last topic, talk about, I don't want to say bomb, that was dropped by the PM as you walked out of the office.

Jessica: I call it a bomb.

Leah: I don't call it a bomb only because he didn't say anything new. So this, we're talking about a white paper that was released by Justin Trudeau himself. In his last days as Prime Minister and it like, to me it was like if you fed the last 10 reports that looked at the RCMP and made recommendations into Chat GPT and asked you to write it a white paper, right? That's what you would've gotten.

So it wasn't new in the sense that any of the ideas in it were new. But it was new in the sense that you had the Prime Minister saying, this is what we should do a then he walked away. And we hadn't seen anything like that out of his government at all in the preceding 10 years.

Jessica: Well we had seen last summer, there was discussion around reforming the RCMP public Safety Minister at the time Dominic LeBlanc was leading an initiative on that, but we never saw anything out of that other than I guess this white paper. It does come out of nowhere for most people, I think.

Stephanie: I think, yeah, the fact is there's been a number of national security initiatives that I don't think ever quite got out the door that were undertaken including a national security policy that never will see the light of day.

But the other thing we have to remember here too is that, just to be blunt, and I based some of this off of, my own knowledge, but also the writing of Justin Ling and stuff like this and Jess, I know you've had been in these conversations as well.

The fact is that the RCMP is a fierce bureaucratic fighter that just doesn't want to change. They see themselves as part of the Canadian identity, the fabric. And they do not want this. They do not want this reform, and they are, I suspect that they are fighting it tooth and nail so meaning it was just the time to drop it on the way out of the door, which I agree and maybe I, we should definitely need to link to it in the footnotes because not only was this dropped on the last day, it's also hidden on the website, like you can't find it very easily. We'll put it in the notes and you can see there's a number of good reforms I think that are in there. Basically the idea that the Minister of Public Safety should be able to direct the force a bit more, which is, which hard because it, you have to balance that principle of independent policing or police independence, right? You don't want the the administrator of public safety, being able to order investigations into things that they like.

We're seeing this in the US right now, and it's not going great. The second thing is the, this idea that we should completely separate or hive off. Federal policing. So the kind of, national security policing, terrorism investigations, espionage, foreign interference, organized crime, from the kind of local policing that the provincial contracts do. That's also another really good, like these were good ideas. Those were the two that really stood out for me. And it, but this is something that I think that clearly the RCMP just doesn't want and doesn't even want to have the conversation.

Jessica: I would also say that it's not necessarily all of the RCMP that doesn't want it. I think it's a very strong, very vocal opposition, but I'm not sure that it represents the majority.

Leah: And this is my problem. The RCMP is an arm of the federal government, they don't get a vote on the floor of the House of Commons, right? They don't get to direct policing policy for the entire country and what is good for policing for our entire country. I've seen no federal politician stand up and say “what we've got is working, and I'm gonna vote against any measure of reform for the RCMP.” There's not a single elected official saying anything of the sort. So you've got unelected public servants, which is what police officers are, right, standing in the way of reform that would benefit and enhance national security in this country. And that to me is -

Stephanie: Anti-democratic.

Jessica: Anti-democratic is the word.

Stephanie: We're seeing anti-democratic behavior.

Leah: I cannot stand it. I have not heard a single good argument other than we don't want to, or our unions won't let us, for not implementing many of these reforms.

Stephanie: And given that there's been 10 reports now on how much this reform is needed.

Leah: It gets repeated that it's gonna be hard. Yes. It's gonna be hard, but the current situation is not working and like, to me, the white paper was somewhat important because it signaled that there's a fight going on between the RCMP and the government and the government is losing,

Jessica: Which is incredible. That's a crazy situation to be in. This is an organization that should be accountable to Canadians and to our elected officials and is actively opposing that will, which is in my view, completely unacceptable.

Leah: And actively opposing what is in the best interest of the public safety and national security of those citizens.

Jessica: Exactly.

Leah And so I think it was A) it was cowardly do it in this way by the Prime Minister, but at least it was done to signal that the fight is going on to those who are not paying attention. But he basically said, this is not a fight I was willing to actually do anything about when I was Prime Minister. So here's for the next guy.

Stephanie: National Security was never a priority, maybe one of our podcasts later down the road, we can do a retrospect of the last 10 years of national security because there's some good, but some bad.

Jessica: And I think the thing that disappoints me too about the white paper and the whole conversation after it, is that we haven't actually seen any of the political parties in the election cycle take up the mantle of talking about this as part of their platform.

Which brings us to the next topic that we need to discuss, which is going to be the party's national security platforms. Now we're not confident that we're going to get any platforms. So what we're proposing is we're going to reconvene probably in a week and a half to talk about the announcements that we've seen that pertain to national security. And we're gonna try to make sure that we cover that off across the different parties so that we get a good non-partisan representation of what they're saying and just talk through some of these issues.

Stephanie: So on that note with promise of more to come I think this has been a very good airing of the grievances ladies, and I'm glad we had this conversation, these conversations. There's clearly more here that will be said, whether it's foreign intelligence, the RCMP foreign interference, and I wouldn't -

Leah: Haven't even started about the border.

Stephanie: Oh, gosh, yeah. No, the border is clearly here to stay,

Jessica: To be fair, I really enjoyed this reprieve from Orange Monday, as I like to call this stock market day.

Stephanie: Don't look at her. We're gonna be working for a very long time, okay guys, we're working for a very long time. So on that note thank you so much for listening.

It's been another great episode of Secure Line. If you enjoy this podcast, please tell a friend. Please rate, please subscribe, please review, please do all the things that they always ask you to do on podcasts except for buy underwear or mattresses or whatever that is.

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