Secure Line Podcast Season One Finale - Episode 13 - Nat Sec Fight Club

In the final episode of Season 1, Jessica Davis and Stephanie Carvin dive into what Canada’s new government should prioritize when it comes to national security and intelligence.

From long-overdue RCMP reform to the growing threat of extremist violence, they lay out a transition binder’s worth of ideas—some controversial, all necessary. They debate whether violent extremism deserves top billing, why RCMP structure still fails national security needs, and how Canada’s intelligence collection and sharing strategies need to evolve—especially as U.S. cooperation becomes less certain. They make the case for a separate Canadian foreign intelligence service, stronger sanctions regimes (especially against cybercriminals), and enhanced economic intelligence capabilities.

The episode also touches on Canada’s patchy record on prosecutions, the politics of listings, and why Canada’s "loud noises and sanctions button" approach isn’t enough. Expect some disagreement, a few laughs, and a lot of serious policy ideas.

Plus: both Jess and Steph have Substacks now. Subscribe, rate, and tell us what to cover in Season 2—coming this fall (unless something catastrophic happens first).

Get in touch, share your thoughts, and let us know what you want to hear next.

Stephanie's Substack:

Jessica's Substack:

Listen to the episode below:

Read the transcript below:

Intro: Steph, Leah, Jess - is this line secure?

Jessica: I'm Jessica Davis.

Stephanie: I'm Stephanie Carvin.

Jessica: Welcome to our post-election episode where Steph and I are going to talk through what we think the new government's national security and intelligence priorities should be. Unfortunately, Leah couldn't join us today, but she'll be back soon.

Stephanie: And we're just gonna get right into it!

Jessica: Yeah, so Steph why don't we talk about, first of all, the one priority we most certainly agree on.

Stephanie: Right, and I should say we both now have substack. I have a substack. It's very small. It's not Davis Enterprises, like a media megalopolis thing, it's just a small substack. So if you like my views, you can subscribe to it. It's just under my name. Maybe we can put it in the show notes. But yeah, we both wrote four things and the first thing we put together is perhaps unsurprising to people who follow us is, RCMP Reform. Reform, the RCMP. The R stands for Reform that thing.

This is something that's longstanding and that I think is just ultimately fundamental and I don't even know where to start with this really. It's just the fact that just as a basic overview for those who are perhaps unfamiliar, of course we've had the RCMP as our National Police force, I think since 1873. Very important in terms of, of course the colonization of Canada and like quote unquote settling the West.

And it was, necessary to have this kind of paramilitary style police force from the perspective of the government of the time, of course in order to just make sure that the process of settling the West was going as smoothly as it could. And since then, we've had the RCMP as our federal police force, but importantly in many of the provinces, it's also the provincial police force.

So if you're in Quebec, you have the Sûreté du Québec. If you're in Ontario, you have the Ontario Provincial Police, but pretty much everywhere else your two levels of, policing or three levels in some cases are going to be the RCMP. And at the provincial level it's contract policing. And at the federal level it is this kind of federal policing, which is usually when we talk about federal policing, we're talking about terrorism, we're talking about, organized crime that usually crosses some kind of boundary, we're looking at -

Jessica: Foreign interference.

Stephanie: Foreign interference, exactly. Espionage, those kinds of national security offenses, things that the FBI tends to prosecute.

We have, I think, there's now been like at least eight studies done in the last 13 years looking at how the current model does not serve the 21st century. This is a 19th century model of policing. And I hate the word broken because its overused. We just thought Canada is broken but we decided it's not, in the election. But like it is a model that is flawed and is certainly not optimal for the kinds of challenges we're having and there's a whole bunch of reasons for this.

The first would be of course the model is not great. If you are a new intake, you basically join the RCMP as a police force. You go to Depot for, what is it, like a couple weeks, couple months?

Jessica: It’s months yeah.

Stephanie: Months. Yeah. And you get your training and then you basically are a beat cop for 10 years. And then maybe you get to go work on a sanctions case with no training. And that doesn't seem great.

Jessica: There is a model now for direct entry to federal policing.

Stephanie: Oh, that's good.

Jessica: I think it's very limited in terms of the number of people that it's actually pulled in.

Stephanie: That's not good.

Jessica: The other issue too of like very limited training for federal policing. Yeah, I think that there's.

Stephanie: There's talk of making an academy.

Jessica: Yeah, there's talk of an academy, but I think right now as it stands, like it's, you can measure the amount of federal police training in hours, not weeks or months.

Stephanie: That's not good.

Jessica: Yeah. There has been talk about creating an academy for quite a while now, and I think that the RCMP commissioner is actually committed to it as part of like his idea of RCMP reform. But again, it's not happened. And I think fundamentally there's so many issues around funding and resources within the RCMP. There's real serious questions about where this is even gonna come from.

Stephanie: And yeah, and I just explained what the RCMP is, but you've actually delved into this, right?

Jessica: I've done a fair bit of work on it. I would not consider myself to be an expert on the RCMP, but it's one of those things that it's so big and there's so much to going on there that I think it is actually difficult to be an expert on the RCMP because you can really only be an expert on a little slice of it. But anyways, there's like lots of issues around funding and structure and governance, all of these different things.

But the thing that I think is interesting is that we fundamentally agree that something needs to be done about this. You can point to all those different studies. A lot of them have very different reasons for calling for RCMP reform, but there are like a number of common threads, the federal versus contract policing being one of them.

I've talked about it before on this podcast, the issue of financial crimes enforcement in Canada, always being the thing that gets the resources get pulled away from when we're dealing with threat to life investigations and things like that. There's a lot to unpack on the RCMP and I think what we should do is probably still promise a more dedicated episode.

Stephanie: Several episodes.

Jessica: Yeah on the RCMP. We promise that we'll do it, but I cannot tell you when. Eventually one day, one day. We promise it's big.

Stephanie: Yeah. And to that point, like I think just the fact that the provincial side drained a lot of resources from the federal side, the lack of training, as you just mentioned, they have a recruitment crisis too, right? They're having trouble recruiting. There's obviously been discussions of questions about culture and things that need to change. And yeah, and my view is that, it's just we need a proper civilianized federal police force that can train, taking smart young people and train them to do like computer crimes.

The fact that, we just don't see people being prosecuted for offenses in the way that we do in other countries. Like I said computer crimes, like the National Cyber Crime Center the NC3, I think it is at the RCMP. What are they doing? Like where are they, what are they doing?

The OPP tends, I think to prosecute more in terms of cyber crime.

Jessica: One of the things that really concerns me about some of the language that we hear coming from the RCMP these days is the RCMP talking in terms of disruption. A lot. Instead of focusing on prosecutions and part of me thinks, oh, that's interesting. That's cool. Like we should also think about, disrupting crime in a way that doesn't necessarily require prosecution. But it also reminds me of why CSIS was created in the first place.

Stephanie: Yeah. It didn't go great.

Jessica: Because some of that disruption involved barn burnings, so I fear that we're going almost backwards where I really think that our law enforcement should be really focused on enforcing the law and if we want disruption in different forms, then maybe that's something that the security service can do because they do have threat reduction measure powers. Anyways, I'm not married to those ideas, but it does, it is the kind of thing that's really starting to, when I hear it, it's starting to create a little tingle in the back of my head and not in a good way.

Stephanie: Yeah. The spidey sense.

Jessica: Yeah, exactly.

Stephane: Okay, so let's park this here. I think we can agree you can change as many laws as you want. You can put as many resources into national security that you want to Mr. Carney. But at the end of the day, until the RCMP is fixed, we're really not gonna see prosecutions and we're gonna see a lot of the problems that we have continue.

So more on that to come, I'm sure.

Jessica: But let's stay on a similar topic and talk about one place maybe where we don't agree because I think you as one of your priorities, you talk about violent extremism.

Stephanie: Yes.

Jessica: So why don't you go first and then I'll talk about why I don't agree this is a priority.

Stephanie: Okay so I think what I'm trying to do when I say violent extremism as a priority threat, it's not your grandpa's terrorism. It is.

Jessica: There's still some of that.

Stephanie: Not in the way I'm talking about it. Okay. So I'm trying to take it in terms of trying to understand not just what I would call violent extremism, but we're seeing a transition to what I would call extremist violence in some ways which is sounds like I'm mixing up words, but the kinds of weird phenomenon that we're seeing now in terms of how people are engaging in the threat is very different than what it was I would say, even five years ago.

And I think some of that has to do with the pandemic. There's been a lot of research done recently on, for example, 764 and the fact that you have these gangs of people who are, I don't like the term nihilist violence, but it's kind of violence for violence's sake.

And they're online and they're trying to encourage children. Again, not even adults, like literal children to do, trying to groom them to do the most heinous kinds of acts. And it's just a glorification of violence.

We've seen a lot of intercommunal rivalries with the Israel Palestinian crisis. We've seen, different talks of extremists around that. We've definitely seen a return to certain kinds of religiously motivated, violent extremism as the service would somewhat controversially still continue to call it as a result of that.

But really I think what we're looking at is this rise in non-ideological mass casualty violence, fixated violence that some of the tools that we've developed in terms of trying to develop pathways to get people out of this are very applicable. And I think we need to continue to fund research that looks at this and looks at, I have a grant that looked at like their relationship with online and offline extremist violence. so admittedly I'm close to this, but I should say none of my funding comes from Public Safety, it comes from Women and Gender Equality Canada.

But the fact is that this is something that is not going away. It's getting worse. And I think that the kind of when you approach it again not so much as a national security problem, but as a public health issue. And understand that certain national security challenges can be public health issues. I think it it actually broadens the way we can look at these problems and get new insights and better understandings and going forward.

Jessica: Yeah, and that's not without precedence, right? Like even when you look at something like fentanyl that is both a public health crisis and a national security crisis.

These things can both things can be true. Absolutely.

I'm gonna, I'm gonna really push back and strongly disagree with you because, okay no, I'm not really gonna strongly disagree with you -

Stephanie: Fight me.

Jessica: We're gonna have a fight club now. I think you, you probably heard me talk about this before, but every time I hear things like, the new types of extremism, I recoil in horror because I think that there's in terrorism studies and somewhat to a certain extent in so mostly in academia and somewhat in, in national security circles, there's a real fixation on ideology as something that we need to understand in order to really counter extremism, and I don't agree. I have never understood ideology as being so important in terms of countering terrorism and extremism.

You have to have some understanding in terms of like where people are going to connect and have these meetings and all these kinds of things. But fundamentally, understanding the depths of why someone commits violence I don't actually think has a huge explanatory power and I don't think that it's actually all that helpful from a counter-terrorism perspective.

So I think while it is useful and sometimes interesting to understand a lot of these things, I don't necessarily think this needs to be a priority. I think that the RCMP is, despite what we've already just said about the RCMP, like I actually think that they're doing a pretty decent job.

There's definitely some refinement that needs to be made in terms of dealing with contemporary threats and contemporary issues. But overall, I think that the way they go about countering terrorism and violent extremism is largely successful.

Stephanie: So more research and trying to understand the ideology is not at all what I'm talking about.

Jessica: Oh, okay.

Stephanie: No it's not. More research on pathways out in treatment and, but also like more about not necessarily what the belief is, not what the ideology is, but more about how this stuff works. Like how people are actually doing this. It's more about the methods than the ideology, I would say. Going into the Roblox, and convincing people to do this work. Funding the centers that are getting people out of this, right? So you have Shift in BC you have the Organization for Prevention of Violence out in Western Canada. You have Yorktown in Toronto, you have Situation Tables across Canada, probably not nearly enough of them that are trying to get people to the help because if there's one thing we have learned, to your point is that ideologies, don't, they don't really explain a whole lot. And when you sit down with someone, and I've never done this, so just to be clear, but they sometimes wanna have that ideological fight with you, or in the case of this kind of non-ideological, fixated violence, there's no ideology really to deal with. These are people who like thrive in this idea of brain rot which is, you can't have an ideological discussion, but it is about finding the tailored program for these people.

I don't think there's one massive solution to this. I think what we need to be developing are toolkits and that's effectively what I'm talking about. Not the necessarily the ideological study of what makes 764 tick. It's brain rot. I don't think we need to spend too much time on this. They're just trying to get kids to do the most horrific things possible because it's sick.

Jessica: Yeah. Like sometimes there isn't a huge explanatory piece to it. I would also say though, there's been a lot of work on terrorism and extremism over the years, and I actually think that we have a really good understanding of push and pull factors in and how people exit these kinds of ideologies and organizations. Applying that might be a bit more of a difficult challenge, but I actually think that a lot of that research is in place. Does it need to be updated on a continual basis, of course, because different circumstances, particularly technological developments will impact that.

But I'm less convinced about this as as a priority.

Stephanie: Yeah, I just think I dunno, like maybe we can disagree on this. I think the numbers of youth being sucked into these things is unprecedented. I am very worried about the, about Manosphere, gender-based and anti-2SLGBTQI+ sentiments that are online now.

Then we get, then we start actually getting into questions about freedom of belief and these kinds of things. But the point I would make is that we do need to be funding the treatment centers and the situation tables that are at least trying to take these individuals who are going down these paths and trying to get them into better situations, let's treat people and treat it as a public health issue as, as much as we can.

So we, okay. We can agree to disagree there and that's fine. But like I, where I sympathize with you is I agree we don't need to sit down and fund many conferences on the ideologies here. I think the kind of practitioner focus here is where it needs to be.

Jessica: Yeah. So my number two priority is really about enhanced and expanded intelligence relationships beyond the United States. This obviously comes out of President Trump and all of the various things that he said about kicking Canada out of the Five Eyes. See episode X, y, z that we did on this. And Canada's a 51st state.

There's no doubt in my mind that the US is and will be for the foreseeable future, one of Canada's primary intelligence partners. What I worry about is the sort of structural rot that's happening in the United States. The gutting of the FBI. Staff reductions in intelligence agencies.

That overall antagonistic relationship with Canada, which makes it actually difficult to share intelligence, like from a very practical perspective with it. Somebody who's talking about soft invasion of your country. It makes it really hard to, do those, that kind of work. And I think that relationship is gonna stay strong for a while, but I think it's gonna be very case based and very case specific.

Is Canada's number one partner on Russia right now, the United States? I don't think so. Is Canada's number one partner on North American Islamic State adherence, the United States? Absolutely. I think that’s still work that's going on. I know we just saw our third or fourth terrorism prosecution for financing this week, an individual who pled guilty.

Stephanie: It's only happened in Canada three times. Well done RCMP.

Jessica: And of course it had a US component to it. Because it had a US undercover and there was a US connection.

Stephanie: They gentle parented us into that prosecution. Okay. Sorry. We're drifting back. We're drifting back. Okay.

Jessica: So that will remain a really important relationship, but Canada really needs to expand its existing intelligence relationships. I wanna emphasize this like it's not that Canada only shares intelligence with the United States, we have the rest of the Five Eyes. We actually have intelligence sharing relationships much beyond the Five Eyes. And I think that more time, we should tend that garden, right? We shouldn't just be tending the small plot of land. It should be the full garden that we're going for here.

Stephanie: Yeah. And it's interesting, so you put down the enhanced relationships and I wanna tie this into your next point that you raised, which is also enhanced collection because I think this actually starts to get to one of my priorities too. So why don't you talk about what you mean by enhanced collection.

Jessica: Yeah. And so when I'm talking about in those intelligent sharing relationships, it's not just for the sake of having them. It's what are we gonna specifically do for it? And what are we gonna get from it, right?

Stephanie: It's not intelligence friends sitting around a circle, going to camp.

Jessica: We, that's what we have now, to be honest. Sounds fun. We have a little bit of a kumbaya situation going on with some of our intelligence partners, but we haven't really tended that relationship in a really cohesive way because we don't need to. Why would we spend money and effort when we have the United States?

Stephanie: Hear me out. Here me out. Instead of the Five Eyes, we need the Vibe Eyes, just the vibes. I did it.

Jessica: I don't like, I don't like it.

Stephanie: laughing Sorry.

Jessica: But back to what we should be collecting with these enhanced relationships. I am all about economic security and trade, so I don't think that Canada has a ton of natural security interests globally, I think, we have to work to define them.

The United States relationship is very important. We have a lot of trade relationships that I think are super important and economic relationships. And so that's where I think that we should be focusing our collection, right? Really about enhancing that economic security trade. And this is the kind of thing that Canada, I think could really become very niche an expert in.

We are, we're already quite good at it actually.

Stephanie: Is that because we've had this intel sorry the ICA, the Investment Canada Act?

Jessica: The Investment Canada Act, it's been in place for quite a long time, and so we've had a chance to really develop the intelligence that supports that process and all of those different things.

But it goes a bit beyond that. Some, and even argue that GSRP contributes, contributes to our economic security agenda. But I think there's so much more we could lean into this. I think I describe it in my Substack article is I think our current capabilities are about a five out of 10, and I think we could just turn that, dial up and get it right to a 10 and that would give us something really valuable to share because a lot of our existing intelligence partners are going to have similar economic security concerns to us because it's all built on those trade relationships. So this is where I see, not just collection for collection's sake, but targeted collection, targeted relationships for economic security and trade.

Stephanie: And certainly that would be something that Carney, I think would be interested in. Like that, I think that fits well with, if you looked at the Liberal platform and God helped me, I read all the platforms except for the Green party.

Jessica: I read it for us.

Stephanie: There you go. But the fact is that it has that real economic security bend to it. And I think that's it. And to your, again, to your point that we have right now we have, if we think of a Canada's foreign intelligence relationships, if we say we don't have foreign intelligence, the CSE gets very mad.

Of course they collect through the global information infrastructure. So the emails, the text messages, the voice call, phone calls, stuff like that. But we don't have a human intelligence agency that could do some of the really kind of unique things. They can collect security intelligence. So when you are looking at these companies that are trying to invest in Canada, there is that security element to it, right? So CSIS can look into these companies and try to figure out what they are, but beyond that, we can't collect this kind of economic intelligence that you're talking about when it relates to the national interest as opposed to the security intelligence. And I think to your point, this is really about the fact that we could really develop this expertise, this niche area.

And I think the other thing that's really important here for people to understand is what our allies want is not our high level analysis. “Hey, China's trying to invest and take over industries.” Okay? Yeah. We all know that. Thank you. Thank you Canada. What other countries are really looking for, when we talk about intelligent sharing relationships, that tactical granular information that, oh, it's not that China is trying to, take over critical minerals. It's like company XYZ is actually owned by these seven different shell companies, which then go back to control by the government of China, the PRC, and this is why we have to be concerned about that particular company we've done the research now.

Jessica: And the only way that you figured that out is because you had coffee with the chair.

Stephanie: Exactly. Or I think, we were discussing the other day like, there may be situations where you have to do some kind of pokey things like setting up fake companies maybe to see where things are going and doing that kind of activity, which would require, to my point, a foreign human intelligence service. Ta-da, we got there.

So that is the thing that I've been advocating for. If you follow me on the socials, you'll know that I had an article come out in the Globe and Mail with Thomas Juneau and former National Security Intelligence advisor Vincent Rigby about why we should move towards that. Now, Jess, I do note that you talk about this in your piece, but you don't actually come out and state it as a priority.

So what's your thinking here?

Jessica: Yeah, this is a really specific reason I didn't do this, so I think, I agree a hundred percent Canada needs a foreign intelligence service, a human foreign intelligence service. I think it would really augment our capabilities. I don't see this happening very quickly.

Obviously, like there's a lot of legislative and policy work that needs to go into it, so I actually don't think it's great to have it as a priority for like the first couple of years. I think this is the kind of thing where the policy work can be going on in the background while we actually do my priorities two and three, which is enhance those relationships, enhance that intelligence collection. But I hundred percent agree with the establishment of this.

I also wanna put my foot down here and say I don't think this needs to be a 10,000 person organization. I think a tight set of intelligence priorities and a few hundred people can make a huge difference in this.

I also would hesitate to see Canada really scale and try to establish a really huge footprint internationally without, really testing the idea first to make sure that this is in fact like a good use of our money.

Stephanie: A hundred percent agree with all of that. I think, so the approach that Thomas, myself and Vincent Rigby put forward in the editorial is about, is a two step program effectively, right?

The first would be to, okay, it's probably gonna take 5 to 10 years to get any kind of organization like that running because of exactly what you said, the policy work, the legal work and stuff like that. You'd wanna do it I think, you could perhaps do it under Crown Prerogative.

I don't think that's a good idea. I think you wanna actually make it very clear which laws we're okay with breaking, which we aren't.

Jessica: We need to have a little asterisk here that Leah's gonna have to come back and talk to us about all of these, the legalities of all of this on another episode. She was really sad to not be able to come in and do that with us today.

Stephanie: Yeah, that sucks. That sucks. I agree. But in the meantime, as you said, we can enhance the kind of collection that we do now. And there's a number of ways that, that we could do that. Again, I don't know if we wanna get into all those right now.

But I do think the one thing I'll just say here that I do think is important is there's gonna be a lot of push to just have CSIS do the foreign human intelligence collection. And I think that's a bad idea, and I think that's a bad idea for two reasons. One is that the legal framework for security intelligence is different from the arrangements for foreign intelligence. And they'll say, we're doing it now. We can do stuff like, yes, okay, you're great, you have foreign operating stations. This is a public thing. We know this. But still that the intelligence you're getting is still relates to the security of Canada. And so we can find ways to make that work in ways that, go more abroad when you have to.

But the other issue that I think is really important is that this Service's mandate just got drastically expanded under Bill C-70, right? They're gonna be doing a lot more consultation, a lot more work is expected on foreign interference and all these kinds of things. They got no new resources for that and they're having challenges doing recruitment and retaining people. This is a real problem. I don't wanna say I don't wanna just like poo-poo the service because that's not my intention. My intention is that, my intention here is to say that they're having trouble meeting their mandate now and not necessarily through fault of their own.

Although some people may wanna disagree with that, but I think they need to focus on their new enhanced mandate before they take on even more things. And that's why I think it should be separate.

Jessica: Yeah, and I'm a little bit more vague on why I think it should be separate. I'm still working through my thinking on that but my initial reaction is that, these are very different functions. Having these two functions on with very likely different legal frameworks, as Leah will hopefully clarify for us in the near future. And my thinking is that having two of these two functions under the same organization will inevitably lead to mission and tradecraft creep. Where it becomes very difficult to understand if something is happening under a security intelligence framework or if it's happening under a foreign collection framework. And I think that's just bad from a legal perspective. Probably from a human rights perspective as well, and a Canadian charter perspective but again we'll get Leah on to really walk us through some of these issues. But I agree, I think we're agreed. More intelligence, more collection, more focus, more foreign human intelligence more intelligence,

Stephanie: More, but not just not just everything. Strategically, as you said, strategically targeted in important ways especially on the economic side, supply chain, et cetera.

Jessica: You did say something that I, again, wanna disagree with. I'm very much about disagreeing with you today as much as I possibly can.

Stephanie: Sorry, I'm from Oshawa, man. Let's just, let's go.

Jessica: I've been grumpy all week, so you're bearing the brunt of it today. Okay. You said that, our partners really want our granular intelligence.

Yes and no. I would say Canada has actually been really amazing, I think on the assessment side of things, on economic security, and I think we've been very forward leaning on that. Despite being a very small country with a very small, intelligent footprint, proportionally that smallness sometimes really is beneficial.

And I'll relate this experience that I had when I was in the United States to explain this. I once went down to talk about a particular issue. It had to do with a finance and economic securities you can probably imagine. And I had a full day of meetings set out and I was in the United States and I sat in a room and all of the different desk officers for the different issues that I cover walked through.

And so it was me. Briefing. And I was the only analyst working these issues and then 30 people on the US side. And the one thing that I'll say, obviously they had much more granular and detailed knowledge than I did on most of these issues, but I had an overarching perspective that they failed to put together.

And so they were coming to me and hearing from me how I saw all these 30 different, what they consider to be desks connecting together. And I think that's one of the strengths of Canadian intelligence is that because we don't have a lot of depth, we don't have a desk officer for the, extremely narrow subset of whatever economic security issue is. We have a handful of people who do this issue. And so they have to have this broader perspective. So I think our strategic intelligence and our strategic assessments on these issues tend to be extremely strong from, for that reason.

Stephanie: Okay. I, this is no shade on analysts. I was a former analyst. You’re a former analyst. Love my analyst, love my strat analysts. All good. I base this on having done the interviews with the community and they say look, yes, we do the good strategic stuff, but what our allies want from us is the more of the granular and the tactical. And, I take, I think the last podcast we did, you said this really good line, which really stuck with me and I think I actually poached it and used it in one of my substack, which is the whole point of that granular information is to influence and inform.

And yes, I think the strategic stuff can inform, but I do believe that the real currency of intelligence is that more tactical, granular information. And this is where I think our allies would like to see us do more. They're happy with the strat stuff that we do. They think it's fine. No one's complaining about it and I agree we can put this stuff together in ways sometimes that, a team of 3 in Canada can sometimes put things together better in a way that 300 can't in the US right? Because there's so many different moving parts, egos, rivalries, things like that. But I do believe that this is something we need to augment.

Jessica: Yeah in my experience, in the absence of that sort of granular information, which the United States has obviously been the main provider of for the Five Eyes generally, Canada's been valued for its ability to have that forward leaning analysis and we've actually been in the forefront of a number of sort of pivotal moments on economic security issues where we were calling stuff out earlier than a lot of other people were and I think that's one of those places where I see a lot of value for Canada which would only get better if we had more collection on this issue.

Stephanie: Okay. So we will leave it there. Lukewarm disagreement. It's nice outside. It's getting warm.

Okay. So the final thing I put on here was intelligence evidence. That was actually my number two. It goes with RCMP reform. If we can't prosecute people for national security offenses, like why are we even here? Like it's good to disrupt, it's good to have, that economic, not dissing that at all. But when it comes to the organized crime, which again like we have discussed on this very show can have links to foreign governments who wish to do us harm. And this is a real problem when it comes to stopping violent extremism and things like this, if we're not actually arresting people then and prosecuting them effectively and if we can't take the intelligence that's out there and use it to actually prosecute these people so that, when we prosecute people for terrorism financing, we do it more than once a decade because I'm guessing it's probably more than that.

Jessica: I suspect so.

Stephanie: You suspect so that this is something we absolutely have to fix.

And the other thing I'll put on the list of things I didn't talk about that you mentioned, I think that were in the Green Party platform that we, I did not mention is cyber. Cyber is a major national security concern for the business community, and the private sector.

They're being absolutely killed in cyber. And there's a shortage of cybersecurity specialists and things like this and we need to, obviously we should pass Bill C-26, which died when the Trudeau government kind of died. That's a bill that should pass. But there's a whole lot of things we should be doing on cyber. And so I'll leave it at those two other things, the also rans.

Jessica: Yeah. And cyber's actually a great segue into my fourth and final issue that I raise. And it's all about sanctions and Canada's delightful sanctions regimes. So I think we talked about this on the podcast, but I was a bit annoyed by the listing of criminal organizations under our terrorism provisions. We've talked about this. Yeah. While I feel it's technically correct, like I don't think that it's unlawful, it does annoy me from like a typology perspective. because I don't actually think that they're the same thing.

But that's fine.

Stephanie: There's criminal groups that do terrorist kind of things, and there's terrorist groups that do criminally things. And you're this is the former spilling over into the ladder.

Jessica: Yeah. There's a whole bunch of reasons I think we've already talked about in the podcast if you haven't listened to that episode, go back and find the one where I rant about sanctions and terrorism.

Stephanie: I think it's, when we're talking about the fentanyl Czar.

Jessica: Yeah, probably. But there's a couple things in our sanctions regime that we don't do that I think would be really useful. First of all, I don't mention this in my substack, but can we please fix our listings process? And by fix, I mean make it much more rigorous so that it can't be that the United States President can't just call us up and say, could you please list the following groups as terrorist organizations? And we're like, yes sir, let's get to it. There should be an actual process and maybe legal standard behind this, I think would be really useful.

Stephanie: One of the reasons this stands I guess is because it's really hard for someone who's been called a terrorist to raise their hand and be like, hello. How you gonna, how you gonna pay for a lawyer?

Jessica: A hundred percent. This is exactly the issue. Nobody cares about it except for you, me and Leah. And maybe Thomas a little bit, I still think like it's just so bad.

And even internally, like even the policies and processes governing that, it's not clear to me how Public Safety's listings team sets priorities and if they set priority, what kind of methodologies they use.

Stephanie: I’m telling you its the Vibe Eyes.

Jessica: Yeah, like I've tried to ATIP, I've tried to ATIP it. They refuse to give me anything.

Stephanie: Oh really? Okay.

Jessica: Rant over. Come on the podcast guys. We'll be nice.

Stephanie: Yes, please. Come on the podcast. I'll make sure Jess use some protein first.

Jessica: Sorry anyways, the other sanctions regimes that we need. One for criminal actors could be really useful because then we wouldn't have to necessarily list criminal gangs under our terrorism provisions.

Stephanie: Oh, I like that.

Jessica: Yeah. Like it's, and you could have a whole set and more proportional to the threat set of activities that could be enabled under this.

And then one for cyber actors. So partners in the UK and the US actually already have this capability to list criminal cyber gangs and to subject them to financial administrative restrictions. So this really, in my view, things like ransomware gangs, under any of our existing sanctions regimes, I don't see where they fit.

Like in some cases you could maybe squint and make them a terrorist organization. In other cases, like maybe if you look like really far in the distance, they fit under SEMA if they've got like a state connection. But it's like really you're having to fudge.

Stephanie: And by SEMA you mean the Special Economic Measures Act.

Jessica: And like you really have to blur the lines and fudge it a lot, whereas like a dedicated sanctions regime for criminal and cyber actors could really like target these gangs. And people might be surprised to learn that Canada's actually one of the most targeted countries for ransomware actors.

So this is a real issue that's targeting Canadian universities, healthcare, private sector, all of these different things. And it's really disproportionate to the size of our financial sector and our economy. I'm actually exploring the reasons for this in my postdoc at University of Calgary but I think we need to do something about it. Maybe before I have the full answers as to why it's happening.

Stephanie: I love this idea, Jess. I think this is such an interesting idea and I don't understand why, would you even need legislation to do it?

Jessica Yeah, you'd want legislation because we have legislation for the terrorism listings.

Stephanie: Okay fair.

Jessica: Special Economic Measures Act. So you know, you figure out where it lives and what the powers are gonna be and all that kind of stuff. But it could be things like, getting a little bit proactive, like as a lot of our terrorism stuff does, it allows us to get as I say, left of boom, so you're not investigating just after the crime happens. So you can be a bit more proactive. Maybe, some threat reduction measures, targeting ransomware gangs, all these kinds of things could be really useful for Canadians. That's my pitch. I think that it's really important. I'm sure that no one else cares about this.

Stephanie: I think some might, the victims of this, right? And increasingly we are seeing like, I mentioned at the beginning, we're having all these crimes happening and they're not really being dealt with, that gets back to our board priority, the RCMP.

But I like this idea because also it, it serves that kind of public education function. There's a lot, there's a lot we could do there. I like this idea. The only thing is Canada's really good at listing things.

I always say, our foreign policy when it comes to this things is like loud noises and sanctions button, right? Those are our two things. We say, oh we’re standing up for such and such, and then we are gonna put sanctions on you, and then we don't really do anything. Sanctions button, and then we never enforce it.

So to your point about sanctions yes. But I love, I don't think I've ever heard you say that before and I wanna hear more about it. Maybe.

Jessica: I'm working on it for University of Calgary.

Stephanie: Work faster!

Jessica: I'm only one person!

And I would be cautious too. I think that there there does need to be a lot of policy work around this and I was actually, I would argue a lot of, here's where I'm gonna call for more research.

Stephanie: Oh sure take my research funds!

Jessica: Here's one area where I actually think we need more research. But like figuring out like what is the actual best policy response to ransomware gangs.

Is it prohibiting payments? Now, I would argue based on some of the research I've done in the terrorism space, like when terrorist groups kidnap for ransom, it's not always the same. That's not always the best approach.

So I think there's a lot of policy work that could be done, like there could be things like that we, where we criminalize the payment, maybe we don't criminalize the payment, maybe we establish like a negotiation team. Like maybe there's a whole bunch of things that happen. Maybe some of these things are already happening and I just don’t know about them.

But I think, a broader public policy response to this is probably an important thing. And again, a great place for Canada to lead because we are so targeted.

Stephanie: Wow. Okay. So we have come up with a list of things that we hope the government will do. He probably won't,

Jessica: This is our transition binder for the Prime Minister.

Stephanie: Yes, please. And subscribe, Mr. Carney. But yeah, we'll see what happens. National security is very seldom a priority. It played an interesting role in the election in the sense that it was brought up, but also unstated. We'll see. I'm curious to see as to where this goes. If you study in this area, if you work in this area, you're used to having your heart broken. Let's just continue to monitor and I'm sure we will have much more to say. And I look forward next year, this time next year when we'll be doing our one year report card on how the government's been doing.

Jessica: I love a one year report card, and so this is our last episode of season one of Secure Line. We're gonna take a little hiatus, we're gonna plan out episodes for the new year. We'll probably be back, not over the summer, probably early fall.

Stephanie: Unless something happens.

Jessica: Yeah, unless something catastrophic happens but let's keep our fingers crossed for.

Stephanie: Or really good. Something really good could happen.

Jessica: Maybe not. Okay. Maybe not. That seems less likely. Less likely.

Stephanie: I'm in the better mood today, I think.

Jessica: Okay. I'm the grumpy one. I'm just absolutely not.

Stephanie: Fair enough.

Jessica: But we'll hope we'll be back in probably September. If you wanna get in touch with us and tell us what we should be recording. I think we're available on social media. You can contact on email.

Stephanie: Some people have emailed me, so thank you. Someone suggested some names from my Substack because right now it's just my name.

Jessica: Yeah, you can email us, you can reach out on social media. Tell us. You can like, subscribe and comment. I do actually read the comments. I don't respond to them because I haven't figured out how yet, but. Let's be honest about our shortcomings here Steph.

I might be grumpy, but I'm honest,

Stephanie: Grumpy, but honest. It's what the people are asking for, Jess.

And have a good summer to everybody. And if you'd like this episode, perhaps you can rate, review, subscribe, tell a friend, and we'll see you very soon. See you soon!