The government and opposition parties are furiously at work seeking a backroom compromise, both substantive and face-saving, with regard to their positions on the release of Afghan detainee documents.
Both have much to lose if no compromise is found. No government relishes the idea of being held in contempt of Parliament. And beyond that prospect lies a public that might grow increasingly fed up with the issue, to the broad detriment of whatever public support for the mission remains. The timing couldn’t be worse, as we enter a crucial phase of military operations around Kandahar. Also waiting in the wings are more unsalutary legal wrangling and the prospect of an unwanted election. So let’s hope a compromise is found under the stern gaze of House Speaker Peter Milliken.
But a compromise, whatever shape it takes, will be a Band-Aid solution to a problem that will not go away. We need to think a little more strategically, a little farther ahead. We need a long-term solution regarding parliamentary access to state secrets.
A long-term solution is important, because Parliament has a role to play as a check on government power on national security issues. However deferential Canadian public opinion has tended to be in the past, we live in a time of vastly different national security problems and a higher level of public expectation about government transparency. There is more at stake than just parliamentary privilege, which might strike some Canadians as an arcane matter. Parliament serves, at least in theory, as an important channel for public education on matters of national security policy and threats. If Parliament is blinded by insufficient access to national security information, the public is blinded as well.
The current arrangement does not serve us well. Parliament operates at a considerable disadvantage in fulfilling its role of holding government accountable and informing Canadians. This is especially true when it faces a government whose instincts are to hold national security issues tightly and when it has no routine access to what used to be called state secrets – now more insipidly referred to as “national security confidentiality.”
We have landed in the Afghan detainee mess for complex reasons, including the government’s desire to severely clip the wings of the Military Police Complaints Commission, which was originally seized with the matter. Once the parliamentary special committee on Afghanistan got its teeth into the issue and began to hear highly contradictory testimony, it was inevitable that a showdown would come over committee access to classified documents. Clearly, there is a politically charged story here that needs to be set straight, which depends on access to the complete record.
Although the special committee on Afghanistan is “special” in its subject matter, it is no different from other parliamentary committees in that its members are not security cleared to see classified records and do not have any special resources or expertise in examining such material. Stephen Harper’s government tried to do an end run around the issue by handing the access problem off to retired Supreme Court justice Frank Iacobucci, who would “advise” the Justice Minister at some unspecified point in the future about what documents were safe for parliamentarians to see. From the start, this was unlikely to satisfy the opposition – hence the current impasse.
The way forward, past whatever Band-Aid is eventually offered, is to emulate what many of our allies and counterpart countries have done: Create a statutory parliamentary security and intelligence committee, which would be security cleared and become the natural place to refer matters like the Afghan detainee issue. Just such a committee was advocated by Paul Martin’s government as early as
The solution is at hand. It won’t be easy to make it work; it will need senior members of Parliament willing to serve on it without much hope of political gain or public exposure. Committee members will have to park their politics at the door. Any such committee will need dedicated, expert committee staff and budgets. It will have to accept the limitations of operating within the ring of secrecy. It won’t be able to say all it comes to know. But it will serve us better than anything we have at present. The biggest objection to it – that we can‘t trust parliamentarians with secrets – has been negated by experience elsewhere. It is also an objection that we should be ashamed of as a nation.
Wesley Wark is a professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs. He gave invited testimony to the special committee on Afghanistan about access to classified information and conducted research on Afghan detainee documents for the Military Police Complaints Commission.
