Peter Jones is a professor at the University of Ottawa and a former senior policy analyst in the Security and Intelligence Secretariat of the Privy Council Office. Alan Jones is executive adviser to the University of Ottawa Professional Development Institute and a retired CSIS officer who served in numerous operational and policy positions, including assistant director of CSIS. Laurie Storsater is a retired public servant who held several security and intelligence positions at the Solicitor-General, the Privy Council Office and the Communications Security Establishment.
The controversy over Global Affairs Canada’s Global Security Reporting Program (GSRP) has been a while in coming, but many of those present when it was created expected it one day. And now, that moment may have come: Michael Spavor has alleged that he was arrested in China because he unwittingly provided intelligence to his fellow detainee Michael Kovrig, who had reportedly once served as a GSRP diplomatic officer. The Globe and Mail has since further reported that this was the second time a Canadian was jailed by Beijing after talking to a GSRP official.
To be clear, the GSRP is not a clandestine intelligence gathering program and never was. But the way it was created and operates has sometimes made this murky.
In the wake of the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the Chrétien government signalled to the bureaucracy that serious new money would be spent on “security,” broadly defined. Departments and agencies, which had been through years of successive budget cuts, lined up for a share.
There was, briefly, talk of actually creating a Foreign Intelligence Service, though that was quickly put aside. The government wanted to fund things that would have a more immediate impact, and the creation of such an agency would take years. It would also involve complex political and bureaucratic processes and battles that the government had no desire to take on.
Amongst the various proposals was one from what was then called the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT), the forerunner of today’s GAC. After years of cutbacks to its capacity for political reporting from posts abroad, DFAIT’s reporting and analysis was a shadow of what it had been in the so-called “golden age” of Canadian diplomacy.
DFAIT proposed creating a program of officers who would be specially trained and sent to key posts to report exclusively on political and security questions. They would not be subject to the ever-growing list of administrative and other tasks which increasingly consumed the lives of diplomats abroad. They would also have a mandate to get off the diplomatic circuit and cultivate contacts in society much more broadly.
To make sure that these precious resources would not be gradually whittled away by the bean counters who had eroded DFAIT’s reporting capacity over the years in the first place, the money was ring-fenced. In keeping with the “security” focus, the program was placed under DFAIT’s intelligence and security branch.
This latter step was probably a mistake. Over the years, this branch of DFAIT had argued that Canada should have a Foreign Intelligence Service – under its control, of course. Some of the individuals involved when GSRP was created had been part of this discussion.
As GSRP got going, there was an uncomfortable degree of overlap with intelligence; the reports that came in often had that “feel” about them. What’s more, DFAIT, and later GAC, made much of the fact that the GSRP reports were shared with Canada’s fellow members of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance. This last point was particularly important to Ottawa because the Five Eyes relationship is based on reciprocity and trading: If you don’t put into the pot, you don’t get back from it. Over the years, one of DFAIT/GAC’s strongest arguments for a Foreign Intelligence Service has been that Canada needs it to gain and maintain access to allied foreign intelligence. GSRP reporting was seen as partly filling the gap.
This resulted in GSRP straddling some uncomfortable boundaries. It is not a clandestine intelligence collection program, but it sometimes looks and feels like one. It reports to, and is run by, the intelligence branch at GAC. Its products are not intelligence reports, but they are shared within an allied network that is specifically for that purpose.
When all of this was being created, there were voices that raised these concerns. Speaking bluntly, there was the clear possibility that someone would end up in a foreign prison accused of “spying.” Protestations that GSRP is not an intelligence program may be true in terms of the finely crafted distinctions that define the Canadian bureaucratic battleground, but are lost on a foreign government intent on finding an excuse to punish Canada.
So what is to be done? One option is to do nothing. The GSRP has been around for decades now and has had very few (public) mishaps. No program can be entirely without some risk. If it is decided that something has to be done, however, it would be a shame if the GSRP were ended: It does return important information, the quality of the reports is high, and Canada’s Foreign Service does far too little serious political and security reporting. But whether it needs to be under the purview of the intelligence branch within GAC is a worthwhile question. It probably does need to be ring-fenced and protected, lest its budget be whittled away again. Whether its reports need to be talked up as a contribution to Canada’s standing within the Five Eyes community is another fair question.
Perhaps the biggest question, however, is whether Canada needs to take the plunge and actually create a clandestine Foreign Intelligence Service. If Canada does need such information for its own uses, and for the purposes of trading within the Five Eyes relationship, maybe the time has come to actually seriously examine the task of doing it – something no Canadian government has ever really done.
What Canadian detainees have alleged seems to indicate that creeping into this field sideways, sort-of and without really admitting it, has risks all its own.