Grilling of David Johnston diverts attention from necessary intelligence reform

David Johnston, the government’s appointed special rapporteur to study and make recommendations about the threat of foreign interference, made his first appearance before a Parliamentary committee this week to discuss his work. Drama was in the air.

Did Johnston survive his three-hour ordeal before the Commons’ Procedure and House Affairs Committee? That’s an eye of the beholder question. Certainly, he changed no minds among opposition parties about his role, independence, integrity or, perhaps most importantly, the value of the public hearings that he plans to begin in July. He gets a complete thumbs down from Conservatives, the Bloc, the NDP alike.

But there is no wavering from Johnson. Nothing he heard at committee, and most of it was predictable, has changed his mind about carrying on his function, despite a parliamentary motion asking him to stand aside. He has a mandate, believes the work is important, and will not bow to attacks on his integrity or independence. The Liberal government backs him and Liberal MPs on the committee are quite prepared to both decry partisanship and attack their opponents.

As Kurt Vonnegut would say — “and so it goes.”

While the partisan gridlock on display was to be expected, there were some new lows, including a doozy of a suggestion from Conservative MP Larry Brock that someone else wrote Johnston’s report for him. Not many highs, though there were some more probing questions from the NDP (who packed the committee meeting with its big guns, including its leader, Jagmeet Singh) about whether Johnston had been critical enough about government attention to foreign interference in his first report, issued on May 23.

The Conservatives asked tough questions about whether public hearings would really serve diaspora communities that are the first line of foreign interference, and whether Johnston had fully grasped the issue of Chinese state-sponsored disinformation campaigns targeting Conservatives politicians.

While all the polarized attention is on Johnston, what seems to unite this committee is a lack of interest in the actual reforms needed to fix what Johnston’s report identified as a dysfunctional system of intelligence threat reporting.

Other than questions from Liberal MP Greg Fergus, scant attention was paid to the issues Johnston has highlighted, including changes to key pieces of national security legislation, such as the CSIS Act, the strengthening of review bodies, reforms to the handling and use of intelligence in decision-making, declassification of secret information, changes to the Cabinet committee system.

Perhaps opposition members fear that even to pay attention to such issues somehow validates Johnston’s work.

Nor does the word “urgency,” which Johnston uses often, seem to resonate. Opposition members repeatedly declare their preference for a long-drawn-out judicial inquiry (two to three years, ballpark) as the best fix. That might be preferable for the purposes of talking about the problem; it would simply leave it to government to try to come up with fixes now.

What we should be demanding from political parties are proposals to better secure Canada and its democracy from threats in the future. Some of the Conservative’s thunder from their 2021 electoral platform has been stolen by subsequent Liberal action — on banning Huawei, moving to create a foreign influence registry, crafting an Indo-Pacific strategy that names China as an adversary. Time for the Conservatives to come up with something new.

The NDP’s 2021 election platform features vague promises to “stand up to China,” and to provide “co-ordinated support for those facing threats by Chinese entities here in Canada.” It then pivots to peacekeeping and international development. The NDP needs to come up with a more substantive posture on national security.

The Liberal government, for its part, has to get much better in explaining to Canadians the nature of national security policy changes currently underway; they will also have to respond rapidly and substantively to Johnston’s recommendations when they are published in October.

Time to get down to it, on all political sides, offer up your ideas for change, or risk the loss of further trust by Canadians. You don’t need a judicial inquiry to put your best national security strategy forward.