Is Canada Still a Serious Country?

The last two days in Ottawa suggest the answer is no

Nothing shows why our allies are slowly writing Canada out of the western alliance script - or giving us more of a bit player role - more than the last two days in Canadian politics. The last two days also show why confidence in the government and our national institutions are on the wane in all parts of the country. There appears to be an acceptance of mediocrity and an almost complete absence of seriousness in Ottawa.

Day One

Yesterday, in their appearance before the Procedure and House Affairs (PROC) committee a senior Minister of the Crown (Blair) and the Prime Minister’s National Security Advisor (NSA) confirmed what many close observers have suspected for quite some time. Nobody is accountable in the Trudeau government.

Over the last number of months, this point has been hammered home time and time again. Ministers do not read their briefs. They don’t read or even access their emails. And on some occasions, they sit on critical requests from security agencies leading to serious delays and potentially lost opportunities to learn more about threats to the country. Testimony at PROC has also disturbingly shown that senior members of the civil service seem to have grown accustomed to such political indifference and may even be getting influenced by it.

In her testimony to committee, the NSA could not properly explain the process to ensure that the Prime Minister or other Ministers actually reviewed important intelligence reports that were prepared for them. Whether by email or in their physical reading files, top civil servants are unclear whether anyone actually read anything, let alone understand whether specific intelligence will be actioned in any meaningful way. It is clear that things are being passed up the chain of command only to disappear or not be adequately acknowledged.

The worst part of the testimony from senior officials at committees in recent months has been the fact that nobody seems to care anyway. The attitude of indifference and indecisiveness of the Prime Minister and several Ministers over the last eight years has also seemed to infect some in the senior ranks of a generally world-class civil service. This is truly a very sad development, but one that is not surprising after many years of the Prime Minister shaping the priorities and team around him. If the Prime Minister seems unconcerned about intelligence reports or choses to prioritize other issues time and time again over several years, slowly the machinery of government that supports him will begin to anticipate his priorities and slowly adopt them as their own. This is troubling when the priorities run contrary to the public interest.

We saw this in action during the SNC Lavalin affair several years ago, when Canadians had a revealing look behind the scenes at the interaction between the Prime Minister and senior advisors. The scandal revolved around pressure being applied on the Attorney General to comply to the wishes of the Prime Minister with pressure coming from both political staff in the PMO and from the head of the Privy Council Office. The taped conversation between the non-partisan Clerk of the Privy Council and then Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould was very instructive.

…And I think he is gonna find a way to get it done one way or another. So he is in that kinda mood, and I wanted you to be aware of that….

The pressure placed upon the Attorney General by both the Prime Minister and figures around him show the culture that has been in place in the Trudeau government. In the transcript it is almost possible to sympathize with an exasperated senior civil servant trying to heal a rift in the cabinet until you realize that what he was doing was not appropriate in the circumstances. It is clear that even senior members of the civil service may slowly adapt to the style and the priorities of Prime Minister Trudeau.

With this in mind, perhaps the unserious attitude towards accountability by the Minister and the NSA is more understandable. The fact is, the issue of foreign interference is simply not a priority for the Prime Minister. He has downplayed the issue from the start of his government. This despite the fact that Trudeau’s first NSA was the first major official of the Canadian government to issue a public warning about Beijing’s actions half a decade before the Liberals came to power. If the issue is not a priority to the Prime Minister then unread reports, inaction and lost lines of accountability from the team supporting him are not a big deal. The Globe and Mail headline nails it once again. Nobody is at fault. Or, in the words of the National Security Advisor herself “[t]here is no one single point of failure”.

Day Two

Today, at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute conference in Ottawa, the NSA was not in a House of Commons committee, but at a podium. She had also left behind the subject of China and was back on more comfortable ground for this government. She was speaking at a conference entitled “A Window on the World” in front of dozens of diplomats, public policy leaders and security officials. The “number one security threat” facing Canada and the world, the NSA informed the audience, is “climate change”. I am sure the Ambassadors from Europe and those rimming the South China Sea breathed a collective sigh of relief after that statement.

Climate change is an important geopolitical issue, but it is not serious to suggest it eclipses the war in Ukraine or the aggressive foreign policy posture of China as the top security threat facing our country. Climate change is indeed impacting issues with security dimensions like the arctic, global migration, food security and a range of other issues, but it is more of a secondary consideration given that it complicates other threats that are far more acute. In fact, this is what Vincent Rigby, the NSA’s predecessor, determined as well in a well-received policy paper entitled A National Security Strategy for the 2020s.

Rigby and University of Ottawa Professor Thomas Juneau issued their report just last year and it outlined the present threat environment and made several smart recommendations to develop a national strategy to confront an evolving foreign and domestic set of challenges. They did not list climate change as the most pressing threat facing Canada, but included it in a section called “Transnational Challenges” and described the issue in this way:

Transnational phenomena such as pandemics and climate change are primarily public health and environmental issues respectively, but they also carry important national security implications when their impact exceeds a threshold. They can also act as catalysts for many of the other threats we discuss in this report.

- Vincent Rigby and Thomas Juneau at page 7.

I agree with Rigby and Juneau on how they dealt with climate change and on many of their recommendations. This is why I had them on my Blue Skies podcast last year because these conversations are important in a world in the process of de-globalizing and realigning more than at any time in several generations. We need a better national security strategy and better public education on the risks facing Canada, which is why the statement by the NSA today was so far off the mark. There is quite a long list of foreign and domestic threats facing Canada at the moment that are far more worthy of serious policy attention by Ottawa.

Only after eight years of a Liberal government completely fixated on a policy agenda that fits their political ‘brand’ and electoral coalition would this issue rise to the top of the security threat action list in Ottawa. The comment sounded like something the Prime Minister or Minister Guilbeault might say and not the NSA. The Polish Prime Minister was in Ottawa today as well and I am quite sure the war in Ukraine, energy security and Russian disinformation came up with a little more urgency than climate change. With the war not far from their border, Poland and many other allies like them cannot afford to be unserious like Canada seems to be.

As The Sun Goes Down on Day Two

The Prime Minister must start to understand that what is best for his electoral coalition and political brand is not always what is best for the national interest. Senior mandarins advising him must also resist getting caught up in political culture and agenda set by Prime Minster Trudeau. Rather than resorting to the leaking of delicate information to raise red flags, senior officials must try to inject some seriousness into the Trudeau government. They must strategically push the national interest and set the agenda where it needs to be for our economic prosperity and our security. Speak up. Push back (respectfully). Rock the boat a little, even if it risks the Prime Minster getting “in that kinda mood”. An unserious Ottawa is driving polarization and an erosion of trust in our country, so it is finally time for the Liberal backbench and senior advisors to the government to get serious.