Public governance in national security took a step forward in Canada.
On Monday, November 25th, the prime minister released the first-ever mandate letter for his National Security and Intelligence Advisor (NSIA), Nathalie Drouin. You can read it here.
Like the tradecraft it represents, the reveals are not always noticeable at first glance. Let’s dissect it a bit. Our benchmark will be this sentence from the accompanying Privy Council Office news release: “The mandate letter serves as an important authority and accountability measure.” (Read the NR here.)
Two words stand out: authority and accountability. Authority, because in the bureaucratic shadow-world of multiple intelligence and security centres across government, someone has to be in charge. Accountability, because someone has to be held responsible. This mandate letter makes clear, or should, that that person is the NSIA, herself.
In a profession that revels in, and revolves around, secrecy (for good reasons), a public mandate letter is an unusual gambit. But after two years of public revelations and assertions (plus counter-assertions) of foreign interference in elections and who knows what else in Canada, it is both an overdue action and a necessary, if belated, political response.
Indeed, the mandate letter signed by Prime Minister Trudeau makes clear that this was the overriding impulse behind the move. It states: “Public discussions on foreign interference reaffirm the need for a stronger, more clearly articulated NSIA position that can oversee and guide the intelligence process from collection and assessment, through policy development, to our response and operational coordination.” Ironically, the very public discussion initially resisted by the government is now the justification for this very move. In response, the government established the independent Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference in Federal Electoral Processes and Democratic Institutions with Justice Marie-Josée Hogue in September 2023.
Much media and opposition party attention on the foreign interference issue has classically focused on the equivalent of that famous Watergate scandal question in the US: “What did the president know and when did he know it?” The prime minister has been criticized for being inadequately briefed, either on his own volition or by officials, on matters of foreign interference. What he knew and when did he know it, became prime political fodder. It reached an apogee when headlines shouting that a leading opposition MP, Michael Chong, had been a target of Chinese foreign interference were put to the prime minister at an Inquiry hearing: “My instant reaction was to turn to my [national security intelligence adviser] officials and say, ‘Find out what exactly the threat is, and if it is indeed this, why am I only learning about this in the newspapers?’, Trudeau said.” Part of his defence, legitimately, is that he must rely on knowledgeable officials to bring relevant information to his attention. They had not, in his telling; yet it was their job.
Good senior officials always follow this one overarching management dictum when dealing with politicians – no surprises! Not in this case, evidently. Mr. Trudeau had been very publicly surprised. Unsurprisingly, he is using the new mandate letter to make clear where responsibility and accountability lies: “As my National Security and Intelligence Adviser, I expect you to manage the flow of intelligence and analysis necessary for me to effectively fulfill my duties as Prime Minister. In deciding what intelligence and analysis should reach me, as Prime Minister…”
The mandate letter is unusual also because it applies to a singular public servant official – the NSIA, herself – rather than an institution or office. Cabinet ministers receive mandate letters too from the prime minister, but they are elected and publicly accountable for their performance. The NSIA is neither elected nor publicly accountable. So, this is a departure from the norm in public service where officials are only privately accountable to their superiors inside government not to the public or parliament. But that line looks like it is being smudged, if not fully erased. Another significant intelligence information failure like before can now be set at the feet of the NSIA, personally.
With responsibility come accountability. Indeed, good governance practice dictates the following: you cannot hold someone accountable for something which they are not responsible. So, a now very public mandate letter hitches this good governance principle directly to good governance practice, at least potentially.
Potentially, because private failures by public servants are rarely sanctioned publicly. There are good institutional reasons for this, one of which is that it would make a risk-averse public service even more so. But public accountability is a bedrock principle of strong democratic governance. Shielding public servants directly from this principle blurs this line rather than reinforces it. This new public mandate letter might just augur a departure towards greater individual public servant accountability.
So much for accountability. What about authority?
The ‘no one is in charge’ refrain about Canada’s national security and intelligence networks has emerged as the most crucial governance challenge surrounding foreign interference and, very likely, other issues. The initial report of the Hogue Commission referred obliquely to: “a certain lack of understanding of the role that everyone plays, or should play, in combatting foreign interference,” This is unsurprising given the much maligned but still useful 2023 report of the Special Rapporteur on Foreign Interference, former Governor-General David Johnston. He noted: “There are serious shortcomings in the way intelligence is communicated and processed from security agencies through to government…”
Clearly, some reinforcing was needed. The reinforcements came in the form of this unusually public mandate letter to the NSIA. It is designed to give her that authority, to put her in charge. Madame Drouin is now ‘first amongst equals’, so to speak, when it comes to trafficking national security intelligence to the prime minister. Although the NSIA position was created almost twenty years ago, the need for a more sophisticated and integrated supporting apparatus is clearly past due. From CSIS to the RCMP to Global Affairs Canada and the Canadian Security Establishment, several institutional actors are engaged daily in national security and intelligence gathering and protecting. Now, per the mandate letter, the NSIA is to: “Lead a refreshed annual process to establish Canada’s intelligence priorities, and work with security agencies to communicate these priorities publicly.”
But this involves more than just the prime minister. In the wake of the foreign interference revelations, the prime minister announced the creation last year of Canada’s first-ever National Security Council, a group of ministers designated “…as a forum for strategic decision-making and for sharing analysis of intelligence in its strategic context.” This anodyne label masquerades its role of ensuring stronger political engagement in national security issues. Yet, it has not yet congealed within the federal bureaucracy as the effective coordination and decision-making device envisaged by some, criticized for meeting only four times in its first six months.
A former NSIA, Vincent Rigby, had higher hopes for the new National Security Council. Welcoming its creation he saw this body “…as filling a major gap in Canada’s national security architecture.” He recommended it meet every two weeks, something that clearly did not occur. Importantly, Rigby highlighted the strategic nature of the new NSC. “A positive first step”, he wrote, “would be to craft a new national security strategy, the first in nearly 20 years.” The mandate letter explicitly calls for the NSIA to “…lead efforts to deliver a renewed National Security Strategy in 2025.”
In the dictum of espionage, all this yet prove to be an accountability ‘false flag’, with the NSIA a ‘dangle’, serving up more ‘disinformation’, to ‘honey trap’ journalists and the public into thinking real action is being taken.
More likely, it is a genuine attempt to get a better governance grasp around a high-stakes, complicated matter.
