2024.03.18

Today, I am thinking about what I would call a comprehensive security framework. I latched onto this idea while reading the National Security Strategy from 2004. It's called “Securing an Open Country,” if I recall correctly. It came out under Paul Martin's government, shortly after he took power.

In that document, which is the last document we have that even purports to be a national security strategy in Canada, they define “comprehensive security” as encompassing both national and international security. What's interesting to me about it is that it has eight chapters, and the first one is called, “Canada's Approach to National Security,” and the second is called, “Building an Integrated Security System.” The third one is “Intelligence,” and though, if I

recall correctly, they're mostly talking about national intelligence, but let's give it to them that they consider that chapter to be about both national and international security. The next four chapters are all national security issues:

-  Emergency Planning and Management

-  Public Health Emergencies

-  Transportation Security

-  Border Security Chapter

Chapter eight is called “International Security.” It's only about four or five pages long. So, of a roughly 52 page document, less than a tenth of that is devoted to international security. The rest of it is either kind of theoretical (if you can call it that) stuff about security generally, and then the bulk of it – well over half, 26 pages are about National Security, so, 26 pages about National

Security, five pages about International Security.

I would say, add twenty years to this, and it's becoming clearer and clearer to me the more I think about this, the problem is not the lack of a coherent strategy or a comprehensive strategy; the problem Canada faces is that they we've drawn this line between National and International Security.

On the one hand, you have all the things I just listed, (Emergency Management, Health, Transportation;  I would also include Energy Security, border control, these kind of things) and that's considered National Security.

Then on the other side you have things I can list off the top of my head: military defense (expeditionary deployments), international development, diplomacy, the environment (which I would consider an international security issue), and I would put economics under here as well because is reliant on our international economic relations to be a secure country.

So, we've drawn this sharp line between all these factors. All the stuff that goes on inside Canada, and all the stuff that goes on outside Canada. But the security conundrum that I think we're facing now is that what I would just call, “political warfare.” Political warfare exploits the seam between these two categories (national and international security). All the stuff that's coming out from Sam Cooper's reporting, all the stuff in that Financial Times article that came out in November or December. It was a really good article called, “How Geopolitics Caught Up To Canada,” and it just lists all the ways that we're an utter embarrassment on the international stage when it comes to security. All of the things that are coming to light now are what I would broadly label as “political warfare.” And political warfare exploits this seam between the categories of national and international security.

Election interference is a good example, but even just the porousness of our border, how easy it is for assassins from India or agents from Iran to get into Canada, undermine our national security, and then get back out, back to their regimes those are the things that are truly threatening security of Canadian citizens. And we don't really have a name for this category of bad things going on in the space between National and International Security.

Now, I'm just thinking out loud here, off the top of my head, but one of the reasons I would say this is happening is because, in my experience in the military, we really stovepipe intelligence. Intelligence obviously falls under both National Security and International Security, but the two are kept so separated in Canada. And this was a chronic problem when I was working in Ottawa. If we were doing anything, not even intelligence analysis, just researching stuff online, if we landed – even accidentally – on a Canadian website, or if we were researching a potential threat that had a link to a can Canadian business, we had to break contact and report it immediately. And we would get in trouble regularly for collecting “intelligence” on Canadian citizens.

I really think this stove-piping of intelligence is at the root of the problem. Or it's at last one of the things at the root of the problem, because we haven't been able to articulate to the government or to citizens that the threats that are getting in and destabilizing Canadian society and threatening Canadian citizens, those threats are basically bouncing between our categories of security (national and international). They're international threats that are infiltrating the national security sphere. And because our intelligence apparatus (through policy, through rules, and also just through culture) distinguish so sharply between national intelligence collection and international intelligence collection that the threats gone under-noticed, or at least under-appreciated by the broader Canadian public. CSIS agents had to risk their life and their livelihood, risk being charged with treason, to leak the reports about the foreign interference in our elections because they had collected international intelligence that revealed threats to National Security, and they had no mechanism to marry-up the two into a common understanding between politicians, citizens, and the intelligence apparatus.

So, my two big observations here are, first, we've drawn much too sharp a distinction between National and International Security and that's being exploited by political Warfare conducted by other nation states; and, second, that I think the root cause of this is that the integrated intelligence assessment (meaning whoever it is that's supposed to be linking these two up) is not getting the bigger picture, the common operating picture, the common understanding to decision makers (even if they are doing it effectively in a Top Secret facility somewhere). And it's definitely not getting to Canadian citizens.