The head of Canada’s spy agency said the greatest threat to Canada’s national security comes from China and Russia, while bemoaning the outdated legislation that is limiting the agency’s capabilities.
Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) director David Vigneault also called for greater overall collaboration and awareness to deal with a higher threat level amid the pandemic, speaking at a webinar hosted by the Centre for International Governance Innovation on Feb. 9.
CSIS has previously warned about the theft of COVID-19 vaccine research and attempts by China and Russia to gain access themselves or recruit insiders and former employees to do so.
Regarding China, Vigneault made the distinction between the Chinese people and the ruling regime.
“To be clear, the threat does not come from the Chinese people, but rather from the government of China,” Vigneault said after lauding the contribution Chinese Canadians have made to Canada in a number of areas.
The Chinese Communist Party is “pursuing a strategy for geopolitical advantage on all fronts—economic, technological, political, and military—and using all elements of state power to carry on activities that are a direct threat to our national security and sovereignty,” he said.
Vigneault provided the example of China’s Operation Fox Hunt, which threatens and intimidates Chinese diaspora to repatriate.
“Operation Fox Hunt ... claims to target corruption, but it’s also believed to have been used to target and quiet dissidents to the regime,” he said.
Last October, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested five people in an alleged Operation Fox Hunt plot.
Vigneault also singled out globalization and rapid technological changes as factors that have created more opportunities for interference.
“Interference has always been present in Canada, but the scale, speed, range, and impact have grown as a result of globalization and technology,” he said.
Outdated Legislation
Vigneault said the threats Canada now faces are vastly different from what was envisioned in the 1984 CSIS Act, which was better suited to the Cold War. The legislation “unduly limits our investigations in a modern era,” he said.
“The CSIS Act … greatly impedes our ability to use modern tools and assess data and information. We need laws that enable these types of data-driven investigations,” Vigneault said, adding that it “limits our ability to provide relevant advice to key partners.”
Though Vigneault did not refer to any case specifically, in July 2020, a Federal Court justice had denied a request by CSIS to gather foreign intelligence from a location inside Canada, on the grounds that the method proposed to do so was beyond CSIS’s legal mandate.
The court released a redacted version of the ruling in early February 2021. While the redactions prevent the proposed method of intel-gathering to be known, the document contains several sections that refer to the internet, including a heavily redacted section titled “the jurisprudence relating to information accessible through the internet” and two references referring to jurisprudence recognizing “the borderless nature of the internet.”
