A federal agency reviewing foreign interference in the last two general elections is calling on the government to release additional secret cabinet documents to assist its investigation, saying it has so far received only a “limited number of documents” for its probe.
The National Security and Intelligence Review Agency (NSIRA) has been studying allegations of foreign election interference since Global News and The Globe and Mail began publishing a series of reports in late 2022 citing national security sources and documents that highlighted efforts by Beijing to interfere in Canada’s 2019 and 2021 general elections.
The NSIRA is an “independent expert review body for all national security and intelligence activities” within the federal government.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau agreed in late May to waive cabinet confidence for both the NSIRA and the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP) to allow them to review secret national security documents that then-special rapporteur David Johnston had access to prior to publishing his first report on foreign interference on May 23.
The two security bodies had both been studying foreign interference allegations for months beforehand without access to cabinet documents.
Johnston recommended in his report that the Liberal government grant both the NSIRA and the NSICOP access to “all the documents” that were provided to him in his investigations.
However, NSIRA wrote in a press release on June 26 that the federal government has only given it a “limited number of documents originally withheld for Cabinet Confidence.”
“If NSIRA is to review Cabinet confidences, it must be able to review all Cabinet confidences relevant to its review,” the agency wrote.
NSIRA also noted that its chair, former Supreme Court judge Marie Deschamps, wrote a letter to Trudeau on June 7 requesting that all cabinet-confidence documents related to NSIRA’s investigation be released to the agency and that all documents provided during the course of its investigation be unredacted.
“In order to ensure the integrity of our review and not limit or influence our evidence base, NSIRA must have access to all documents contained in any class of documents provided, rather than a subset of these documents,” Deschamps wrote in the letter.
Trudeau spoke with Deschamps in March about the NSIRA’s review of “how Canada’s national security agencies handled the threat of foreign interference” in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections, according to a press release from the Prime Minister’s Office on March 6.
“Given it is an external and independent body, the NSIRA will appropriately set its own mandate and scope of study,” said the release, adding that the agency’s findings will be reported to Parliament once completed.
