A counsel for the Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference has warned that foreign intelligence services will be paying close attention to its proceedings with the objective of extracting “every drop of value.”
“I think most people would observe among the most sophisticated intelligence agencies in the world will be analyzing every bit of information that comes out of this commission of inquiry,” said commission counsel Gordon Cameron on Jan. 29.
Commissioner Marie-Josée Hogue in the first public hearings this week will receive testimonies from experts about how to disclose the very sensitive information the inquiry is looking into. Making as much of that information public, within legal confines, is part of the inquiry’s mandate.
Mr. Cameron, who had served as counsel with the Public Order Emergency Commission in 2022, gave a presentation on the nature of information the commission is currently handling.
He said that to date, 80 percent of the documents received from the government are classified in nature, with 80 percent of those being classified at the Top Secret level or above. Lower levels of classification include Confidential and Secret.
Information is classified according to the potential injury it could cause to the national interest if disclosed. Information marked above Top Secret includes that with special markings for limited distribution, such as “Canadian Eyes Only,” or which was collected through electronic means like signals intelligence.
Mr. Cameron warned that foreign intelligence agencies are able to interpret small pieces of information by combining it with what they have already collected to draw an intelligence picture.
“What we know, from our own understanding of the ability to aggregate information, these intelligence agencies have massive databanks of information and have the ability to take the crumbs that come out of this inquiry and combine them with that information, and draw conclusions that are very difficult to predict,” he said.
Without knowing what these agencies possess, it’s hard to know what they can do with the information, added Mr. Cameron.
The potential injury to national interests was the main reason former special rapporteur on foreign interference David Johnston cited when he recommended against holding a public inquiry in May 2023.
Mr. Johnston eventually resigned under pressure in June, and negotiations took place between political parties over the summer to designate the terms and the commissioner of the public inquiry currently taking place.
To deal with these complex matters of taking sensitive information into the public space, the commission will hear on Jan. 30 from lawyers with experience in the national security field.
Later this week, current and former top officials from the security apparatus will testify, including Canadian Security and Intelligence Service Director David Vigneault.
Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc will appear at the end of the week to close the first phase of the public hearings. The next phase, which will look into foreign interference in the 2019 and 2021 elections, should take place in March, Justice Hogue announced.
The public inquiry has been spurred by national security leaks in the press depicting widespread interference by the Chinese regime. While it is expected that a major focus will be China, the mandate of the commission is not limited to that area.
