Quotulatiousness

March 5, 2024

The National Microbiology Laboratory scandal in brief

Filed under: Cancon, China, Government, Science — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tristin Hopper rounds up some of the eye-opening details of the security breach at Winnipeg’s National Microbiology Lab which certainly looks like a factor in the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic story:

Whether or not COVID-19 started as an accidental lab leak, the pandemic just so happens to have originated in the same neighbourhood as the Wuhan Institute of Virology, home to a coronavirus laboratory with a known history of lax security protocols.

For that reason alone it’s a major scandal that Canada’s own high-security biolab was employing two scientists – married couple Xiangguo Qiu and Keding Cheng – who according to CSIS exhibited a reckless disregard of lab security and the protection of confidential information. Now, tack on the fact that both Cheng and Qiu are suspected of prolonged unauthorized contact with the Chinese government.

This week, Health Canada bowed to opposition pressure and published an illuminating package of more than 600 official documents detailing CSIS’s evidence against the couple, as well as internal emails from the Winnipeg-based National Microbiology Laboratory where they worked. The highlights are below.

The lab is surprisingly casual about shipping planet-altering pathogens

One of the main accusations against Qiu is that she sent lab samples to China, the U.S. and the U.K. without proper authorization. Around this same time, she also sent highly virulent Ebola samples to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

[…]

Cheng was accused of breaking virtually every cyber-security law in the book

If Qiu’s signature offence was sending out lab materials without proper authorization, Cheng’s was that he routinely ignored even the most basic protocols about computer security.

[…]

Throughout, both were in constant (unauthorized) touch with China

The CSIS reports don’t necessarily frame Qiu and Cheng as traitors.

[…]

The pair kept changing their story after being presented with smoking gun evidence, according to CSIS

Some of the documents’ more cinematic passages are when CSIS agents describe lengthy interrogations in which the pair were confronted about their alleged breaches of Canadian national security.

May 7, 2023

The Line reports on “a Liberal policy convention in Fantasia”

Filed under: Cancon, China, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

It used to be said that the marketing department in any given organization was where the rubber met the sky (three drink minimum), but the Liberal convention in Barad-dûr-by-the-Rideau now owns that territory:

Once upon a time, Canada was led by a serious man named Pierre Elliot Trudeau. No matter what you think of his tenure as prime minister, there is no question that he took the job, and the country, seriously. Today his offspring, both biological and ideological, prance around the Canadian political landscape, smug and entitled and all the rest of it. But none of them has the foggiest idea of what they are doing with with the power they inherited, or why, or for what purpose.

[…]

For the evening entertainment on Friday, they brought out Jean Chrétien — another fantastically unserious person — to do his usual petit gars de Shawinigan routine. And did the old coot ever deliver, bragging yet again about keeping Canada out of Iraq, jabbing at Pierre Poilievre, and joking that he expects The Globe and Mail to call for a royal commission into Hillary Clinton showing up at the Liberal convention and interfering in Canadian elections.

Oh, our sides. They split. No matter that two days ago was World Press Freedom day. No matter that Friday also happened to be NNA night, where the Globe and Mail won nine awards. This is the Liberal convention after all, where one of the main policy proposals up for debate is a suggestion from the B.C. Liberals to essentially nationalise the news. Why not aim a few kicks at the media. The Liberals are paying for it anyway, aren’t they?

In his speech, Chrétien played to the latest Liberal idée fixe, which is that all of the party’s troubles since 2018 — from SNC Lavalin to WEgate to the egregious handling of Chinese interference — are all due to the clickbait chasing yellow journalists at the failing Globe and Mail.

For those of you who weren’t lucky enough to live through the nineties, Chrétien is the Liberal prime minister who brought you such hits as “what me worry?” about a Quebec referendum on secession; a joke about his PMO ordering the RCMP to pepper spray UBC students protesting his decision to invite a brutal dictator to dinner on their campus; and the Shawinigate and Adscam scandals, both of which are still routinely taught and referenced as case studies in ruling party greaseballery at its most unctuous.

But Liberals be Liberals. As National Post columnist Chris Selley noted: “This is deadly serious shit and this buffoon is playing it for laughs, just like [he] always played deadly serious shit.”

The “deadly serious shit” Selley had in mind is surely the river of scandal coursing through the Liberal Party in Ottawa over Chinese interference in Canadian politics, with tributaries flowing in from riding associations across the country, the Trudeau Foundation in Montreal, and numerous other parts of the Canadian political landscape. On Monday, the Globe and Mail reported on a CSIS analysis from 2021 which alleged that the family of Conservative MP Michael Chong was targeted by China’s security apparatus for unknown sanctions, in response to Chong’s sponsorship of a House of Commons motion calling China’s persecution of the Uighurs a genocide.

On Tuesday an understandably alarmed Chong was given an emergency briefing about the threat by CSIS director David Vigneault, in a meeting arranged by the prime minister.

This isn’t just about Michael Chong. Every member of parliament, every member of the government, should be up in arms over this. The Chinese diplomat in Canada involved, Zhao Wei, should have been sent home immediately, but Melanie Joly is still weighing the pros and cons.

As appalling as the targeting of Chong is in its own right, more scandalous still is the government’s response — equal parts utterly incompetent, unbelievably shady, and shamelessly partisan.

The scandal begins with the fact that Chong himself was never told about the CSIS report. Why is that? On Wednesday, the prime minister claimed it was because the threat identified in the CSIS report wasn’t deemed serious enough by the intelligence agency, so it never circulated outside of the agency. The first Trudeau had heard of this, apparently, was when he read about it in the newspaper.

But on Thursday, Michael Chong told the House of Commons that he’d been told, in a call from Trudeau’s current national security advisor Jody Thomas, that the report had actually made its way to the desk of one of her predecessors. When Trudeau was asked to explain this apparent contradiction on Friday, he said: “In terms of what I shared, I shared the best information I had at the time on Wednesday, both to Mr. Chong and to Canadians.” When asked who had given him this information, Trudeau declined to answer.

Look, we’ve seen this game before, countless times, with this government and this prime minister. Trudeau’s habit of responding to allegations of wrongdoing or incompetence or mismanagement by first denying any knowledge of the issue, then discrediting the source, and finally throwing unidentified third parties under the bus, is a well trod path for this deeply unserious man.

Given the pattern, we’re pretty skeptical of Trudeau’s claim that he’d been given incomplete information. Honestly, it wouldn’t surprise us in the slightest if it turns out that he just made the whole thing up.

March 25, 2023

Canada’s ChiCom influence scandal – “All of the damage has been self-inflicted”

Filed under: Cancon, China, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The Trudeau government has been expending a lot of time, effort, and political capital trying to avoid an open scandal. So much, so typical. What isn’t typical for the federal Liberals is just how badly they’re going about doing everything all of a sudden:

None of this ought to have been a shock, and none of it needed to put the Prime Minister’s Office in its current state of calcified pickle. After all, rumours and off-the-record chats about this stuff have been going around for literally years.

No, how this crew has chosen to handle these stories at every single step has made the scandal worse for themselves. Every. Single. Step. All of the damage has been self-inflicted.

This government is the epitome of an organization that is tactically smart and strategically dumb. Not only has their damage control mirrored the response of the SNC scandal (that ended so well for them), but every misstep has had the result of slowly backing the prime minister into rhetorical traps he has set for himself. This is a government that knows how to win the daily news cycle by losing the game. One that can’t distinguish between legitimate criticism and bad-faith partisan attack — probably because it is so insular and bunker-bound that it sees the world before it divided between loyalists and blood enemies. It’s symptomatic of leadership that is in its final stages of terminal fatigue, and doesn’t yet realize it. These guys cannot help but win themselves to death.

[…]

Imagine, as more stories hit the wire, the government had skipped all of those unnecessary weeks of obfuscation and deflection and simply appointed a special rapporteur to examine the need for a public inquiry. In this counterfactual, let’s also assume that the person he picked isn’t a long-time personal friend. What if Trudeau took allegations of interference seriously at the outset, and his party avoided stunts like skipping committee meetings and filibustering to prevent the testimony of his chief of staff, Katie Telford?

Where would they be today if they hadn’t squandered every iota of credibility and goodwill with the press, the NDP, and his own intelligence services? To put it more directly, what if they hadn’t spent the past few weeks acting as if they had something to hide?

Would they be better off? Maybe?

As an aside, I notice that many of the Liberal proxies are out in force on social media attacking the media and CSIS in an effort to defend the sitting government. I have to ask: how’s that working for y’all? Are you getting the sense that Global News and Sam Cooper and the Globe and Mail have been successfully cowed? Have their CSIS sources stopped leaking? Has Jagmeet Singh been brought to heel?

I’m going to put something out for consideration: Perhaps the denials, obfuscations and attacks are only making the scandal worse. They’re convincing journalists that there’s a real story here while prompting an already pissy collection of national security sources to leak harder.

October 13, 2022

Are we to believe that Prime Minister Trudeau lied about the Freedom Convoy? To the fainting couches!

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Some recent revelations show that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was … less than perfectly honest … about the intelligence reports he was receiving about the Freedom Convoy:

It has now been revealed that statements by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau associating the “Freedom Convoy” with Nazism were unfounded, according to Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) documents published by Blacklock’s Reporter.

On January 31, 2022, Trudeau conflated support for the “Freedom Convoy” with “Nazi symbolism” in his first press conference addressing the massive anti-mandate demonstration that captured the world’s attention in the first two months of the year.

Trudeau also stated at the time that he would not meet with the truckers because of their supposed “hateful rhetoric” and “violence towards citizens”, behavior he consistently implied was a core aspect of the movement’s strategy to put an end to COVID jab mandates nationwide.

Contradicting Trudeau’s characterization, the now-revealed documentation from CSIS, dated February 2 – just two days after the prime minister’s initial comments – explain that the protest was predominantly comprised of “patriotic Canadians standing up for their democratic rights” and not of those holding extremists beliefs.

Detailing how the presence of bigoted imagery is “not unique” when it comes to large-scale protests, CSIS also noted that the presence of swastikas on some flags was “not necessarily to self-identify as Nazis but to imply the Prime Minister and federal government are acting like Nazis by imposing public health mandates”.

It was therefore the conclusion of CSIS that while some attendees had manually added swastikas to flags, it was to associate Trudeau with Nazism as a statement of their opposition to the ideology.

Two weeks after the CSIS report was produced, Trudeau doubled-down on his conflation of the Freedom Convoy with Nazism, accusing the Conservative Party of Canada, and in particular Jewish MP Melissa Lantsmann, of standing “with people who wave swastikas”.

November 6, 2016

Canadian intelligence agencies and domestic overreach

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Michael Geist on the drumbeat of revelations — but less outrage than you’d expect — on the extent of surveillance being conducted within Canada by CSIS and law enforcement organizations:

In the aftermath of the Snowden revelations in which the public has become largely numb to new surveillance disclosures, the Canadian reports over the past week will still leave many shocked and appalled. It started with the Ontario Provincial Police mass text messaging thousands of people based on cellphone usage from nearly a year earlier (which is not government surveillance per se but highlights massive geo-location data collection by telecom carriers and extraordinary data retention periods), continued with the deeply disturbing reports of surveillance of journalists in Quebec (which few believe is limited to just Quebec) and culminated in yesterday’s federal court decision that disclosed that CSIS no longer needs warrants for tax records (due to Bill C-51) and took the service to task for misleading the court and violating the law for years on its metadata collection and retention program.

The ruling reveals a level of deception that should eliminate any doubts that the current oversight framework is wholly inadequate and raises questions about Canadian authorities commitment to operating within the law. The court found a breach of a “duty of candour” (which most people would typically call deception or lying) and raises the possibility of a future contempt of court proceeding. While CSIS attempted to downplay the concern by noting that the data collection in question – metadata involving a wide range of information used in a massive data analysis program – was collected under a court order, simply put, the court found that the retention of the data was illegal. Further, the amount of data collection continues to grow (the court states the “scope and volume of incidentally gathered information has been tremendously enlarged”), leading to the retention of metadata that is not part of an active investigation but rather involves non-threat, third party information. In other words, it is precisely the massive, big data metadata analysis program feared by many Canadians.

The court ruling comes after the Security Intelligence Review Committee raised concerned about CSIS bulk data collection in its latest report and recommended that that inform the federal court about the activities. CSIS rejected the recommendation. In fact, the court only became aware of the metadata retention due to the SIRC report and was astonished by the CSIS response, stating that it “shows a worrisome lack of understanding of, or respect for, the responsibilities of a party [SIRC] benefiting from the opportunity to appear ex parte.”

January 31, 2016

“To be honest, the spooks love PGP”

Filed under: Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

If nothing else, it’s a needle in their acres of data haystacks. Use of any kind of encryption doesn’t necessarily let CSIS and their foreign friends read your communications, but it alerts them that you think you’ve got something to say that they shouldn’t read:

Although the cops and Feds wont stop banging on and on about encryption – the spies have a different take on the use of crypto.

To be brutally blunt, they love it. Why? Because using detectable encryption technology like PGP, Tor, VPNs and so on, lights you up on the intelligence agencies’ dashboards. Agents and analysts don’t even have to see the contents of the communications – the metadata is enough for g-men to start making your life difficult.

“To be honest, the spooks love PGP,” Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute, told the Usenix Enigma conference in San Francisco on Wednesdy. “It’s really chatty and it gives them a lot of metadata and communication records. PGP is the NSA’s friend.”

Weaver, who has spent much of the last decade investigating NSA techniques, said that all PGP traffic, including who sent it and to whom, is automatically stored and backed up onto tape. This can then be searched as needed when matched with other surveillance data.

Given that the NSA has taps on almost all of the internet’s major trunk routes, the PGP records can be incredibly useful. It’s a simple matter to build a script that can identify one PGP user and then track all their contacts to build a journal of their activities.

Even better is the Mujahedeen Secrets encryption system, which was released by the Global Islamic Media Front to allow Al Qaeda supporters to communicate in private. Weaver said that not only was it even harder to use than PGP, but it was a boon for metadata – since almost anyone using it identified themselves as a potential terrorist.

“It’s brilliant!” enthused Weaver. “Whoever it was at the NSA or GCHQ who invented it give them a big Christmas bonus.”

February 9, 2015

The fantasy that CSE/CSIS oversight will actually protect the privacy of Canadians

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Michael Geist on the rather disturbing news that Canadian intelligence agencies are busy watching the uploads of every internet user (including the Canadian users that CSE/CSIS are theoretically banned from tracking by the letter of the law):

… the problem with oversight and accountability as the primary focus is that it leaves the substantive law (in the case of CSE Internet surveillance) or proposed law (as in the case of C-51) largely unaddressed. If we fail to examine the shortcomings within the current law or within Bill C-51, no amount of accountability, oversight, or review will restore the loss of privacy and civil liberties.

First, consider the Snowden revelations that the CSE has been the lead on a surveillance initiative that gathers as many as 15 million uploads and downloads per day from a wide range of hosting sites that even appear to include the Internet Archive. The goal is reputed to be to target terrorist propaganda and training materials and identify who is uploading or downloading the materials. The leaked information shows how once a downloader is identified, intelligence agencies use other databases (including databases on billions of website cookies) to track the specific individual and their Internet use within hours of identified download.

The Levitation program, which removes any doubt about Canada’s role in global Internet surveillance, highlights how seemingly all Internet activity is now tracked by signals intelligence agencies. Note that the sites that host the downloads do not hand over their usage logs. Rather, intelligence agencies are able to track who visits the sites and what they do from the outside. That confirms a massive surveillance architecture of Internet traffic operating on a global scale. Is improved oversight in Canada alone going to change this dynamic that crosses borders and surveillance agencies? It is hard to see how it would.

Moreover, these programs point to the fundamental flaw in Canadian law, where Canadians are re-assured that CSE does not – legally cannot – target Canadians. However, mass surveillance of this nature does not distinguish between nationalities. Mass surveillance of a hundred million downloads every week by definition targets Canadians alongside Internet users from every corner of the globe. To argue that Canadians are not specifically targeted when it is obvious that the personal information of Canadians is indistinguishable from everyone else’s data at the time of collection, is to engage in meaningless distinctions that only succeed in demonstrating the weakness of Canadian law. Better oversight of CSE is needed, but so too is a better law governing CSE activities.

March 29, 2014

Surveillance of Canadian telecommunications channels

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

The University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs looks at how the Canadian security establishment operates:

The issue of lawful access has repeatedly arisen on the Canadian federal agenda. Every time that the legislation has been introduced Canadians have opposed the notion of authorities gaining warrantless access to subscriber data, to the point where the most recent version of the lawful access legislation dropped this provision. It would seem, however, that the real motivation for dropping the provision may follow from the facts on the ground: Canadian authorities already routinely and massively collect subscriber data without significant pushback by Canada’s service providers. And whereas the prior iteration of the lawful access legislation (i.e. C–30) would have required authorities to report on their access to this data the current iteration of the legislation (i.e. C–13) lacks this accountability safeguard.

In March 2014, MP Charmaine Borg received responses from federal agencies (.pdf) concerning the agencies’ requests for subscriber-related information from telecommunications service providers (TSPs). Those responses demonstrate extensive and unaccountable federal government surveillance of Canadians. I begin this post by discussing the political significance of MP Borg’s questions and then proceed to granularly identify major findings from the federal agencies’ respective responses. After providing these empirical details and discussing their significance, I conclude by arguing that the ‘subscriber information loophole’ urgently needs to be closed and that federal agencies must be made accountable to their masters, the Canadian public.

[…]

The government’s responses to MP Borg’s questions were returned on March 24, 2014. In what follows I identify the major findings from these responses. I first discuss the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), and Canadian Border Service Agency (CBSA). These agencies provided particularly valuable information in response to MP Borg’s questions. I then move to discuss some of the ‘minor findings’ related to the Canadian Revenue Agency (CRA), Competition Bureau, Statistics Canada, and the Transportation Safety Board (TSB).

July 30, 2013

The return of “lawful access”

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:56

Michael Geist on the Canadian implications of some information that was published in a Buzzfeed article about a Utah ISP and the NSA’s installation of a “little black box” in their network:

The article describes how a Foreign Intelligence Service Act (FISA) warrant allowed the NSA to monitor the activities of an ISP subscriber by inserting surveillance equipment directly within the ISP’s network. The experience in Utah appears to have been replicated in many other Internet and technology companies, who face secret court orders to install equipment on their systems.

The U.S. experience should raise some alarm bells in Canada, since the now defeated lawful access bill envisioned similar legal powers. Section 14(4) of the bill provided:

    The Minister may provide the telecommunications service provider with any equipment or other thing that the Minister considers the service provider needs to comply with an order made under this section.

That provision would have given the government the power to decide what specific surveillance equipment must be installed on private ISP and telecom networks by allowing it to simply take over the ISP or telecom network and install its own equipment. This is no small thing: it literally means that law enforcement (including CSIS) would have had the power to ultimately determine not only surveillance capabilities but the surveillance equipment itself.

While Bill C-30 is now dead, the government may be ready resurrect elements of it. Earlier this month, a cyber-bullying report included recommendations that are lifted straight from the lawful access package.

June 11, 2013

Federal government denies collecting electronic data on Canadians

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:55

Oh, well, if the government denies doing something I guess they pretty much have to be telling the truth, right? Unfortunately, the photo accompanying this Toronto Star article doesn’t show if Peter MacKay is crossing the fingers on his left hand:

The Conservative government flatly denies Canadian spy agencies are conducting any unauthorized electronic snooping operations.

After facing questions from the NDP Opposition about how far he has authorized Ottawa’s top secret eavesdropping spy agency to go, a terse Conservative Defence Minister Peter MacKay left the Commons, telling the Star: “We don’t target Canadians, okay.”

A former Liberal solicitor general says that doesn’t mean other allied spy agencies don’t collect information on Canadians and share it with the Canadian spying establishment.

Liberal MP Wayne Easter, who was minister responsible for the spy agency CSIS in 2002-03, told the Star that in the post-9/11 era a decade ago it was common for Canada’s allies to pass on information about Canadians that they were authorized to gather but Ottawa wasn’t.

The practice was, in effect, a back-door way for sensitive national security information to be shared, not with the government, but Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) and, if necessary, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).

CSEC is a new bit of alphabet soup in the public sphere … I’d never heard of the organization until yesterday. Tonda MacCharles explains what the agency is empowered to do:

The CSEC, an agency that is rarely in the public eye, has far-reaching national security powers to monitor and map electronic communication signals around the globe.

It is forbidden by law to target or direct its spying on Canadians regardless of their location anywhere in the world, or at any person in Canada regardless of their nationality.

The National Defence Act says CSE may, however, unintentionally intercept Canadians’ communications, but must protect their privacy in the use and retention of such “intercepted information.” The agency’s “use” of the information is also restricted to cases where it is “essential to international affairs, defence or security.”

CSEC’s job is to aid federal law enforcement and security agencies, including the military, in highly sensitive operations. It was a key component of Canadian operations in Afghanistan, for example.

June 10, 2013

No surprise here – there’s also a maple-flavoured PRISM

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:05

In the Globe and Mail, Colin Freeze covers the Canadian data collection program that was approved by the Martin government in 2005 and “renewed” by the Harper government in 2011:

Defence Minister Peter MacKay approved a secret electronic eavesdropping program that scours global telephone records and Internet data trails — including those of Canadians — for patterns of suspicious activity.

Mr. MacKay signed a ministerial directive formally renewing the government’s “metadata” surveillance program on Nov. 21, 2011, according to records obtained by The Globe and Mail. The program had been placed on a lengthy hiatus, according to the documents, after a federal watchdog agency raised concerns that it could lead to warrantless surveillance of Canadians.

There is little public information about the program, which is the subject of Access to Information requests that have returned hundreds of pages of records, with many passages blacked out on grounds of national security.

It was first explicitly approved in a secret decree signed in 2005 by Bill Graham, defence minister in Paul Martin’s Liberal government.

It is illegal for most Western espionage agencies to spy on their citizens without judicial authorization. But rising fears about foreign terrorist networks, coupled with the explosion of digital communications, have shifted the mandates of secretive electronic-eavesdropping agencies that were created by military bureaucracies to spy on Soviet states during the Cold War.

The Canadian surveillance program is operated by the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), an arm of the Department of National Defence.

August 6, 2012

CSIS considers what to do with information possibly obtained through torture

Filed under: Cancon, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:48

The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) partners with the intelligence services of our allies, which sometimes means they get information that may have been partly or completely obtained through torture of suspects. This is a problem:

A secret high-level committee at Canada’s spy agency is tasked with deciding whether information received from abroad is tainted by torture, declassified records show.

Internal Canadian Security Intelligence Service memos reveal the key role that the recently formed Information Sharing Evaluation Committee plays in determining if the spy agency makes use of the suspect material.

The committee — whose existence was previously unknown outside the intelligence service — also helps CSIS decide whether to send information to foreign agencies in cases where it might lead to mistreatment.

Detailed instructions direct committee members to comb through databases, consult human rights reports and weigh the particular circumstances of each case to arrive at a decision.

Ultimately, CSIS director Dick Fadden makes the final call when the committee decides information is likely derived from torture, of if sending Canadian material to an allied agency could result in someone being abused.

June 18, 2010

The final word on the Air India atrocity?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, India, Law, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:23

This National Post editorial summarizes the report on the bombing of Air India flight 182 twenty-five years ago:

Yesterday, former Supreme Court justice John Major delivered his report into the attack, and the bungled investigation that followed. It is a damning indictment of the performance of the police and the government which does not mince words in portraying officials as slow, disorganzied and curiously detached from the enormity of the attack, which killed all 329 passengers, most of them Canadians. The government was simply not prepared to deal with terrorism, he said, and the two major investigating forces — the RCMP and CSIS — became bogged down in turf wars, bureaucratic battles and alarming displays of investigative ineptitude.

It has long been argued that Canadians’ seeming indifference to the bombing derived from the fact most of the dead were of Indian background, a suspicion Mr. Major addressed directly. “I stress this is a Canadian atrocity,” he said. “For too long the greatest loss of Canadian lives at the hands of terrorists has somehow been relegated outside the Canadian consciousness.”

Prime Minister Stephen Harper met with relatives of some of the victims, calling the report a “damning indictment” and pledging to respond to Mr. Major’s call for compensation and an apology to the victims’ families.

Though it has been apparent for years that the police response to the tragedy was riddled with errors, the extent of the blundering as detailed in Mr. Major’s report is no less startling. While victims’ families clamoured for information and some form of justice against the killers, CSIS and the RCMP lost themselves in bureaucratic battles, treating one another more as rivals than as co-operative forces engaged in the same search for answers. Between them, he noted, there was ample intelligence to signal that Flight 182 was at high risk of being bombed by Sikh terrorists. Yet taken together, their performance at gathering, analysing and communicating information was “wholly deficient.

As I mentioned the other day, the RCMP has largely squandered their once sterling reputation, and Mr. Major’s report makes it clear that the rot has been long-established and festering. It’s up to the federal government to make some serious changes to save that organization — or to disband it and start over fresh. For historical reasons, I hope reform is possible, but I’m not betting on it.

The point that most Canadians didn’t see this atrocity clearly because the vast majority of the victims were of Indian origin is well made: Canadians, for all of our vaunted “multicultural values”, didn’t see all those innocent people as part of our nation. Racism isn’t pretty, especially for a country that pretends to be beyond such historical problems.

April 15, 2010

QotD: Chinese espionage in Canada

Filed under: Cancon, China, Economics, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:39

China’s not buying our oil; it’s buying the reliable flow of Canadian corporate profits and our stable economic outlook.

Is it a national security risk to Canada?

No, again. It is true that, according to CSIS, the Chinese government represents the largest espionage threat to Canada, stealing the equivalent of $1-billion a month from our country in industrial secrets. (That’s more than our annual exports to China.)

But that espionage is done illegally by Chinese students, expats and other sympathizers, not through the legal ownership of share certificates. No doubt our high-tech energy secrets are being stolen and will continue to be stolen, but that is not happening because of a Wall Street deal. The central strategic value of the oil sands is not at risk.

Ezra Levant, “Pipeline to Asia”, National Post, 2010-04-15

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