Canada’s spy agency aims to begin sharing intelligence next year about pervasive foreign threats with entities outside the federal government – such as companies, universities, public utilities, Indigenous governments and diaspora groups – after a landmark bill passed this summer, a top official told a security summit in Vancouver.
René Ouellette, a leader with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, said during Tuesday’s closing panel of the Vancouver International Security Summit that his agency initially estimated it would take Parliament about a year to pass a bill ushering in this “sea change” in its approach to sharing secret information. CSIS had planned on using that year to craft new protocols.
But, he noted, Bill C-70′s rapid progress into law in June has kickstarted the effort to “work on implementation and build up the policy architecture beneath it,” which CSIS is now doing.
“We’re a bit like the dog that caught the car at the moment,” said Mr. Ouellette, director-general of academic outreach and stakeholder engagement at CSIS. “The bill passed in 46 days from introduction to royal assent, which, for anybody who follows the legislative process will know, is pretty fast.”
Lindsay Sloane, a CSIS spokesperson, said in an e-mailed statement the agency is already harnessing the new law, but she declined to be specific about a timetable for when Canadian organizations and companies will start to get specific information about the threats they may have.
The conference heard that China and Russia are waging a hybrid war against Canada by disrupting and stealing from public agencies, such as water utilities, as well as from the private companies that oversee three-quarters of the country’s critical infrastructure.
Until the amendments to the act governing CSIS, Mr. Ouellette said, his agency could only collect intelligence and share it with Ottawa because the regulations were borne of the Cold War, in 1984, when foreign espionage and sabotage almost exclusively targeted the various arms of Ottawa. CSIS has long recognized that other countries and their criminal partners are targeting businesses and civil society groups, as well, and has worked to improve its outreach in the past few years, he said.
He noted a big step for CSIS in this regard was issuing its first public alert during the initial wave of the pandemic to warn Canadian vaccine researchers that Chinese and Russian spies were trying to compromise or steal their work.
“We really pushed ourselves out in ways that made us all, frankly, pretty uncomfortable and created a bit of internal cultural turmoil in the organization. It was quite a bit of a change for us in terms of how we operated,” Mr. Ouellette said.
But, he told the crowd of bureaucrats, businesspeople, bankers, lawyers, security experts, academics and tech entrepreneurs, that the feedback from biotech companies and universities showed the spy agency this type of lab espionage was “a lot more common than a lot of us had expected.”
Vlasta Zekulic, a branch head of strategic issues and engagements for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, said better co-ordination between democratic governments and the private companies they regulate is needed to protect national security in the face of threats from authoritarian regimes such as Russia, which quickly co-opts new technologies created by Russian companies for use by its military.
She cited the example of how, even before Russia invaded Crimea, it brought every single company dealing with autonomous artificial intelligence systems together and soon began deploying any useful products on the battlefield.
“Those leaders know exactly where potentials are and how to harness them,” she told the final panel.
Calvin Chrustie, the former head of the B.C. RCMP’s organized crime unit who now is a partner at a private crisis and risk-management firm, told the panel he is hopeful that Canada can begin to tackle its massive national security gaps now that Ottawa is engaging more widely.
“As a Canadian that’s been exposed to these threats, in a personal and professional capacity, it was the first shift in trajectory that I’ve seen since I’ve been involved with combatting the foreign threats because I haven’t heard Canadian officials talk as frank, open and transparent – and empathetically – toward the business community and the community at large,” said Mr. Chrustie, whose company Critical Risk Team is a founding partner of the summit.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly referred to Calvin Chrustie as founder of the Vancouver International Security Summit. He and his company are founding partners. This version has been updated.