Arthur Porter is taken is into custody in a photo from the Panama Police twitter feed. Porter, the former head of Canada's spy-agency watchdog, who received prestigious appointments from different levels of government and was nearly honoured with a street in his name, has been arrested abroad on fraud charges.THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO-Panama PoliceThe Canadian Press
The federal government employs a quarter of a million Canadians – and almost none of them are spies, senior managers or secret operatives. The vast majority are junior-level, white-collar bureaucrats. The federal government should bear that in mind as it implements a new policy that, for no good reason, threatens the most junior civil servants with everything from credit checks to having their online activities scrutinized, all in the name of – what else? – "security."
In some cases, federal bureaucrats may also have to submit to being fingerprinted.
It's perfectly appropriate for the government to probe the background of people who work with sensitive information or have access to the highest-level state secrets. For example, the director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service should be above reproach; knowing a senior government mandarin is vulnerable to financial catastrophe is pertinent information. Case in point: The government should have gone looking for the red flags surrounding Dr. Arthur Porter, before appointing the accused fraudster to the head of the body overseeing Canada's spy agency.
But an administrative assistant in Shawinigan? A clerk in Victoria? They should not be held to such a high standard.
The rationale for the intrusive new rules, which quietly came into effect last fall and will be rolled out across the sprawling government bureaucracy by 2017, is that they will help safeguard national security. That's an appropriate reason in some cases, and a thin pretext in others. National security is not helped by knowing that an employee whose job has nothing to do with protecting it once failed to pay her credit card on time. And that's why it should be none of Ottawa's business.
There are recent cases of criminal gangs and foreign operatives infiltrating the Canadian governmental apparatus. Steps must of course be taken to prevent that from happening. But extending a broad range of meddlesome background checks to those with the basic "reliability status, standard" clearance that's required for most government jobs is overkill. The longstanding practice of checking criminal records surely goes far enough.
Public sector unions have filed grievances in protest of the new measures; the federal Privacy Commissioner has also raised concerns. They should be heeded.
National security is being turned into a handy pretext for extending the federal government's reach in all sorts of directions. It shouldn't be invoked as a way to justify fishing expeditions into the affairs of private citizens, or public employees.