National-security adviser Jody Thomas waits to appear as a witness before the standing committee on procedure and House sffairs (PROC) investigating intimidation campaigns against MP Michael Chong and other members at Parliament Hill in Ottawa.Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press
A July, 2021 CSIS assessment warning Beijing was targeting a Conservative MP and his relatives in China was sent to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s national-security adviser at the time, as well as three deputy ministers, but it’s unclear if anyone read the top-secret document, MPs heard Thursday.
National-security adviser Jody Thomas, who was deputy minister of National Defence in 2021, was adamant that Mr. Trudeau was unaware of the threat to the MP, who turned out to be Conservative foreign affairs critic Michael Chong, until The Globe and Mail revealed he was a target on May 1. The Globe report cited the Canadian Security Intelligence Service assessment and a national-security source.
“I learned about it in The Globe and Mail. I had not previously seen the report nor had the Prime Minister,” she told the Commons procedure and House affairs committee.
But Ms. Thomas testified that the CSIS assessment was sent in July, 2021, to her at National Defence and to the deputy ministers of Foreign Affairs and Public Safety, as well as to David Morrison, who was Mr. Trudeau’s acting national-security adviser. He was presented the information in mid-August, she said.
Conservative MP Michael Cooper, seeking direction on what happened next to the intelligence after it reached these offices, asked Ms. Thomas: “And it went nowhere?”
She replied: “Correct.”
Ms. Thomas said she was away on leave and never read the report that explained how Mr. Chong and family members in Hong Kong were targeted by Beijing. She would not speculate on what happened with Mr. Morrison, who has said he never read it either.
“We found out who it had been sent to and tried to determine why it had not been briefed up,” she said. “It was incumbent on the deputy ministers to brief their ministers.”
That apparently did not happen, but no single official is responsible for the failure to notify Mr. Chong, Ms. Thomas said. “There is no one person. There is no one single point of failure.”
She added: “I acknowledge Mr. Chong should have been informed.”
Ms. Thomas said officials deal with massive amounts of information and there needs to be “a better management of intelligence” that is coming into the offices of deputy ministers, ministers and the national-security adviser.
“My reading package on any given day can be somewhere between 50 and 100 pieces of intelligence,” she told MPs.
Chinese diplomat Zhao Wei, who was involved in the targeting of Mr. Chong, was expelled from the country shortly after The Globe report. Beijing immediately retaliated, sending home a Canadian diplomat posted in Shanghai.
Since The Globe’s May 1 report, CSIS has confirmed that former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole and Vancouver NDP MP Jenny Kwan have also been briefed that they have been and remain targets of the Chinese government over their outspoken criticism of Beijing. The three MPs have expressed dismay that they only found out years later that the Chinese government had sought to interfere with their roles as MPs.
Mr. Cooper challenged Ms. Thomas, saying he doesn’t believe the Prime Minister or senior ministers were not aware of Chinese-interference activities.
“That memo from July, 2021, was a month before the federal election campaign, involving allegations of interference, targeting democratically elected members of Parliament. If that doesn’t get to the Prime Minister, then what does?” Mr. Cooper asked in a testy exchange. “How is that believable?”
Ms. Thomas fired back: “The Prime Minister cannot make determinations about information he was not given and he was not given the information, period.”
She told MPs that Ottawa has since taken steps to fix the communications breakdown that was first identified publicly by special rapporteur David Johnston in his report tabled on May 23. She said all sensitive information involving foreign interference, particularly if it is directed at MPs, will be assessed by a group of deputy ministers, who will provide advice to the Prime Minister about what to do with the intelligence.
Mr. Johnston said he learned that CSIS sent a note to then-minister of public safety Bill Blair, the minister’s chief of staff and his deputy minister in May, 2021, alerting them of intelligence “indicating the PRC [People’s Republic of China] intended to target Mr. Chong, another [unidentified] MP and their family in China.”
But, Mr. Johnston said, neither the minister nor his chief of staff received this note and neither have access to the top-secret e-mail network on which the message was sent.
Mr. Cooper asked Ms. Thomas on Thursday whether it was appropriate that Mr. Blair didn’t see the note because “he didn’t have his login information” to the top-secret network.
Ms. Thomas disputed this narrative of events. “Minister Blair would have been given a reading package” of what his department determined he should be apprised of, she said, saying MPs would have to speak to officials who were at Public Safety at the time to learn more. “Minster Blair doesn’t walk around with a secret laptop logging into it,” she said. “We give them the information they need to read.”
Mr. Blair, however, said in testimony Thursday that CSIS made the decision not alert him to this note.
He told MPs that he never received any “specific information about interference targeting any individual MP.” He also said he first learned of China’s targeting of Mr. Chong and his relatives when The Globe and Mail published the story.
He said intelligence information is brought to attention of the minister only if the director of CSIS determines the minister needs to know it. He said he was briefed in a secure facility or CSIS offices on those occasions.
“The information was not shared to me. It was authorized by CSIS to be shown to me,” he said. “But the [CSIS] director determined this was not information that the minister needed to know and so I was never notified of the existence of that intelligence and nor was it ever shared with me.”
Mr. Blair said he wasn’t suggesting that CSIS purposely withheld information. “They make a determination. They make a determination on the credibility and the seriousness of the intelligence that they’ve gathered.”