The rookie chair of the Security Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC) — the part-time review agency over Canada’s spy service, CSIS — has, regrettably, but not surprisingly, failed to disabuse anyone of the notion that he is little more than a loyal Conservative apparatchik.
The former Tory cabinet minister was appointed SIRC chair last June by his former political boss, Stephen Harper. Immediately, questions were raised about whether Strahl, given his political pedigree, would or could exercise any independence when it came to keeping tabs on this nation’s scandal-prone spy service.
Today, we have the answer after a series of unprecedented and disturbing revelations about the alleged criminal conduct of not only CSIS, but also the top man at SIRC whom Strahl replaced.
First, fresh off his appointment, I challenged Strahl in this space last August to publicly respond to, and probe the fact that CSIS had — after years of denial and stonewalling — routinely intercepted for more than a decade the supposedly sacrosanct conversations between Toronto lawyer Rocco Galati and two of his clients deemed by Ottawa to be security risks.
Galati, a persistent burr in CSIS’s hide, secured the belated admissions about the spy service’s illicit eavesdropping in a Toronto court. Quite reasonably, Galati said CSIS’s breach of solicitor-client privilege had “corrupted” the judicial system.
Yet, months passed and not a peep from Strahl. So, earlier this week, I contacted SIRC and asked if Strahl was finally prepared to break his silence on the matter.
Michael Doucet, SIRC’s newly minted executive director, told me that he planned to “slip (Strahl) a copy of your op-ed piece and have a conversation with him on it” during the review agency’s two-day board meeting in Ottawa that began on Tuesday.
Doucet added that he first learned of the serious allegations after reading my Toronto Star op-ed in preparation for my interview with him. “I haven’t yet, to be honest with you, looked into or briefed myself up on this particular incident,” Doucet said. “Quite frankly, your article is my knowledge base (about the allegations) at this point in time.”
Translation: SIRC and Strahl didn’t seem to be aware of or doing anything about CSIS’s illicit wiretapping until I reminded them about it. It’s hardly reassuring evidence that our watchdog over CSIS has stirred from its somnolence and is now on the job.
My conversation with Doucet then turned to what Strahl and SIRC were doing about the cascading revelations swirling around the review agency’s former chair, Dr. Arthur Porter.
Porter, you may recall, quit the hush-hush job in November 2011 after splashy news reports revealed that the Harper appointee had ties to an Israeli businessman who has been variously described as a possible arms dealer, spy and consultant to dictators.
Then, late last month, Quebec’s anti-corruption police issued an arrest warrant for Porter — who now lives in Nassau, Bahamas — and charged him with several fraud-related offences, breach of trust, participating in secret commissions and laundering proceeds of crime in connection with a hospital construction in Montreal. Porter vehemently denies the charges. (By the way, Porter, the former head of the McGill University Health Centre, is also being sued by McGill University to repay about $300,000 it claims it loaned the oncologistPorter, the former head of the McGill University Health Centre, is also being sued by McGill University to repay about $300,000 it claims it loaned the oncologist.)
As SIRC chair, Porter was privy to state secrets. Notwithstanding the criminal charges, ties to an alleged arms dealer, and a lawsuit over a lot of money, the Harper government and SIRC have effectively told Canadians: move on, nothing to see here.
For his part, all the prime minister could muster in defence of his decision to appoint Porter as SIRC chair, was that the unsettling charges his pick is facing had nothing to do with his tenure at SIRC. “I just point out that none of these matters relate to his work in his former federal responsibilities,” Harper told reporters last week.
Really, sir. The first SIRC chair ever to resign amid scandal. The first SIRC chair ever to become a wanted man. The first SIRC chair ever to be charged with a spate of indictable offences, and the supposed party of law and order is washing its hands of it all. It’s unacceptable and a dereliction of duty to boot.
Following Harper’s lead, Strahl and SIRC are washing their hands of Porter too.
In a CBC interview last week, Strahl said, in retrospect, Porter was “not a good appointment.” Despite this, Strahl added that he was confident that there was no security breach. This confidence is, however, a little tenuous and is founded, it appears, on an apparently perfunctory review of the material Porter saw during his tenure as chair. “We don’t have any issues, at this point in time (my emphasis), with information that Dr. Porter was provided,” Doucet told me. “That’s not an issue for SIRC today.”
As a result, Doucet confirmed that the Porter affair would not be on the agenda at SIRC’s board meeting this week. But Eva Plunkett, the last Inspector General over CSIS — whose office was permanently shuttered by Public Safety Minister Vic Toews late last year — believes it should be.
Plunkett, who long trained an incisive eye on CSIS for a variety of ministers, told me in an interview that if she were still doing her job, she would have promptly recommended to Toews that it would have been wise for her to launch a thorough examination of everything Porter reviewed or had access to.
It’s a shame Plunkett isn’t around to do just that.
Original Article
Source: thestar.com
Author: Andrew Mitrovica
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