A 2021 analysis by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) was recently made public in which the agency presents various concerns related to climate change.
Phil Gurski, a veteran of CSIS and the Communications Security Establishment, is puzzled as to why CSIS would put out such a document.
“That paper, if it was in fact written by CSIS, has absolutely nothing to do with the CSIS mandate,” Gurksi told The Epoch Times.
CSIS Reports
The CSIS document, prepared in April 2021 and recently released to The Canadian Press, discussed the impacts of global warming on Arctic, coastal, and border security as well as food and water supplies. CSIS’s analysis, the document said, shows that climate change “presents a complex, long-term threat to Canada’s safety, security and prosperity outcomes.”“Someone must have put CSIS up to this, because CSIS wouldn’t do this on its own,” Gurski says. “What sources does CSIS have under its current mandate, where we can actually say ‘we think x, y, or z is going to happen because of climate change?'”
He says this gives him the perception that CSIS is being told what to do by the government, whereas it’s supposed to be operating independently under its own mandate.
“I’m perceiving, and it’s really a perception, that a lot of outside influences, i.e., the government, are basically telling CSIS what to do and what not to do.”
“As with any movement, only a small, fringe element supports the use of violence or might be willing to engage in it,” the briefing said.
Gurski says it’s obvious there was no threat to national security here and that if he was in charge of the CSIS unit that issued that briefing, he would have told them not to proceed with it.
“It wasn’t the kind of paper that I was accustomed to, that my colleagues and I would write at that point [when I was still with the agency]. [We worked on issues] related to actual threats to national security or public safety,” he said.
“They’re saying there’s no threat. So my question would be, if there’s no threat, then why are you writing it?”
He says his sense is that CSIS has become more politicized in recent years and that he is seeing the same frustration in his former colleagues, many of whom are quitting the agency.
“There’s a real frustration building up in CSIS, and I think part of it might be the perception that there is a little more political interference than it was historically. But again, I don’t have any definitive proof that that’s happening,” Gurski says.
A CSIS spokesperson told The Epoch Times that as the “threat environment” evolves, so do the agency’s assessments.
“That is why CSIS continues to monitor the threat environment and update our assessments as needed,” Brandon Champagne said in an email.
He referred to Vigneault’s comments to the Emergencies Act inquiry on May 10, 2022, where he said the agency is concerned about “lone actors—people who engage in violence spontaneously.”
“This is where we were focusing our activities during the convoy and providing information to law enforcement and to the government,” Vigneault said.
Other Agencies
Andy Brooke, a retired RCMP officer who has been involved in counter-terrorism operations, also bemoans what he says is politicization in recent years in the police force he once served, and the government’s interaction with the security forces and agencies.
“As the lead Canadian investigator in a major international case, the outcome of which had potential implications for Canada’s bid to win a seat during 1998 United Nations Security Council election, I can categorically state that political interference did not rear its ugly head,” Brooke told The Epoch Times.
But things have changed since then, he said.
“Today, by contrast, we see the spectre of political interference casting its shadow across the administration of justice in the SNC-Lavalin matter, the murder of Canadian citizens in the downing of Flight PS752, the facts emerging from the Nova Scotia Mass Casualty Commission, the context leading up to the invocation of the Emergencies Act—regrettably to name only a few.”
The email adds that there is much to be learned from “Indigenous Peoples who have long recognized the interconnected nature between human health and the health of our environment.”
The Epoch Times got a copy of the email via an Access to Information request.
David Leis, vice president with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, says these reports are another example of government agencies deviating from their specialized roles.
“In Canada, one of the most insidious developments that has occurred in the last several years has been the steady politicization of agencies that have a long and critical tradition of being professional, neutral, and non-partisan,” he says.
“But consistently, there’s evidence after evidence pointing to the dysfunctional politicization of our institutions.”
Leis says the situation also raises the question of whether public resources are being used in the most effective way.
“We do not have unlimited resources. So it begs the question, what are their priorities other than to suit the government and not the people?”
A spokesperson with PHAC told The Epoch Times that the World Health Organization has said that climate change is the “single biggest threat to human health.”
“A strengthened public health system is well-positioned to be a key partner on climate action. This includes helping to prevent and track the spread of climate-sensitive infectious diseases like Lyme disease, promoting healthier and more resilient populations through climate-friendly initiatives like increasing green space, and helping communities understand and adapt to the inevitable effects of a changing climate,” the unnamed spokesperson said via email.
Shift in Focus
Gurski also wonders about whether CSIS resources are being utilized effectively.“Precious resources, which are finite, are being reallocated to areas that don’t warrant it, because the nature of the threat doesn’t warrant it,” he says.
He notes that there’s also been a shift in focus in the intelligence agency.
Up until the time he retired in 2015, he says upwards of 90 percent of CSIS’s investigations were on radical Islamist terrorism, and just a small portion on “far-right” issues. But he says now it seems the split in focus on the two issues is half-and-half.
Gurski says the topic of the “far-right,” which he says generally refers to supporters of Nazism, fascism, and white-nationalism, has mutated since his time and become more serious, so more attention to it is justified, but he doesn’t think other important issues are getting as much attention.
“I have seen nothing to convince me that the far-right constitutes a threat equal to what the Islamists did when I was there, because they were definitely planning mass casualty attacks across Canada,” he says.
“You have any idea what’s going on outside your borders? Terrorists are killing thousands of people a year around the world. Is Canada immune from this?”
The report made its assessment based on the Right-Wing Terrorism and Violence dataset developed by the Center for Research on Extremism (C-REX) at the University of Oslo. The university says as far as it’s aware, its dataset is the only one “systematically covering the development of far-right violence in Western Europe since 1990.”
Media
Gurski says this shift in focus can also be impacted by where the media puts the most attention, which in turn would have a major influence on political leaders and public opinion.“It’s all about far-right—far-right this, far-right that,” he says.
“I was concerned by comments made publicly by public figures and in the media that I believed were not premised in fact,” Morris told the inquiry on Oct. 19.
Morris said how the media go about news reporting is important, because law enforcement officers “are informed” by those reports. But he said when it comes to news reporting, there are “multiple perspectives, and some of those perspectives seem to be based in confirming a worldview.”
“I saw that information, those assertions, foreign influence, money, etc., being played out by a number of people and talked about. And I would challenge that,” Morris said.
Gurski says when major media report on certain issues, those issues get picked up by MPs in the House of Commons who pose questions to the government. He says during his time with the agency, this increased attention by politicians would not translate into a change in focus for CSIS.
“Historically, that wasn’t us. But, maybe that’s changed.”
