The West Block, Episode 28, Season 7

THE WEST BLOCK
Episode 28, Season 7
Sunday, March 18, 2018

Host: David Akin

Guest Interviews: Minister Scott Brison, Michael O’Hanlon,
Marie-Danielle Smith, Yaroslav Baran

Location: Ottawa

On this Sunday, the security of our electoral system: new calls to tighten political finance rules and harden our cyber security defences. Is Canada ready in case a foreign power tries to hack the 2019 general election?

Then, sanctions, expulsions and condemnations: What will stop Russia from flouting the rules-based world order?

And after another wild week in Washington, we’ll unpack the politics of the Canada-U.S. relationship.

It’s Sunday, March 18th. I’m David Akin, and you’re in The West Block.

The foundation of Canada’s democracy is free and fair elections. But that foundation is under threat like never before, from foreign hackers to foreign financial influence. Ottawa is taking notice, so just how vulnerable is our federal electoral system? Here’s your West Block primer:

It was the story of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Fake news stories about Hillary Clinton filling Facebook feeds and Twitter streams. And the same could happen in Canada in 2019. There are plenty of weak spots: hackers could target political parties to steal voter lists, e-mails, party strategies or they could target Elections Canada sites for the same information, malicious robocalls could misdirect voters on polling day. State-sponsored hackers in Russia or China are a likely threat, but election hackers could try to botch the ballot on behalf of commercial interests, terror groups, or anyone else threatened by a stable and strong Canadian democracy.

Joining me now is Scott Brison. He is the president of the Treasury Board, but he is also the temporary minister for Democratic Institutions, while permanent Minister Karina Gould is on leave with her new baby and that’s kind of a neat first for you and your cabinet to have the first ever cabinet minister in our history take a maternity leave.

Minister Scott Brison: It’s great and it makes sense because it’s 2018.

David Akin: Because it’s 2018. And so here you are with some extra work to do as the minister of Democratic Institutions and we know what was in Minister Gould’s mandate letter, but I wanted to perhaps talk to you a little bit about the election security for 2019. And I guess the first place to start is there have been some studies, has been some reports, but a week into the portfolio what’s your sense of where we might be vulnerable so far as securing our election, making sure citizens know that the results are results they can trust?

Minister Scott Brison: Well, it’s a very important question, David, because we have a responsibility to protect and to defend the integrity of our electoral system. This is something we take seriously, and as a government one of the first things we did was to commission a Communications Security Establishment of Canada, CSEC, to actually do a thorough study of the cyber risk to the Canadian electoral system. They looked at the 2015 election and did an analysis that in fact, there was not significant foreign interference in the 2015 election. But their analysis globally indicated that over the last year, 13 per cent of the elections in the world had some level of foreign interference. So what that means for us as a government is we’ve got to be vigilant, and particularly as we move forward towards the 2019 election, we’ve got to take a whole of government approach which we’re doing with DND, public safety Democratic Institutions, Heritage Canada, Global Affairs. The leadership role that we’re playing at Democratic Institutions is important. It’s important to realize that CSEC is one of the most respected cyber agencies in the world in terms of cyber security, and we are ensuring that we take every step in Canada to ensure, again, the integrity of our electoral system, including Budget 2018 where we—

David Akin: Well I was going to bring that up: $750 million over the next five years.

Minister Scott Brison: Absolutely.

David Akin: Not all of that is going to go to secure our election, but I assume some of it is going to be.

Minister Scott Brison: A significant part of it will be towards cyber security for elections, but what we do in Canada is really important what we do multilaterally because other countries, their governments are facing similar challenges.

David Akin: We’ve seen in the U.K. with the Brexit referendum.

Minister Scott Brison: Absolutely. And what we need to do is to learn from other countries, share best practices and ensure that we’re doing everything we can to protect the integrity of our electoral system. That’s what Canadians deserve and demand and we’re going to make sure that happens.

David Akin: Is there some specific things that you can identify to say we’ve identified a particular vulnerability at Elections Canada or the House of Commons? And I know I’ve talked to the House of Commons chief information officer. That gets tens of thousands, I understand, of cyber-attacks or probes on a daily basis, but are there some specific things that might be under consideration?

Minister Scott Brison: Well, first of all, it’s a whole of government approach that we have to take and we’re taking that very seriously. It’s also a whole society approach. Citizens themselves have a responsibility and we have a responsibility as government to make sure that we’re providing the right information to citizens to ensure that they can actually do that. So if Canadians go to the website: getcybersafe.gc.ca, they will find helpful tips that we have compiled based on what other countries, but also what we’ve identified as potential risks in Canada.

David Akin: This is written by our own spies or anti-spy establishment, these tips.

Minister Scott Brison: Yeah, we’re actually garnering that type of information from our own security establishment: getcyberspace.gc.ca. Canadians can go, they can learn and they can apply these practices in their own lives to protect their own cyber security, which is important. I mean Canadians are doing their banking online, so of course banks have—our Canadian banks are global leaders in terms of dealing with cyber threats. Our government, increasingly Canadians—90 per cent of Canadians did their taxes online. Last year 68 per cent of Canadians are doing almost all their banking online.

David Akin: And yet we saw this week, Stats Can lost a pile of census forms. I mean sometimes giving your stuff to the government doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not going to get lost. Things can happen.

Minister Scott Brison: No, no. And it’s important to realize that analog systems can have security issues as well. Digital systems that are double authenticated can actually be as secure as analog systems if we get it right. But we’ve got to get it right and that’s one thing that our government takes very seriously in terms of dealing with citizens information on an ongoing basis, whether they’re dealing with Health Canada or Immigration and Refugees Canada or the electoral system. So we are as a government writ large taking digital security and cyber threats very seriously.

David Akin: Let’s move on to some of the other ways elections could be influenced and that is we have seen in any number of elections, third parties ahead of a writ period will start to advertise for or against a particular position and there’s been suggestions from the left and the right that the money for some of that advertising is coming from foreign donors. This week we saw the Public Policy Forum, as you know, make some recommendations that we ought to tighten up our election financing regime, particularly with regards to third parties and foreign money. Are you able to say that that’s a priority that you’ll be able to move forward on before the session rises this spring?

Minister Scott Brison: It’s a priority to do everything we can to protect the integrity of our system and I’ve just had an opportunity to read through the Public Policy Forum report and they’ve presented some very interesting ideas, including looking at applying some level of limitation in terms of the timing of third-party spending on advertising. These are things we will consider as we move forward. And balancing again—

David Akin: Would you have to have something in place, though, soon? I mean we’re not that far from campaign time.

Minister Scott Brison: You’re right there is certainly urgency to this. But we also have to balance between, again, protecting the integrity of our electoral system with also recognizing the importance of free speech. And there is a balance in the same way that there’s a balance between understanding the difference between chat bots operated by foreign organizations aimed at deliberately thwarting Canadian elections versus free speech in Canada and people expressing their opinions as citizens on social media. We have to always strike that important balance between free speech of Canadian citizens and again, protecting the integrity of our system.

David Akin: Alright, Scott Brison, the temporary Minister of Democratic Institutions, best of luck with the job. Thanks for coming in.

Minister Scott Brison: Thank you very much, David, great to see you.

David Akin: Thank you. Still to come, we’ll unpack the politics of the week that was in Trump, Trudeau and trade. But first, how should Canada and the West respond to Russia?

David Akin: Welcome back. So, what to do about Russian aggression? After the attempted murder in England, Britain expelled Russian diplomats. Canada, and others, issues statements condemning what it called “despicable actions by Russia” and the Trump administration finally announced new sanctions in response to that attempted murder, but also in response to interference in the U.S. presidential election. But the key question is will any of that get the Kremlin’s attention? Michael O’Hanlon is a U.S. national security expert and senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute. He’s in Washington this morning. Michael, great to have you on the program, and I guess the first place to start perhaps is the West’s response to this action. Is it sufficient? There’s been a lot of chatter both ways about that this week.

Michael O’Hanlon: You know it’s a great question. I was encouraged by the response in the first instance because I thought it was quite firm and it was telling that it came from several countries altogether. The language was direct. There were no caveats about our confidence in our conclusions. Even though we perhaps couldn’t prove this in a court of law, we were going to be duped by some Russian story that they didn’t know what was going on. We fully supported the British decision. It came in juxtaposition and coincidence with the imposition of more sanctions by the United States. That may have been a coincidence but it was a happy coincidence. So, I was encouraged. I thought this was a strong message and most of all, it told Russia, you know, we are on to you. Just because you deny things doesn’t mean that most of the western world gives you plausible deniability as if you were in a legal setting in a court of law. We’re not stupid. We can figure out that if there’s only one place this nerve agent was made and you’ve got a habit of state sponsored assassination against your enemies, we have no reason to think that anybody else did this but Russia. And so, on balance, I was encouraged by the response. Perhaps other things will be necessary down the road, but I think this was a pretty good start.

David Akin: I want to zero in on the Trump administration’s response because as everybody knows, Trump himself has seemed to be reluctant to really tighten sanctions in the past against Russia for the whole collusion thing, election interference, whatever you want to call it. What in your mind might have changed the White House’s mind over the last week?

Michael O’Hanlon: Well, you know, I think that President Trump recognizes that certain specific actions, for which there is clear evidence, need to be recognized for what they are. He gets touchy and testy about the 2016 election for sort of obvious reasons. We shouldn’t be too surprised that even though, I think, making a mistake to give Putin so much slack, that he doesn’t want his own electoral mandate rendered illegitimate or in some way challenged just because Russia may have been trying to help him win and may have been trying to hurt Hillary Clinton. You know, it was one of 100 factors that went into that election. I personally don’t think it was anywhere near the most important and, you know, I understand why President Trump would feel a little bit of hesitancy to be the first one to talk about Russia’s role in that kind of shenanigan, even though Russian behaviour was unacceptable. What Trump should be able to do, of course, is to clarify that going forward any kind of initial inklings we saw of Russian interest in interfering with our elections will be opposed very strongly and we have to expect more. I think he should be saying that. But on this issue it’s separate. This issue is a specific act of violence on the territory of a NATO ally against a person that Russia had no business and no right to attack. And so I’m glad that President Trump just called it as it is.

David Akin: The victim of this attack was a Russian agent who had been termed by the British a ‘double agent’ and I’d assume the only way to read Russia’s motive—Putin’s motive in this is a message to anyone else: Don’t be a double agent. But he surely must have known this provocative action would have resulted in the exact response we saw from the West. Is it getting his attention? I mean I’m trying to figure out—a lot of people are trying to figure out his long game with some of these sorts of shenanigans.

Michael O’Hanlon: Well I think the long game is exactly where Putin is weakest, in general. So if you look at what he’s done in Syria, in Ukraine, in Georgia, in other parts of eastern Europe, you can understand the actions if you think in a short-term framework. He wants to prevent these countries from joining the west. He wants to weaken the United States and NATO. He thinks that we are too domineering around the world in how we handle various foreign policy issues that we act like a soul hyper power, we the Americans in particular, but all the rest of you who are our NATO allies as well. And so you can understand that there’s a sort of petulance, a sort of vindictiveness and a desire to reassert Russian prerogatives as Putin understands them. All those motivations sort of make sense. I don’t consider them very impressive or noble, but you can sort of get inside his head. But, what that does of course, the actions he’s taken in response to all those motivations have rendered Russia far more cut off from the world economy, put Russia’s economy into a bit of a tailspin, you know, really weakened Russia’s ability ultimately to integrate with the outside world and so he doesn’t have a great long game. He’s playing short-term tactics. That’s always been his strength. He’s pretty good at it. You know, he’s had some success from Ukraine to Georgia to Syria, admittedly in very brutal and nefarious ways, but, you know, he’s pretty good at that. He’s not so good at figuring out where this leaves Russia five or 10 years down the road.

David Akin: We’ve seen sporting events have a big impact on world geopolitics with the winter Olympics and the Korea’s, perhaps a lessening of tensions there. There’s another big sporting event this summer, the 2018 FIFA World Cup of Soccer. Russia’s hosting. We know Britain is saying no ministers or senior officials are going to attend that. But is that something the West may want to consider, using that sporting event as another lever.

Michael O’Hanlon: Well, you know, you use the term lever. A boycott would be sort of pure punishment. So that kind of an idea is better as a possibility that you could raise in advance to try to induce better behaviour. It’s not so great when after the fact, after a transgression you decide to invoke that. I think we had no choice in 1980 when the Soviet’s had invaded Afghanistan. That was such an egregious geostrategically fraught moment. This is a much more finite specific thing. So no, I would not boycott the soccer championships over this particular issue.

David Akin: Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institute in Washington this morning. Michael, thank you so much.

Michael O’Hanlon: My pleasure. Thank you.

David Akin: Up next, unpacking the politics of another wild week south of the border and what it means for Canada.

David Akin: Welcome back. Well it may have been a break week here in Ottawa, but there was plenty of political drama to go around, from Trump’s factual fiction to NDP leader Jagmeet Singh’s mixed messages about Sikh extremism. And joining me now to unpack the politics is Marie-Danielle Smith from the National Post and Yaroslav Baran, a principal at Earnscliffe Strategy Group. So good to see you both here and it was a bit of a crazy week. We started out with the steel and aluminum smelter tours of Prime Minster Trudeau. We end with this very strange made up event or whatever with Donald Trump on trade. Marie-Danielle, I’ll start with you. Give your sense of whether the Trudeau-Trump trade file is getting better, getting worse, getting weirder? What do you make of the week?

Marie-Danielle Smith: Well things took a turn for the weird this week when Trump seems to have made up a meeting in which he made up statistics that were made up.

Marie-Danielle Smith: So, you know, we kind of see this and think to ourselves, well in a way though it’s also more of the same because we’re so unexpected with Trump. We don’t know what’s coming at any point and I think this is just kind of a continuation of the rhetoric that we’ve seen from him before, the bluster where he’s trying to kind of throw us off our game. The bottom line is will that affect NAFTA or not? And we’ve seen these sorts of arguments about the trade deficit over and over, but those negotiations are still ongoing. Nothing has changed, so let’s wait and see.

David Akin: The professionals are still at their post negotiating.

Marie-Danielle Smith: In theory.

David Akin: Yaro, let me ask you about the general way that the Trudeau government has been managing the Trump White House relationship. They’ve had a strategy for a year to “flood the zone”. They may have blown it on Asia perhaps on some foreign policy things with our Asian partners, but what’s your sense on how they’re doing with the White House?

Yaroslav Baran: Look, they may have had a pretty disastrous trade kind of foreign policy generally, but on Canada-U.S., I honestly don’t think that it’s possible to be doing something more than what they have been doing. I think it was a smart strategy that’s multi-pronged broad charm offensive leveraging premiers, business leaders, anybody who has relationships going after governors, senators, congressmen south of the border, to create in house indigenous pressure in the U.S. That’s a right approach and I think they’ve been doing a pretty commendable job at it.

David Akin: And I assume too, Marie-Danielle, with the fact that we don’t know who Trump’s going to fire tomorrow. That’s a good strategy to make sure you know a lot of people because you’re going to need to know a lot of people.

Marie-Danielle Smith: Yeah, you make as many connections as possible and hope for the best.

David Akin: Alright Yaroslav, I want to switch gears for a little bit. Just so our viewers know you have in another lifetime, spent some time in a Conservative war room for a couple of national elections. You’ve also been overseas in the Ukraine to lead some election monitoring. We had Minister Brison—Scott Brison on the program today talking about the potential threats to the security of our election in 2019. As a guy who knows elections inside out, what do you think? Should we be satisfied with the security of our systems?

Yaroslav Baran: Well, anybody who thinks that Canada is somehow immune to interference, the kind of interference we’ve seen in other countries is being naïve. There’s no reason why we’re special. In fact, Canada—well like let’s face it, the big offenders in this space are Russia interfering in other people’s elections. Canada has been one of the most steadfast countries standing up to Russia and the foreign policy level, so there’s no reason to think that we’d be given a pass. That said there are certain advantages in our system. We don’t really have a digital component to our elections.

David Akin: The paper ballot.

Yaroslav Baran: We have the paper ballots counted by people, etc. So the idea of a massive hack of the system to falsify results isn’t really possible. The big threats, the real threats are the kinds of things we’ve seen in the U.S., in Brexit, in Czech, in Hungary, in Austria and Germany, which is the false news, the social media push to influence opinion and that’s a lot harder to ward against.

David Akin: Just again, to destabilize our democracy or create doubt among us all. We all have friends who are active or will be active in the war rooms for all three parties in this election. What about the parties themselves? What’s your sense? I mean we saw in the 2016 presidential election it was John Podesta’s e-mails that got hacked. It was the Democrats who were vulnerable. Do you think our parties are taking for the security of their own systems seriously enough?

Yaroslav Baran: Every political party is making huge leaps forward on its own cyber security from election to election. It keeps getting tighter and people are taking this more seriously and rightly so. But again, one additional benefit that we have in Canada, at least in so far as Russian interference, is that unlike other countries, we have generally something close to unanimity in terms of our foreign policy facing Russia.

David Akin: No one’s soft on Russia.

Yaroslav Baran: Yeah, there’s no loose fish that they can try to target and bolster and try to prop them up. I mean every significant political party sees them for what they are: An oppressive totalitarian state that squashes descent and invades its neighbours and so on. There’s no difference of opinion on that.

David Akin: I’m going to switch gears again and come back to Marie-Danielle to talk about the NDP and their leader Jagmeet Singh. It was a week in which he started out sort of dancing around how close he was to Sikh radical, Sikh extremists and he finished the week trying to clear things up and say he seemed to be against some things, but not necessarily. I think this is maybe a problem down the road for the NDP and Jagmeet Singh, but what’s your read of the situation?

Marie-Danielle Smith: Well these questions have sort of plagued him from day one. We saw that controversial interview with Terry Milewski at CBC where he was questioned on his very first day as leader on this issue. And what he kind of failed to do until this week was just categorically say that he believes in the Supreme Court’s decision on Air India. He believes that version of events and who was responsible. He never actually said that until this week, so I think for some people that might answer the question. But this kind of long simmering debate over Sikh extremism. Is it still an issue? Is it present in Canada? All these kind of questions have been boiling up for a while now and he’s going to have to answer more of them in the weeks to come.

David Akin: And in terms of, I don’t know if you’d call it crisis communications yet for the New Democrats, but it hasn’t been a great week for them to try and figure out how they’re going to manage and it starts with their leader, wouldn’t you say?

Yaroslav Baran: No, it hasn’t been a great week, but it’s also a tough issue. And you’ll notice, even yesterday he didn’t quite say directly ‘he done it.’ He said I accept to the report and oh yes, what you’re referring to was one of the findings. He couldn’t quite bring himself to say it explicitly and directly. But, I’ve got to say, I have some sympathy for him because it is a complex issue and in politics people are looking for quick and dirty, black and white, 7-second sound bite answers and it’s hard to do with complex issues.

David Akin: No, I agree with both of you. Yaroslav Baran of Earnscliffe Strategy and Marie-Danielle Smith of the National Post, it’s great to see you both and have a great Sunday.

That is our show for today. Thank you so much for joining us. I’m David Akin. Have a great week