The Decibel - Canada’s ministers are missing critical memos

Episode Date: June 23, 2023

Controversy followed Minister of Public Safety Marco Mendocino after he said he was unaware that notorious serial killer Paul Bernardo was being moved from a maximum security to medium security prison. His explanation follows a pattern of federal ministers saying they’ve missed emails or hadn’t been briefed by their staff on major files.Marieke Walsh, the Globe’s senior political reporter, joins us to break down what’s happening with all these ministers missing crucial communications and what this says about competency in the federal government.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Lately, it seems like a lot of federal ministers haven't been getting the information they were supposed to. No, no, well, let's be really clear. I was never briefed on that information. I was informed on May 30th, the day after Paul Bernardo was physically transferred. I have also made it clear to my staff that this should have been briefed immediately. I wasn't reading my emails. I was not aware of the Center for Confederate and Disseminating Facilitation letters. Information that was released on Monday through the media never made it to me, to my office, or to the minister at the time. So what's going on here?

Marika Walsh is the Globe's senior political reporter. She's on the show to help us understand why all these ministers say they've missed memos and what this says about government competence. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Marika, it's great to see you. Thanks for being here. Thanks so much for having me. So it feels like recently we've been hearing a lot from ministers that they're not getting crucial information. And I know you've been covering Parliament for a number of years. So is this normal to hear that kind of thing?

I mean, I don't think it's normal the extent to which we're hearing it. I think that people understand things fall through the cracks. I think what is sort of stretching credulity right now is the seriousness of the information that appears to have fallen through the cracks and how often it's happened to how many ministers. And I think when you take that all together, the problem for the government is it's now leading to questions of competence and what they are doing in their jobs when these kinds of things aren't happening. Yeah. So we're going to go through kind of the big picture stuff. But I think first, let's just do a quick rundown of the situations that we actually have

been seeing. And then we can go through each one in more detail. But just kind of, can you lay them out for us, Marika? How many instances of ministers missing the memo have we actually seen recently? So in about the last five or six months, it's been several. And one of them we already spoke about on the podcast a few weeks or months ago, Menaka, and that was then Defense Minister Harjit Sajjan saying that he wasn't reading his emails during the fall of Afghanistan in 2021. And since then, through reporting from Steve Chase and Bob Fyfe on the foreign interference scandal, as well as through the David Johnson report on foreign interference, we've learned that there were two memos sent to the government from CSIS that outlined the targeting of MPs by China. And one of them went to Bill Blair and his chief of staff,

and that was in May 2021. And Bill Blair says he didn't get it. At the same time, a different memo on the same topic was sent to the prime minister's national security advisor, really one of the most senior civil servants and advisors in the federal government. And there was a lot of turnover in that office. And that memo also wasn't read for several weeks and wasn't acted on once it was read. And then, of course, we fast forward to the last few weeks on Parliament Hill with Marco Mendicino. And this is, I think, a story that really hit a nerve with people because of the topic. And that's Paul Bernardo, who was one of Canada's most notorious child killers and serial rapists, and really scarred a generation when his crimes were publicized in the 1990s. And what we learned in the last few weeks

is that both the prime minister's office, the senior levels of the bureaucracy, and the public safety minister's office were briefed that Mr. Bernardo could be transferred from maximum to medium security back in March. And three months later, the prime minister and the public safety minister were both expressing shock when the news broke that he was transferred. And in the weeks since have said that while their offices knew that this could be coming, they were never briefed on it until it happened. So let's go through these situations one by one. We'll start with the minister of public safety, Marco Mendicino, not knowing that notorious serial killer Paul Bernardo was transferred from the maximum security prison to a medium security prison, as you just said. So what happened there? Where was that breakdown of communication? That's really the million dollar question, because we know his staff got the information.

We know that senior civil servants got the information. He says he didn't get the information. We know that senior civil servants got the information. He says he didn't get the information. And there's maybe it's that there is no good explanation for why, but there certainly has been no public explanation for why it is that his staff decided not to brief him. He has said that it was the wrong decision. He has said that he has spoken to his staff since to highlight that he needs to be briefed on these sorts of matters. And so this is why I think the opposition parties have really jumped on this issue, because it just doesn't add up from their perspective. What is happening in government that such fundamental breakdowns in communication are happening when this is not a rookie minister and this is not a rookie government. We're now years into the liberal government. And Mr. Mendocino has been in cabinet for several years now as well.

Yeah, I mean, that seems like the kind of obvious question that is raised here. Like, what is happening if these things are not being communicated in this way? And Marika, you were in a group of a number of reporters chasing down the minister to try to get him to answer questions about this. How is it? How is it? And we have questions. Come on. It is fairly frequent that ministers don't want to answer a direct question, but I guess what is his behavior where you actually had to chase him down that hallway?

What does that tell you about this situation? It speaks to how tenuous the situation is for the minister, I think, and how fragile it is. Marco Medichino is sort of known as somebody who is happy to engage with the press, even when it's on tough topics, even when he is in the hot seat. So in the past on how he justified the invocation of the Emergencies Act on the gun bill, which required a massive climb down from the government in order to pass a version of the gun bill. So there's been more than one occasion in which the minister has been on the hot seat in which his file has caused problems for the government. And that's not new in public safety. Public safety is a very challenging file. But it is one of these things where because we know that the minister has always been open to answering questions in

these times, the fact that he wasn't this time really was noteworthy. Journalists honestly waited, I think, four or five hours on Tuesday or Wednesday of last week to speak with the minister. We kept being told he's coming. He might be coming later. He'll be coming later. So we were all waiting in the foyer. You know, I was just sitting on the floor trying to file my story from my phone. So it just speaks to the fact that he is in a tenuous position, the fact that this has hit a nerve and all the more so because opposition parties, the conservatives namely, are calling for him to resign or be fired. And the prime minister has been loathe to actually express support or confidence in his minister since this happened,

which is also another sort of red flag that if the prime minister isn't coming to a minister's defense at the same time that there's rumors of a cabinet shuffle, things aren't going very well for that minister. I guess one more question before we kind of move on to the next situation. But I wonder, like, how involved are ministers in high profile prison transfers? Like, yes, we're talking about the communication of this issue. But underlying that is, you know, the question of could he have prevented Bernardo from being transferred? Totally. And that's a fair question. And it is correct that the corrections agency is arm's length from the minister. We don't want politicians deciding which prisons inmates go to. But there is a process in

place for high profile offenders, because it is public, it is in the public interest, and it is very emotional for the victims' families and for the public at large. And there is a process of notifying the government when there's a high profile offender decision or transfer coming. And the corrections agency says that they did that, that they sent communications materials to the government about this. And I spoke with a former director general at public safety, Mary Campbell, who has since retired from the government, but she was directly involved in these kinds of discussions. And she said the minister could have taken the lead to both ask questions behind the scenes about why this decision was made to make

sure it was properly understood, properly thought out. No, he can't change a particular offender's or inmate's sort of future or the decisions around where they go, but they can do the follow-up and the scrutiny to make sure that it is a rationale that can be explained, and they can also then take the leadership role to explain to the public why this has happened. And instead of that happening, instead of the office taking the time to prepare all of that in the three months that they had, she says that the minister's initial comments actually stoked public fear and anger over this because he expressed shock and apparent sort of anger or discontent at the decision, even though his office knew about the decision. Yeah. Let's move on to the next example, Marika. I want to ask you

about Harjeet Sajjan, the former Minister of Defense, who said he wasn't checking his emails during the fall of Afghanistan in 2021. Can you just remind us what was going on there? So in the summer of 2021, at the same time that the federal government decided to call an election, a snap early election, Afghanistan was falling to the Taliban and Canada and other allied countries were in a real scramble trying to save the Afghans who they had for years promised refuge to. That if you worked with allies or the diplomatic or military missions, you could immigrate or move to the country that you helped. So Canada and the other allies had these extensive promises, but a crumbling security situation.

And in that time, Senator Marilu McFedren, who was a sitting Canadian senator, began to send travel documents that purported to be from the Canadian government from her office. And she says that the federal government knew about this and that in a sense that she was sort of sanctioned to do it. And the documents came from Minister Harjit Sajjan's then chief of staff, George Young. The senator says that Harjit Sajjan was notified of this. And so when Harjit Sajjan was asked, well, were you? He told MPs at a committee, well, I might have been, but I don't know, because I wasn't reading my emails at the time. And I haven't checked them since. And again, that was just this moment on Parliament Hill and it's sort of in the Ottawa bubble of, huh, what's happening? Like, say that again.

And so what position does it put the government. I think more broadly, the narrative is beginning to set that there is a question of competence, as I mentioned, and that is the bigger issue that the government has to contend with as it's going into the summer and as it's sort of at this midterm point in its minority government. We'll be right back. Okay, let's move on to our third example here. We've been hearing a lot about foreign interference recently from China and hearing a kind of similar response to the ones that we've been speaking about already. So Marika, let's talk about Bill Blair back when he was public safety minister. What's the situation there? So this also, interestingly, goes back to 2021. When Bill Blair was public safety minister, he received or he was sent, I should say,

a memo from CSIS alerting him that conservative MP Michael Chong and another unnamed MP and their families were going to be targeted by China or were being targeted by China. This is in relation to questions around how sort of the Chinese government tries to meddle in Canadian politics, in Canadian public life. And the minister says that he never received that memo, while CSIS says that it was sent directly to him. And it wasn't sort of your average everyday briefing. It was a specific issues memo. It gets sent to sort of an internal, highly secured email system in which somebody has to go into a specific room at the public safety department, print off the memos, and then provide them to the minister. Yeah, this is not a memo that's kind of lost in the shuffle of things. No, it's not just

sent in the mail. You know what I mean? Like there's like a high priority server that you would assume that somebody is checking regularly. But the minister has said a few different things. He says that he never read the memo. He also at one point said CSIS chose not to tell him, which CSIS has completely rebutted and said, no, we actually chose to tell him. And then somewhere it fell through the cracks again. And then a few months later, actually, a separate memo assessment was sent from CSIS to the National Security Advisor in the Prime Minister's office. And that memo was not immediately read by the National Security Advisor at the time. Once it was read a few weeks later, they didn't act on it because the person who was the acting National Security Advisor at the time said that they thought other people were acting on it.

It was just a memo for your information. I mean, what can this pattern tell us about the government, like how the liberal government is running here? Well, there's been a lot of talk lately about the need to improve communications flows and about different corrections that the government is putting in place. For example, Marco Medichino, in fairness to him, part of the reason why he's had such a rough year this year is because he is the one who's now the public safety minister. So he is part of the person who's answering questions on that missed memo from Bill Blair two years ago, and his department has to address that. But he now has issued two directives to have the agencies who report to him also talk to him. The question is,

why wasn't that already happening? I want to ask you about the opposition parties, because we've seen both the conservative leader, Pierre Pauliev, and NDP leader Jagmeet Singh respond to the situations we're talking about here. Are these situations, are these good things for the opposition? Like, are they actually benefiting from this? I mean, a day on the back feet for the government is never a bad day for the opposition. But whether it's paying dividends, I think is actually a critical question. Despite the fact that the government has struggled so immensely in the last few months, in the by-elections, for example, earlier this week, they were not punished. So just because the government's having a hard time does not mean that the opposition parties don't have their own work to do. And Abacus Data actually came out with a really interesting poll last week that sort of highlights this.

They say that about 80% of people who responded to the poll say it is time for a change from the liberal government. But importantly, they say about 31% say there's no good alternative to Justin Trudeau. And so that sort of highlights for the opposition parties the work they have to do this summer to make them look like a government awaiting, to make them look like credible, trustworthy leaders that voters who are dissatisfied with the liberal government can park their vote with. I will note it's a long time from the next scheduled election, but we're also in a minority parliament. So there is a bit more uncertainty into how things are going. But the NDP have made it very clear that they plan to keep supporting the government in this applying confidence deal. So more and more signs do point

to a longer minority parliament term than a short one. How does this all reflect on the prime minister? Usually they kind of set the tone for the government. So what does all this mean? This is all coming at a time when the government has had a very challenging first half of the year. And when they have been frequently on their back foot trying to respond and react to stories on foreign interference, to news leaks that often Bob Fyfe and Steve Chase are breaking on what has been happening behind the scenes that Canadians haven't known about on foreign interference with China. And so it's coming at this time

where the government's already been struggling. And it's really amplifying conversations in Ottawa about the need for the government to reset, about the need for some sort of refocus to get things back on track. So one of the questions now is how will the government reset this summer? And what people are pointing to is a cabinet shuffle. So just lastly here, Parliament has now risen for the summer. They'll come back in September. Marika, you mentioned a potential cabinet shuffle this summer. Could the Liberals clean up this mess before everything starts up again in the fall?

I think it depends on more than one thing happening. They might be able to refocus on a few priorities. One thing that I did find very interesting this week is that after the by-elections, in which the opposition parties did not make meaningful gains, you know, it was a status quo result, which tends to be a suggestion that people aren't that unhappy with the current government, the opposition parties refocus their attacks on the government on cost of living and on affordability. If the opposition parties are getting their marching orders that they need to focus more on the bread and butter daily pressures

that Canadians are facing, maybe we'll also see the government try to refocus on that, in particular around housing, which the government has been criticized for sort of ignoring in the last budget. Marika, it's always great to talk to you. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks so much, Menaka. That's it for today. I'm Menaka Raman-Wilms. Michal Stein helped edit this episode. Our summer producer is Nagin Nia. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Adrienne Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you next week.