Former public safety minister Bill Blair said he “was not advised” for weeks after CSIS says it told his chief of staff that it was seeking approval to investigate an Ontario Liberal powerbroker in March 2021.
What remains unclear is why, according to testimony from a CSIS official, the warrant application targeting Michael Chan, a former provincial Liberal cabinet minister, sat with Blair’s chief of staff, Zita Astravas, for more than a month before he signed off on it in the run-up to the 2021 federal election.
Chan, who remains a significant figure in both provincial and federal Liberal circles in Ontario, has long been suspected of close ties to the Chinese consulate in Toronto and proxies of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in Canada, according to media reports – claims he has repeatedly denied.
CSIS requesting to surveil a prominent politician is a rare occurrence and would require the sign-off by a federal judge, senior officials within the spy agency and Blair, who is now minister of defence.
As the federal inquiry into foreign interference continues, it has yet to uncover a concrete explanation for the delay.
“While it was appropriate for my staff and CSIS to ensure submissions were correct and complete before it was brought to me, my expectation was and always had been that warrant applications be dealt with properly and promptly,” Blair’s statement to Global News read.
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Astravas, who now works for lobbying firm Wellington Advocates, did not respond to a text message and email Tuesday.
Last week, Justice Marie-Josée Hogue’s foreign interference commission heard evidence that CSIS briefed Astravas on the warrant in early March and delivered the warrant to the office shortly after the briefing.
Michelle Tessier, the agency’s former deputy director of operations, testified that CSIS headquarters, a regional office and agents were “frustrated” by a perceived delay in approving the warrant to surveil Chan, now the deputy mayor of Markham, Ont.
Chan did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday. He is currently suing CSIS over the leaked information as well as two reporters, including a former Global News employee.
Typically CSIS anticipates a 10-day window between delivering a warrant for the public safety minister’s approval and a decision. It’s not clear why this warrant took significantly longer, although former CSIS director David Vigneault testified that he was not concerned with the delay and that when he brought it to Blair’s attention it was approved that day.
Stephanie Carvin, a former CSIS analyst who now teaches at Carleton University, said the agency would have done considerable work in even getting to the point of a warrant application.
That’s because politicians – along with media, religious institutions and academia – are considered particularly “sensitive” sectors when it comes to CSIS surveillance.
“Everyone remembers the lessons of the 1970s and, you know, the searching of politicians and journalists and things like this and how inappropriate and how damning that really was for the community as a whole,” Carvin said, referring to the excesses of the RCMP’s intelligence service that led to the creation of CSIS in the first place.
“And I don’t really think there’s an appetite to go back to that.”
Carvin said for the agency to even take a preliminary look at the actions of a politician, there would be significant involvement from the highest levels of CSIS – perhaps even including the director. And for the agency to actively surveil a politician, it would require not only high-level approval but a significant amount of resources.
“I mean, the service only has so many resources.… It’s not like it’s easy to get a warrant, (and) just because you have a warrant doesn’t mean it’s easy to collect that information,” Carvin said.
“Once you get to that point, you have not only from a legal standpoint … but from a practical standpoint as well, it’s now something you’re willing to put a lot of resources behind because you are concerned.”
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