When Transparency Meets Partisanship, Transparency Dies?

 This tweet touched a nerve apparently.

Damn it. Mr. O'toole. This committee was a good innovation to deal with a thorny problem.

Instead, MPs get no information and we undermine the one way to review intel stuff.

Well done, sir. Way to keep parliament ignorant and useless.

— Steve Saideman (@smsaideman) January 20, 2022

The tl:dr of this whole thing is that there is a real problem that democracies face--how to have transparency and accountability while keeping bad guys (foreign and domestic enemies) from knowing stuff that they should not know--that Canada is poorly armed to handle this challenge, and that the primary reform that managed to finesse some of this is now being crapped on by the Conservatives because ... it is better to score points than to help the country be both democratic and accountable.  

What is the longer version of this?  When I was interviewing politicians about the mission in Afghanistan in 2007, I was stunned to learn that members of the House of Commons Defence Committee lacked security clearances.  I said "how can you do oversight if you don't have access to the secret stuff?"  The response: "we don't do oversight,* we hold the Minister to account."  How can they do that if the Minister (in this case of Defence) has all the info and the members of parliament (MPs) have none?  "We get leaks," and their primary concern was agenda control of the committee, not info.  Why?  Mostly because they would prefer to talk aloud about stuff that they don't know much about than know more via security clearances but not be able to use that stuff in question period or other public fora.  As I framed it, better to be an ignorant critic than informed overseer.  The editor of the journal where Phil and I published the piece softened the title.  

This was not just a theoretical issue for us social scientists (although it did inspire the current book project and trips to many democracies) but also a major political issue.  During the Afghanistan war, one of the major points of contention (the most debated issue in Parliament--my book has handy figures on this) was the plight of Afghans detained by the Canadian Armed Forces--whether they were beaten after being turned over to the Afghan authorities.  The opposition wanted the info on this, the government said they couldn't, but since it was a minority government, the opposition was able to compel the government to produce documents under a very limited process.  The opposition leaders were able to go to a room where the documents were, sans recorders and notepads, and look through the documents, and then ask a judge or judges to declassify stuff. This effectively buried the issue, but it raised questions about how to provide accountability when there is not a minority government or when the opposition does not have consensus about pushing things.

NSICOP--National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians--is an innovation that is about five years old.  The idea here is that there is a committee of parliamentarians and senators who have security clearances and can get access to the secret stuff so that they can access the strengths and weaknesses of Canada's national security stuff.  The focus is mostly on intel agencies, but defence and other stuff gets reviewed as well.  The trick about this committee that causes much controversy is that it is not a parliamentary committee because it reports to the Prime Minister.  Mostly, this has not be a problem as they have issued unclassified reports that have been extensive and informative reviews (my colleagues who do intel stuff track this more closely than I do).  This process does mean that the committee does not serve at the whim of the Parliament, and the PM can limit what is produced.

This became a hot issue this past year as the Conservatives have wanted all the classified documents relating to a biohazard lab in Winnipegs.  They find NSICOP to be insufficiently focused on this, and have undermined it by not sending MPs to join it in the current session.  What do they want?  Damned if I know.  

Erin O'Toole has been grandstanding on this issue in ways that may undermine NSICOP and pour gas on the conspiracy theories out there.  My basic take, having not seen any of the secret stuff, is that the Winnipeg lab thing is an excuse to accuse the government of conspiring to be soft on China.  There is plenty of other stuff out there that can come in handy that way--this particular axis of effort is destructive to that good governance and order Canadians are supposed to care about.  Because O'Toole is killing the one thing parties could agree to that would provide some oversight* over the intel folks in Canada.  

The funny thing is that my tweet above, I think, was the reason I got a call from Mark Holland, the Liberal who is "Leader of the Government in the House of Commons."  He focused on the problem of redactions--that there had been materials that had been declassified but some stuff had been redacted.  The Conservatives think the redactions are problematic and that Parliament should be able to see everything and decide what can be shared with the public.  Holland's alternative is to take the Afghanistan detainee scandal process and make it more of a lasting thing: that some MPs could see the documents in their entirety subject to the usual security clearance laws, and that if they think some stuff should be released unredacted, then a committee of jurists should decide.  This would take the matter out of the hands of the government, and it would also mean that the opposition could not release stuff willy-nilly.  

Again, I am not the expert on this stuff, but this seems like a good compromise that gets at the heart of this--if the opposition cares about the issue itself.  They get access to the info, and then being able to talk about some of it if a panel of judges consent.  I haven't seen yet what O'Toole would say is wrong with this.  It seems quite reasonable.

What is my preference?  That Canada has committees that have security clearances.  This would not be sufficient, of course, because these committees have little heft--they can't change budgets, they have no influence on promotions, etc [the US Congress and German Bundestag are relevant actors not just because their defence committees can get the info but they also have power to use it--to shape budgets].  So, we'd have to innovate to give them a bit more heft so that their increased knowledge would have some relevance.  

But that ain't happening. The MPs don't have an incentive to know more--their incentives all point towards talking more, scoring points, not really focused at all on improving governance. So, this compromise, like NSICOP, is the best we can do. The alternative that O'Toole seems to want--for Parliament to have the power to release whatever it wants--seems problematic especially when at least one party seems to be more focused on spinning up conspiracy theories.  When people say that Canada's politics are immature and its politicians can't be responsible, this is what they (or I) have in mind.

* Oh, and about oversight, this is something where I get into fights with my colleagues.  For some reason, in Canada, oversight in the intel sphere has a different meaning than I have understood it anywhere else.  To me, oversight is about actors getting more information to know what other actors have been doing.  It can be and is usually retrospective (my friends suggest that it is more directive--that oversight is telling the actors what to do--that it is controlling, I think).  Parliamentarians don't need to know what Special Operators are doing right now in the field, but they should know what they did last summer.  Why is this important?  For many reasons, such as democracy requiring transparency (Colaresi has a great book on the contradictions between democracy and secrecy), but for my principal-agent-informed outlook, oversight is important because those who are delegated responsibility for doing something (spying, breaking codes, running special ops missions, whatever) will know more than those who give them those jobs about what actually happens.  One way to insure that those doing the work do the work as they are supposed to do it is make them feel as if they are being watched.  Oversight best works when those who are overseen anticipate that they will be caught if they behave in undesired ways, which then leads them to behave in the desired ways.  

Why can't we just leave this to the government of the day and civilian servants?  Why does civilian control of the military (or of the intel folks) have to involve other elected officials?  Because those in government may be tempted to hide stuff if revelations might hurt them politically.  Civil servants are not accountable to the public, so if you leave it in their hands, things tend to disappear.  There has been talk, for instance, of having the Privy Council Office supervise the various independent agencies that might get responsibility for overseeing the military (Ombudspeople, Inspector General, whatever), but that would be a black hole, not transparency.  

Anyhow, that's a lot for a Saturday morning post explaining a tweet.  Glad I provided the tl;dr up top.