Vincent Rigby saw a lot over his 30-year career in public service, much of it working with some of the most sensitive and secret intelligence issues in Canada.
But for all that experience, the former national security adviser to the prime minister found himself in a state of disbelief in August when he saw the FBI search the home of former U.S. president Donald Trump and leave with boxes of highly sensitive, classified information.
“I was absolutely stunned that based on the media reports that I saw, he had in his possession what are reputed to be very, very sensitive documents and it’s just something that is unheard of,” Rigby said in an interview with The Fifth Estate.
“Just disbelief that somebody could take those out of the White House, stick them, I presume, on a plane or in a truck, drive them down to Florida and then put them … effectively in a basement, it’s just disbelief,” said Rigby, now a visiting professor at the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University in Montreal.
The material has set off a damage assessment by the U.S. intelligence community as it tries to understand what classified information was contained in the documents the former president had in his possession.
But the concern extends beyond just U.S. intelligence. The United States is a member of the Five Eyes, an intelligence-sharing organization that also includes Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.
Vincent Rigby, a former national security and intelligence adviser to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, says that because Canada shares so much intelligence with the United States, Canadian agencies should be concerned about the material recovered from the Florida home of former U.S. president Donald Trump. (Steven D’Souza/CBC)
Rigby said any potential security breach for one member has a ripple effect within the entire group and would also reverberate through the halls of the dozen or so agencies that share and collect intelligence in Canada, including the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS), and the Communications Security Establishment (CSE).
“In a worst-case scenario, there’s Canadian intelligence, that’s a direct implication,” said Rigby who played a critical role in Canada’s intelligence community as the national security and intelligence adviser to the prime minister from January 2020 until his retirement in September 2021.
Unprecedented search
On Aug. 8, the FBI took the unprecedented step of searching the home of a former U.S. president. With heavily armed Secret Service agents standing guard outside, teams of FBI agents searched Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property.
During the August search, the FBI combed through the posh club, which doubles as Trump’s primary residence, recovering 100 documents with classification markings, including 18 marked top secret, 54 marked secret and 31 marked confidential. The documents were found in Trump’s bedroom, an office and a first-floor storage room, according to court filings.
According to an inventory filed as part of a legal battle over the documents recovered, the material found includes some of the highest classification levels of U.S. intelligence, including material that’s highly compartmentalized and only available to a select few.
The FBI says it took about 11,000 documents, including roughly 100 with classification markings found in a storage room and an office, while serving a court-authorized search warrant at the home on Aug. 8. (Getty Images)
The search was part of an investigation by the FBI and the U.S. Justice Department into the storing and mishandling of national defence information and possible obstruction of justice.
The probe was sparked by an almost year-long effort by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to recover presidential records removed by Trump after he left the White House in January 2021.
In January 2022, Trump’s lawyers returned 15 boxes of records. In those boxes, archivists found more than 100 documents with classification markings, comprising more than 700 pages, according to a letter from NARA to Trump’s lawyers.
‘Inappropriate’ to comment, government says
It’s not clear if any intelligence directly related to Canada is among the documents. The Fifth Estate contacted CSIS, Global Affairs, Public Safety Canada and the minister responsible for public safety, Marco Mendicino, for comment.
Instead, The Fifth Estate was sent a response from the Privy Council Office, which reports directly to the Prime Minister’s Office.
“At this stage, it would be inappropriate for the Government of Canada to comment on an ongoing U.S. law-enforcement investigation,” the Privy Council Office said in the statement.
“Should the Government of Canada be made aware of any security breaches, appropriate protocols and procedures are in place to deal with them.”
An aerial view shows former U.S. president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home on on Aug. 15 in Palm Beach, Fla. (Marco Bello/Reuters)
But experts say that because Canada relies so heavily on the U.S. for intelligence, any impact on its ability to collect information would be felt north of the border.
“Knowing the prime minister, he may well have reached out and had some pointed questions, if not directly from him, from a staff in the Prime Minister’s Office: ‘Do we need to be concerned? Are there any issues here? What’s at stake?'” said Rigby, cautioning that he doesn’t know if the prime minister has been briefed.
As national security and intelligence adviser, he was also responsible for co-ordinating the security intelligence community within Canada and liaising with allies, especially the U.S.
Rigby said if he was still in Ottawa in his former job, he’d likely be putting a call into his counterpart, U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan, “to say: ‘OK, can you just give us a little bit of insight here as to what are these documents? And should we be concerned from a Canadian perspective?'”
Implications for Canada
The concern isn’t theoretical, in part because what is reportedly in at least some of the documents relates directly to a current national security issue in Canada.
The Washington Post reported that some of the material recovered “described highly sensitive intelligence work aimed at China.”
Chinese interference in Canadian elections and other national security concerns have been top of mind in Ottawa recently. At a meeting of the procedure and house affairs committee earlier this month, Michelle Tessier, deputy director of operations for CSIS, told members of Parliament about their concern about the Chinese Communist Party.
“They are an actor in foreign interference,” Tessier told the committee on Nov. 1, “and we have said that publicly and I can state again that we are concerned about the activities regarding threats against the security of Canada, including foreign interference by the Chinese Communist Party.”
A seven-page inventory filed by the FBI in U.S. federal court in Florida lists the contents of the boxes recovered during the search of Mar-a-Lago in August. (U.S. Department of Justice)
Rigby said the activities China could be involved in range from foreign interference and espionage to disinformation, misinformation, cyberattacks and more.
He said China is also very aggressive in its intelligence collection so it would likely target information in Trump’s possession to help it understand what the U.S. knows about its operations.
“If this intelligence is not stored properly if it’s sitting in a basement room somewhere without being properly locked up, it can potentially be grabbed by foreign intelligence agencies. And it can put not just the U.S. at heightened risk, but the Five Eyes, our allies and Canada included.”
Artur Wilczynski, a former associate deputy chief of signals intelligence at the Communications Security Establishment, says information shared among the Five Eyes, like intelligence on China, is essential for Canadian security interests. Losing access to that would have an effect on the ability to manage risk, he said.
“If some of that information that’s essential to make decisions is no longer available because sources are compromised, then you do not have all the information that you should have in order to make an informed decision,” Wilczynski told The Fifth Estate.
Artur Wilczynski, a former associate deputy chief of signals intelligence at the Communications Security Establishment, says information shared among the Five Eyes, like intelligence on China, is essential for Canadian security interests. (Steven D’Souza/CBC)
A major reason so many in the intelligence community worry that information could be compromised is that it was stored at Trump’s home in Florida, the private club known as Mar-a-Lago.
The FBI expressed concern that the facility lacked a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, also known as an SCIF, a specially designed area to store and view top secret information.
Mar-a-Lago is well-known among intelligence experts for substandard security, which has seen a host of dubious characters gain access over the years, including a woman posing as a wealthy heiress (who had among other documents, a forged Canadian passport) and a Chinese national who was found to have numerous electronic surveillance and computer hacking devices.
How to steal top secret information
A former CIA case officer tells The Fifth Estate how he would go about infiltrating former U.S. president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club to try to gain access to top secret information stored there.
That easy accessibility makes it a prime target for foreign intelligence agencies to try to gain access to the former president and any material he may have in his possession, says Peter Strzok, a former FBI deputy director for counterintelligence.
“I find it hard to believe that certainly when you think about China, when you think about Russia, that they would not have extended extraordinary efforts which continue to this day to get access to Trump,” Strzok told The Fifth Estate.
“Whether that is people close to him, whether that is his electronics, his email, his texts, whether that is the places that he frequents, that he lives, those efforts were significant in all likelihood, and continue to be significant.”
Easy accessibility of Mar-a-Lago makes it a prime target for foreign intelligence agencies to try to gain access to the former president and any material he may have in his possession, Peter Strzok, a former FBI deputy director for counterintelligence, told The Fifth Estate. (Harvey Cashore/CBC)
Bruce Heyman, a former U.S. ambassador to Canada and a vocal Trump critic, was shocked but not surprised when he heard about the FBI search at Mar-a-Lago.
“This is in a resort property in Florida … a place where people go to have weddings and parties, and we have the highest level of security documents sitting around, laying around the house. I mean, this is absolutely appalling.”
Exposing sources
A major concern would be the fallout for human sources — the spies themselves — if the top secret material found in Trump’s possession fell into the hands of adversaries, said Douglas London, a former case officer with the CIA.
London, who also worked in counterterrorism operations, said a damage assessment of the material Trump had would look at whether any sources or methods of collection had been affected.
He said the process can be exhaustive and operations could be stopped if agencies feel like the people risking their lives to gather information were at risk.
Bruce Heyman, a former U.S. ambassador to Canada and a vocal Trump critic, was shocked but not surprised when he heard about the FBI search at Mar-a-Lago. (Steven D’Souza/CBC)
“These are not necessarily mercenary folks, these are people who often refuse money or material compensation because they’re doing it for their children, their future. And those are the people that will pay the dearest consequences if they’re compromised,” London said.
Those consequences, he said, are severe.
“You’re talking about police, state surveillance, states like Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and even some countries that we deal with as partners across the world who are led by autocrats who are rather brutal and tend not just to kill the agent or the source, but to retaliate against their family and their networks and their friends.”
Rigby agrees the risks posed by the documents found at Mar-a-Lago could potentially have life-or-death consequences for those on the front lines of intelligence gathering.
“They could end up in prison for a long time, or in some cases, extreme cases, they are executed. It’s a very dangerous business, a very dangerous business.”
OTTAWA – Canada isn’t ruling out expelling additional diplomats from India, Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly suggested Friday following bombshell allegations that Indian diplomats in Toronto, Ottawa and Vancouver were involved in state-sponsored violence targeting Canadian citizens.
Canada expelled the Indian high commissioner and five other diplomats on Monday and when asked at a news conference in Montreal Friday if any more expulsions would follow Joly did not say no.
“They’re clearly on notice,” she said.
The minister said that Canada will not tolerate any foreign diplomats that put the lives of Canadians at risk.
A year ago Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Canada had clear evidence that Indian agents were connected to the murder of Sikh leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar in British Columbia in June 2023. The allegations suggest India is trying to snuff out a movement to create an independent Sikh state in India known as Khalistan.
On Oct. 14, RCMP Commissioner Mike Duheme rocked the diplomatic relationship further, saying the national police force had launched a special investigative unit last February to investigate multiple cases of extortion, coercion and violence, including murder, linked to agents of the Indian government.
In more than a dozen cases, Canadian citizens were warned about threats to their personal safety and Duheme said the national police force was speaking out to try and disrupt what it deemed a serious threat to public safety.
The six diplomats expelled are persons of interest in the cases, with allegations that diplomats used their position to collect information on Canadians in the pro-Khalistan movement and then pass that on to criminal gangs who targeted the individuals directly.
India has denied the allegations and expelled six Canadian diplomats from New Delhi in return.
Joly said Friday the allegations were extraordinary in Canada.
“That level of transnational repression cannot happen on Canadian soil,” she said. “We’ve seen it elsewhere in Europe, Russia has done that in Germany and the U.K., but we needed to stand firm on this issue.”
The allegations will be studied in more detail by the House of Commons national security committee following a vote by the committee Friday. Joly and Duheme will both be asked to appear, as will Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc
NDP MP Alistair MacGregor, who put forward the motion to launch the study, said the fact the RCMP came out with such “explosive revelations” underscores how serious the situation is.
“The RCMP made a point that they were doing this because some individuals in Canada had their lives directly in danger and the threat reached such a level they felt compelled to ignore the traditional way of going through the judicial process and make these accusations public,” he said.
Canada’s allegations were followed Thursday by charges announced by the U.S. Justice Department against an Indian government employee who is accused in an alleged foiled plot to kill a Sikh separatist leader living in New York City.
U.S. authorities say Vikash Yadav directed the New York plot from India. He faces murder-for-hire charges in a planned killing that prosecutors have previously said was meant to precede a string of other politically motivated murders in the United States and Canada.
The Indian government didn’t immediately provide comment on the U.S. charge.
American-Canadian lawyer Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a lawyer and dual Canadian and U.S. citizen, said in a statement that he was the target of the alleged murder plot in New York. He said he was targeted because he is a lawyer for Sikhs for Justice and was helping to organize votes in a non-binding referendum on the creation of an independent Sikh state.
Nijjar helped organize a similar referendum in B.C. prior to his death.
The House committee Friday also voted to call Brampton Mayor Patrick Brown to testify, as well as other candidates from the 2022 Conservative leadership contest. A report released in June by the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP) contains a redacted paragraph that details alleged Indian interference in a Conservative leadership contest. A specific year is not mentioned.
The Conservatives have said they have been given no information about any such interference.
The committee is also now considering a second NDP motion calling for all party leaders to apply for a top-secret security clearance within 30 days, along with a Conservative amendment to demand Prime Minister Justin Trudeau release the names of parliamentarians listed in top-secret documents as being engaged in or at-risk of foreign interference.
At the foreign interference inquiry this week Trudeau said Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre refused to get the clearance that would allow him to access the names of Conservatives from those documents, while Poilievre accused Trudeau of lying and demanded he make all the names public.
Trudeau acknowledged the documents include the names of members of other parties, including the Liberals, but said if Poilievre doesn’t get the clearance that is needed to know who is at risk he can’t take any steps to prevent or limit the impact.
Manitoba Conservative MP Raquel Dancho told the committee that Poilievre getting a briefing would be a “gag order” against criticizing the government on foreign interference.
“We can put this to bed, it’s rapidly devolving into some McCarthy witch-hunt as a result of the prime minister’s actions and we can clear this up today by releasing the names,” Dancho said.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 18, 2024.
VANCOUVER – British Columbians go to the polls on Saturday after a too-close-to-call campaign that saw David Eby’s New Democrats and John Rustad’s B.C. Conservatives tangle over housing, health care and the overdose crisis — as well as plastic straws and a billionaire’s billboards.
Forecasters say election day will be soaked in several parts of the province by heavy rain from an atmospheric river system.
But the campaign has already been drenched in negativity, with Eby and Rustad each devoted to telling British Columbians why they shouldn’t vote for the other.
The NDP’s election platform mentions Rustad more than 50 times, compared to only 29 times for Eby, while the B.C. Conservative platform names Eby 50 times, and Rustad only 11 times.
“I hope we never see another election like this,” Eby said this week in Nanaimo, describing the tone of the campaign where he felt compelled to tell voters about controversial public statements made by Rustad and some of his candidates.
“We don’t call people who are gay ‘groomers,'” he said. “We don’t tell Indigenous people that what they experienced in residential schools wasn’t real. We don’t propose that health-care professionals be put in front of an international tribunal similar to the trial of the Nazis called Nuremberg 2.0.”
Rustad, who campaigned in Nanaimo on the same day Eby visited the Vancouver Island city, said the NDP leader has consistently attempted to shift focus away from what he says are the real issues facing the province — mismanagement of the economy, the crumbling health-care system and the ongoing drug overdose crisis that has resulted in more than 15,000 deaths since 2016.
“I don’t know why, I guess as premier he thinks it’s OK to be lying to the people of B.C.,” said Rustad. “The premier of a province like B.C. should be able to be out, being straight up with people and telling them the truth as opposed to lies.”
Regardless of the outcome, the election will go down as a sea change for B.C. politics, with the Conservatives poised to either form government or become the official opposition, after the implosion of the BC United party under Kevin Falcon, who halted his party’s campaign to support Rustad and avoid centre-right vote splitting.
Polls have put the NDP and the B.C. Conservatives locked in a close battle. It’s a remarkable turnaround for the Conservatives, who won less than two per cent of the vote in the last provincial election.
Eby and Rustad spent Friday making last-ditch pitches for support in vote-rich Metro Vancouver.
Eby started in Coquitlam, while B.C. Conservative Leader John Rustad was scheduled to be in North Vancouver.
“We have left nothing on the table,” said Eby, adding every vote will count Saturday. “I have really no regrets about the campaign.”
On Friday, the Conservatives said that if elected they would launch “a full public inquiry” into the use of taxpayer money to buy drugs on the dark web.
That is a reference to a so-called “compassion club” that was operated by the Vancouver-based Drug User Liberation Front to buy drugs including methamphetamine, cocaine and heroin, test it for safety and then sell it to its members.
The club was ultimately shut down and the group’s founders arrested and charged with trafficking.
“This inquiry will seek to uncover who knew what, when they knew it, and what actions were or weren’t taken by the New Democrats, including Premier David Eby,” the party said in a statement.
Rustad was not available to reporters on Friday, but he was holding photo opportunities in Metro Vancouver.
Green Leader Sonia Furstenau was in Victoria, where she is looking to capture a seat in the NDP stronghold of Victoria-Beacon Hill. She has acknowledged the Greens won’t win the overall election, but is hoping to retain a presence in the legislature where the party currently has two members.
The campaign’s only televised debate saw Furstenau tell voters that Eby and Rustad were more closely aligned than people may believe on issues including support for the fossil fuel industry and placing people with mental health and addiction issues into involuntary care.
The month-long campaign has featured regular controversies for the Conservatives surrounding past comments by Rustad and his candidates.
Rustad dropped several potential candidates before the start of the official campaigning period over extreme views posted on social media.
But during the campaign he continued to support Surrey-South candidate Brent Chapman, who called Palestinian children “inbred” and “time bombs” in a 2015 Facebook post.
Eby mentioned Chapman during visits to two mosques in Surrey.
“John Rustad and the B.C. Conservatives are standing with that candidate,” he said at the Guilford Islamic Centre. “They should have got rid of him.”
Eby said the NDP are running two Muslim candidates in the election, including candidate Haroon Ghaffar in Surrey-South against Chapman.
“It’s important to have diverse candidates in the legislature,” said Eby, adding B.C. has yet to elect a Muslim.
Eby faced tough questions from people at the mosque about teaching sex education at schools and the rise of Islamophobia.
Rustad also stood by North Coast-Haida Gwaii candidate Chris Sankey, who suggested vaccines caused AIDS by posting about “Vaccine Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome” during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Then there was Vancouver billionaire Chip Wilson, co-founder of the Lululemon athletic clothing line.
Wilson injected himself into the campaign with a series of anti-NDP billboards outside his waterfront Vancouver home, located in Eby’s Vancouver-Point Grey riding.
Eby and the NDP embraced the moment, saying Eby was on the side of ordinary people in B.C. struggling to make ends meet and not the owner of a home assessed at more than $81 million.
Rustad said he supported entrepreneurs like Wilson, but they couldn’t expect a break on their property taxes.
Rustad’s campaign promise to reverse a ban on plastic straws prompted Eby to begrudgingly agree that “paper straws suck,” but he suggested the B.C. Conservative leader was trying to stir up controversy by diverting attention from major issues facing the province.
Election day coincides with an atmospheric river system that is dumping heavy rain across much of the province.
Furstenau used the weather event to highlight her party’s climate promises, saying the Greens are the only party that offers a serious response to the climate crisis.
“It’s very interesting the timing of an atmospheric river arriving right on the moment of this election campaign, an election campaign where we have one party led by a climate denier and another party led by a climate delayer,” she said.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 18, 2024.
OTTAWA – The executive team from the Assembly of First Nations will meet in the coming days to discuss how to proceed with new negotiations for a child welfare reform deal after chiefs voted against the government’s proposed $47.8 billion agreement at a meeting in Calgary Thursday.
AFN National Chief Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak, who had helped negotiate the deal and pushed for it to be approved, was blunt in her assessment of the outcome in her closing remarks to the special chiefs assembly Friday.
“We also recognize the success of the campaign that defeated this resolution. You spoke with passion, and you convinced the majority to vote against this $47.8-billion national agreement,” she said.
“There is no getting around the fact that this agreement was too much of a threat to the status quo, to the industry that has been built on taking First Nations children from their families.”
Cindy Blackstock, executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society which helped launch a discrimination case against Canada that led to the deal, said “that’s an unfortunate characterization of the chiefs taking a look at the agreement with their own experts and own legal staff and making an informed decision that’s best for them.”
“I respect the National Chief, and I look forward to kind of working with her and everyone to make sure that we get this across the finish line,” Blackstock said.
The defeated deal was struck between Canada, the Chiefs of Ontario, Nishnawbe Aski Nation and the Assembly of First Nations in July after a nearly two-decades-long legal fight over the federal government’s underfunding of on-reserve child welfare services.
The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal said that was discriminatory because it meant kids living on reserve were given fewer services than those living off reserve.
The tribunal tasked Canada with reaching an agreement with First Nations to reform the system, and also with compensating children who were torn from their families and put in foster care.
The $47.8 billion agreement was to cover 10 years of funding for First Nations to take control over their own child welfare services from the federal government, create a body to deal with complaints and set aside money for prevention, among others.
Before the deal was announced in July, three members of the AFN’s executive team wrote letters to the national chief saying they feared the deal was being negotiated in secret, and asked for a change in course. They also said the AFN was attempting to sideline the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society from negotiations.
Those concerns largely remained when the deal was announced in a closed-door meeting at the AFN’s last gathering, with chiefs questioning how the reforms will work on the ground, and service providers saying their funding levels will be significantly cut which would impact their ability to do their work effectively.
Blackstock found support from 267 out of 414 chiefs who voted against a resolution calling for the deal to be approved.
Squamish Nation chairperson Khelsilem introduced a resolution Friday calling for a new negotiation mandate from chiefs.
“This is a lesson for the Assembly of First Nations, for the staff and legal, for the advisers, for the portfolio holder who has worked on this deal,” he said.
“The way we got here was not the way we should have done this. There’s a better way forward.”
His resolution, and another one from child welfare advocate and proxy chief for Skawahlook First Nation, Judy Wilson, called for the creation of a children’s chiefs’ commission comprised of leadership from all regions in the country to negotiate a new deal and provide oversight, along with a new legal team.
It also calls for chiefs to be given at least 90 days to review an agreement before voting on it, with the document to be made available in both official languages.
Khelsilem said the new negotiation mandate was developed with about 50 leaders from across the country, and hopes it will set a positive path forward in the best interest of kids in care after a fairly testy special chiefs assembly. He also said the new mandate will address “flaws” highlighted by chiefs across the country, and will ensure there is more transparency.
“We didn’t have to be in a situation where we had to vote down a flawed agreement and then create a direction to be able to get this back on track,” he said to chiefs.
“We didn’t have to be here if the process that was used to create the (final settlement agreement) was a meaningful process that meaningfully respected and consulted First Nations, that allowed for meaningful dialogue to improve that agreement.”
In a statement, a spokesperson for the minister of Indigenous Services said Canada worked closely with First Nations on this deal, and as it was being amended.
“The agreement that chiefs in assembly rejected yesterday is the final product of those close negotiations,” Jennifer Kozelj said.
“Canada remains steadfast in its commitment to reform the First Nations child and family services program so that children grow up knowing who they are and where they belong.”
Blackstock said that Indigenous Services Minister Patty Hajdu or Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ought to have been at the gathering in Calgary if they stood by the agreement.
In a statement Friday, the Assembly of First Nations Quebec-Labrador said they’re grateful for the work that has been done to date, but that chiefs need to work together to amend the deal so it respects diversity of communities and eliminates systemic discrimination.
“As chiefs, we have a sacred responsibility to protect our children and families for the next seven generations,” said interim regional chief Lance Haymond.
Blackstock says that even though the deal was defeated, it doesn’t mean they’re starting from the bottom.
“We have so much to build on, including the draft final settlement agreement,” she said. “This is a reset to ensure that First Nations kids all succeed.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 18, 2024.
