Richard Fadden is now running out of time to escape the box he constructed in a controversial speech and CBC interview. In two weeks or less, the CSIS director must either make good on a promise to expose Canadian politicians under the influence of foreign powers or admit he made what should be a career-ending mistake by raising a false alarm.
Between political careers, Bob Rae learned a lot about CSIS, serving on one of its oversight bodies. He now says Fadden is caught between negatives.
“If it’s true, he shouldn’t have said it that way,” the Liberal foreign affairs critic commented in an interview.
“If it isn’t true, he shouldn’t have said it at all.”
Rae’s concerns have company. Conservatives asked the toughest questions during Fadden’s Commons committee testimony, focusing on legislation restricting the detail CSIS insiders can reveal.
Release of protected information carries a penalty that could prove uniquely embarrassing for Fadden. Breaches must be formally reported by the director, a requirement that some CSIS experts believe could force Fadden to out himself to Public Safety Minister Vic Toews.
Fadden says that isn’t so. While regretting the “granularity” of his remarks, Fadden insists no state secrets were revealed.
Ultimately, the Prime Minister will have to decide if there’s a difference between straining the law and exercising bad judgment. Far more certain is that Fadden, first in a March speech to the Royal Canadian Military Institute and then in the June TV interview, crossed a great divide.
As global affairs authority Janice Gross Stein points out, it’s one thing to suggest foreign governments are attempting to influence our political process and quite another to say those governments have gained influence over individual politicians.
One is a universal and legitimate activity; the other is a specific offence loaded with diplomatic and criminal consequences.
Stein, who leads the University of Toronto’s Munk School for Global Affairs, puts Fadden’s problem in perspective. If Canadian politicians are beholden to offshore interests, the federal government must act against both them and the foreigners they serve.
If not, a bureaucrat is guilty of introducing to Canadian politics a whiff of the 1950s reds-under-beds smear tactics commonly associated with U.S. senator Joe McCarthy.
Squaring that circle won’t be easy. Spying is always difficult to prove and often dealt with discreetly. But failing to transparently close a case this sensitive would leave in ruins the reputations of a swath of officials and politicians at every government level.
Fadden’s second great mistake was publicly promising to file within a month a report that would normally be kept private.
But silence will satisfy no one and leave Stephen Harper with a suspect director of a security agency reeling from the twin blows of the Air India inquiry and Fadden’s startling indiscretion.
No prime minister welcomes those liabilities at the best of times.
Instead of adding bricks to the security wall, Fadden created the trap now snapping shut.
James Travers is a national affairs columnist for The Toronto Star.