Why Poilievre is refusing to read the ‘traitors’ NSICOP report

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Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has said he would eject any members of his caucus named in a bombshell NSICOP report warning of “witting” foreign agents in Parliament. As Poilievre said in a Wednesday radio interview, he would “absolutely” dismiss any Conservative MPs found to have “wittingly worked with a foreign government against Canada.”

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The only problem is, he’s refusing to read the report.

The reason is a kind of legislative Catch-22 that Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet has previously referred to as a “dumb trap.” If Poilievre gets the top-level security clearance required to read the report, he will henceforth be sworn to secrecy on what it contains.

“Agreeing to this security briefing means getting the information and the names. However, those who obtain the names are not allowed to disclose them, not allowed to talk about it and not allowed to act on this information,” was how Bloc Québécois MP Jean-Denis Garon explained the Catch-22 in the House of Commons this week.

Poilievre’s refusal to read the report also provided a rare moment of agreement between himself and former NDP leader Tom Mulcair.

Speaking to CTV this week, Mulcair said he never would have taken a deal that would have required him to be “hamstrung” on what he could say in regards to a major foreign interference scandal.

“I don’t want to be told that now that I’ve seen this I can’t say that,” said Mulcair, who occupied Poilievre’s current position as Leader of the Official Opposition from 2012 to 2015.

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The former NDP leader added, “I think that on this, Poilievre is completely right.”

Last week, the National Security Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP) announced a bombshell report which they said contained evidence of sitting MPs and senators “wittingly assisting” a foreign government.

But to read the report — and to see the names of the accused foreign collaborators — parliamentarians have to quality for Top Secret security clearance.

Members of the NSICOP are what’s known as “persons permanently bound to secrecy,” meaning that they’re legally bound to take any state secrets to the grave. NSICOP clearance also goes a step further than typical top secret clearances in requiring parliamentarians to waive their usual rights to parliamentary immunity.

Under normal circumstances, comments made in the House of Commons are protected from any number of legal consequences. MPs, for instance, can say as many libellous things as they want without getting sued.

But the act governing the NSICOP makes clear that if a parliamentarian blabs any secrets during House of Commons proceedings, that comments are “admissible in evidence against them” in any subsequent national security prosecution.

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Of course, Poilievre could always qualify for top secret clearance and then simply violate his oath by publishing the report to Facebook.

But there are a couple reasons why he’s unlikely to do that. For one, he would risk going to jail.

Canada’s Security of Information Act prescribes prison terms of “not more than 14 years” for anybody who leaks top secret material.

Also, given that Poilievre intends to be prime minister, it would cause all kinds of catastrophic foreign policy implications if he were to brazenly leak a top secret document.

Canada is nominally a member of the Five Eyes, a coalition of Anglophone countries that share intelligence information with one another. The coalition notably includes two of the world’s intelligence heavyweights; the U.S. and the U.K.

As such, it’s entirely possible that the NSICOP’s “witting” foreign agents report was knitted together in part using secret information from British and U.S. spy agencies.

If that secret information was suddenly to be put in the public domain because of a scofflaw opposition leader, there’s a good chance Canada would immediately lose access to the vast intelligence riches of its English-speaking cousins.

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In 2021, an analysis by the Centre for International Governance Innovation imagined this exact scenario, and spelled out what would happen if Canada were suddenly to become much more cavalier about releasing privileged NSICOP information.

“The answer is not complicated. Canada’s access to classified intelligence would completely disappear,” it read, adding, “if you can’t keep secrets, no one will share them with you.”

Of course, a version of this already sort of happened after Green Party Leader Elizabeth May read the report and then delivered a press conference declaring that it wasn’t all that serious. “There is no list of MPs who have shown disloyalty to Canada,” she said.

In his CTV interview, Mulcair called May’s behaviour equivalent to unilaterally releasing the names mentioned by the report, and expressed his view that the NSICOP report should best be passed to the ongoing Foreign Interference Commission.

“Even though I’m sure Elizabeth May is satisfied with her own judgement on this, I think that other people who know about these things would say, ‘No, we’ve got to go through the whole process,’” he said.

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IN OTHER NEWS

In interviews, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is often extremely hesitant to ever acknowledge a future in which he might not be prime minister. So it’s notable that he recently told a U.S. podcast host that he considered resigning last year just as his marriage was falling apart. “There was a moment last year as I was facing some difficulties in my marriage where I really wondered, OK, is there a path (out)?” he told an episode of the podcast ReThinking. He didn’t resign, of course, and on Aug. 2 Trudeau announced his official separation from wife Sophie. As the prime minister told ReThinking, stepping down was “not me” and “there is so much to do still.”

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