Harassment, bigotry and indifference at CSIS: 3 questions

#cdnpoli
#cdnpoli
Jul 20, 2017 · 7 min read

On July 13, 2017, the Toronto Star broke the story that five experienced employees of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), Canada’s spy agency, launched a $35-million lawsuit against the secretive organization alleging a pattern of racism, Islamophobia, sexism, and homophobia from managers there over a period of many years. The complainants, who remain anonymous due to legal requirements around their secretive work, are diverse: three are Muslim, one is Black, and another is gay. And they also appear credible, each having been with the spy agency for more than ten years. One complainant, known by the pseudonym of ‘Cemal’, has been with CSIS for 22 years. The group also includes the first Black female CSIS employee, known as ‘Dina’, according to the claim. All complainants are now on medical leave from the agency due to stress.

In their joint statement of claim, they allege a wide range of abusive language and behaviour by managers, a small sample of which includes being:

  • referred to as a “homo” and “fag”
  • told that “all Muslims are terrorists”
  • harassed for wearing a hijab
  • referred to as “sheikh” and “Muslim Brotherhood” by a CSIS deputy director in Toronto

The response from CSIS Director David Vigneault states that the organization is taking the allegations “very seriously” and encourages employees to report “real, potential and perceived incidents of harassment, without fear of reprisal” to management. However, the complainants assert in their claim that they had previously followed the internal reporting route and nothing was done by management:

CSIS is a workplace rife with discrimination, harassment, bullying and abuse of authority, in which the tone set by management, namely to mock, abuse, humiliate and threaten employees, has permeated the workforce. CSIS management has not only allowed this culture to thrive, it has actively inculcated this culture, openly rejecting and mocking respectful workplace norms…This racist, sexist, homophobic and discriminatory behaviour has become the accepted culture and norm…Not only do members of management comport themselves in a manner to facilitate this culture, but they refuse to acknowledge it constitutes wrongful conduct. To many of them, the rules simply do not apply.

Of course, these are allegations that have not been proven in court, but former CSIS officers interviewed by the CBC reinforced them. For instance, former CSIS officer Francois Lavigne, who left the agency in 1988, said that: “I thought after 30 years, this was gone. But it’s still alive and well…it’s the Old Boys network.” And former senior CSIS intelligence officer Michel Juneau-Katsuya, who retired in 2000, says CSIS has a “systemic problem” when it comes to discrimination. Even Richard Fadden, who led CSIS between 2009 and 2013, seemed reluctant to deny that such a problematic culture would exist within the organization, stating in an interview with Evan Solomon that “organizations above a certain size all have bad apples”, but it was his “hope” that they are “few and far between.”

As an aside, it’s worth recalling here that records obtained by The Globe and Mail in July 2016 reveal that the Canadian Human Rights Commission twice admonished CSIS for falling short in employment equity audits carried out in 2011 and 2014. Both audits found that CSIS had no visible minority or indigenous managers in its ranks.

These explosive allegations against a secretive taxpayer-funded organization that is entrusted with special powers in order to ostensibly ensure the security of Canadians are extremely disturbing, and elicit three key questions.

Will a credible investigation be launched?

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau weighed in on the lawsuit on July 14, stating that: “Harassment, discrimination, toxic work environments are things that I, this government, find absolutely unacceptable and I can also assure you that the new director of CSIS, David Vigneault, also finds that to be unacceptable.” Vigneault was appointed head of CSIS in May 2017 and assumed his duties on June 19 — he is obviously very new in the role, having not even completed a month on the job before the lawsuit’s launch.

However, though it may be tempting to view Vigneault as a fresh leader who will get to the bottom of the lawsuit’s allegations, the problem is that Vigneault himself has previously worked at CSIS as a senior manager: he was Assistant Director, Intelligence, from 2010 to 2013, and Assistant Director, Secretariat, from 2006 to 2009. Indeed, he served in these senior management roles during the period that the complainants allege many of the incidents of harassment and discrimination by management occurred. In other words, though he may well be innocent in the incidents alleged in the lawsuit, Vigneault’s history at CSIS means that the public can reasonably doubt his impartiality in investigating harassment in the agency.

Public confidence in CSIS requires that a credible investigation be launched to examine the state of workplace culture in the agency. This is what the New Democrats have called for as well, with public safety critic Matthew Dubé stating that:

The reports of persistent discrimination targeted at Muslim, gay and black employees by CSIS supervisors are so disturbing that immediate action is required from the Liberal government. …Such treatment would be totally unacceptable in any workplace in Canada, but here constitutes potential concerns for Canada’s national security as those accused serve as supervisors within our most powerful and secretive agency…I am calling on Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale to immediately launch a comprehensive and credible investigation into claims of rampant and persistent discrimination within CSIS and the impacts it has on employees’ working conditions and on the quality of work produced.

What is happening next door, at CSEC?

Next door to CSIS is the Communications Security Establishment (CSEC), Canada’s version of the U.S. National Security Agency. Along with the RCMP and CSIS, CSEC arguably forms the core of Canada’s non-military security apparatus. CSEC is charged with signals intelligence and has come under public scrutiny in recent years, following the Edward Snowden leaks, for the role it plays in snooping on Canadians’ digital communications. Certainly, the sensitive work CSEC is charged with requires the confidence and trust of the broad Canadian public.

Now, we already know that the RCMP suffers deeply from a long-running toxic culture of harassment, amply documented in various independent reports over the years. And with this lawsuit, there is good reason to suspect that this toxic culture can also be found within CSIS. It therefore seems obvious to ask: what is the internal workplace culture like at CSEC? Unlike their counterparts at the RCMP and CSIS, a large segment of CSEC employees are unionized with the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC), and therefore have additional protections and conflict resolution mechanisms available to them. Nevertheless, in Canada’s close knit security community, it’s not hard to imagine that the RCMP’s well-documented toxic workplace culture and CSIS’s alleged toxic culture could also rear their ugly heads within CSEC.

In this context, what will the Trudeau government do to verify and ensure that CSEC maintains a healthy workplace?

Will reforms to Bill C-51 take these allegations in consideration?

In 2015, the previous Conservative government under Stephen Harper passed Bill C-51, so-called ‘anti-terror’ legislation that dramatically expanded the power of security agencies, including CSIS, and sharply curtailed the freedoms, civil liberties, and privacy rights of individual Canadians. Justin Trudeau campaigned for the Liberals on a promise to reform (not repeal) the most egregious measures contained in the bill, and once elected, handed the file to Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale, who in turn tabled Bill C-59 in June 2017. The bill has been described by observers as “the biggest overhaul in Canadian national security since the creation of … CSIS in 1984.” And the consensus seems to be that while Bill C-59 indeed reverses several problematic parts of Bill C-51, it also leaves some serious concerns unaddressed.

The most serious example of this is the Canada Information Sharing Act, which was introduced via Bill C-51 and now enables government bodies to share amongst each other a wide range of personal information about all Canadians in a poorly conceived effort to uncover terrorist plots. As Daniel Therrien, Canada’s Privacy Commissioner, indicated following the introduction of Bill C-51 in 2015:

This Act would seemingly allow departments and agencies to share the personal information of all individuals, including ordinary Canadians who may not be suspected of terrorist activities, for the purpose of detecting and identifying new security threats. It is not clear that this would be a proportional measure that respects the privacy rights of Canadians.

Regrettably, Bill C-59 does not propose any changes to address concerns around information sharing, which can have profound consequences for affected Canadian citizens, particularly when organizations such as the RCMP, CSIS and CSEC in turn share details about Canadians with foreign governments. We already know, of course, that Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen, was detained in New York in 2002, and then rendered to Syria for torture, due to faulty information passed to U.S. authorities by the RCMP. We also know that three Muslim-Canadian men, Ahmad El Maati, Muayyed Nureddin and Abdullah Almalki, found themselves being tortured in Syrian and Egyptian prisons in the early 2000s due to information sharing by both CSIS and the RCMP. And we also know that Canadian Abousfian Abdelrazik found himself in a Sudanese jail in 2003, where he says he was tortured, after CSIS shared information about him with that country’s government. (Arar received an apology and $10.5 million from the federal government in 2007, while El Maati, Nureddin and Almalki received an apology and compensation from the government in March 2017. Abdelrazik is currently suing the federal government for compensation over his ordeal.)

Now, in light of the CSIS employees’ lawsuit’s allegations, serious questions must be asked about what led CSIS to view these Canadians as threats. What role did racism and Islamophobia play? What role did racism and Islamophobia play in other cases of Muslims targeted for investigation by the agency? What role does racism and Islamophobia continue to play in the organization’s work? And more to the point, will these apparent biases at CSIS lead to amendments to Bill C-59 to protect Canadians from the potentially horrific consequences of callous information sharing?

cdnpoli

)
#cdnpoli

Written by

#cdnpoli

cdnpoli

cdnpoli

Progressive politics and economics

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade