When Premier Danielle Smith revealed Wednesday during Question Period in the Alberta Legislature that she is seeking national security clearance from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), she put Canada’s spy agency in a potentially difficult spot.
Jousting with Opposition Leader Naheed Nenshi about the danger of foreign interference in the separation referendum she is determined to have on a ballot next fall, the premier complained that the RCMP doesn’t brief her on security matters, adding, “I’m not happy with that fact, which is why we have to go to alternative sources to get intelligence.”
“I am going through the process to be able to get a higher clearance so that I can get CSIS briefings because I would like to know if there is any foreign interference happening in our province,” she continued.
On the face of it, though, Smith doesn’t look like a suitable person to be privy to state secrets.
She is, after all, the leader of a political party and government caucus now openly dominated by Alberta separatists who are dedicated to the division of the Canadian state, and at best unconcerned by the possibility of its destruction.
One of the authors of the separatist “Free Alberta Strategy,” Rob Anderson, is her chief of staff. She has been photographed dining with leaders of the Alberta Prosperity Project (APP), the group leading the charge on getting enough signatures on a petition to get their separation question on the ballot. And she is known to be an unblushing supporter of U.S. President Donald J. Trump, who has cast himself as an enemy of Canada – at least once he is finished disposing of all his other enemies – who vows to make our country the 51st state, the better to plunder our resources.
Even if Smith personally is, as she recently insisted, “clearly fighting for Canada,” the company she keeps would in normal circumstances make her ineligible to have access to state secrets.
But we shouldn’t judge her by the company she keeps, someone is bound to say. Judging people by the company they keep, though, is one of the principal jobs of CSIS, or any state security agency.
Then there is the matter of the premier’s company aloft, and I’m not talking about Anderson in his medically necessary business-class seat. Instead, consider Smith’s recent free flight through the friendly skies of Saudi Arabia on a jet owned by the feudal monarchy of that oil-rich principality. We can likely assume that digital recorders were operative aboard.
On the other hand, Smith is a duly elected Canadian premier, and at least one other – British Columbia’s David Eby – has been granted similar status to help him deal with security threats in his own province.
If she is denied security clearance, Smith might very well try to spin the denial into a wedge issue to allege unfair treatment of Alberta by the Canadian government – an old song, but one that always plays well in certain quarters here in Wild Rose Country.
Writing yesterday in his National Security and Intelligence Newsletter on Substack, historian and security-intelligence expert Wesley Wark called Smith’s comments in the Legislature “both naïve and an admission.”
Naïve because the foreign interference, from the United States and possibly other foreign bad actors, is so obvious. An admission because the premier’s request to CSIS “is a clear acknowledgement that provincial bodies have no capacity to understand the prospects of foreign interference targeting Alberta.”
This is a sharp point. That the RCMP may have been reluctant to pass information on to Smith makes sense, Dr. Wark explained, because “you can’t share classified information with a person or office that does not have the requisite security clearance.”
So, he asks, will giving Smith access to state secrets solve the problem? Probably not. Remember, “a Premier wholly unversed in intelligence and with no expertise to backstop her within her own government structures will not be in a good position to understand what she is being told. …”
Moreover, he said, the Alberta Government “may lack the apparatus for storing classified intelligence, so she may find herself, at least for a time, restricted to oral briefings. … Such are the demands of secret information but they are not popular with politicians.”
Even if her briefings are entirely spoken, those of us here in Alberta know Smith well enough to be confident she will soon blurt out a state secret or two on her Saturday morning radio program, unless Corus Radio is prepared to give CSIS access to a bleep-out button.
Dr. Wark also cites CSIS’s legislated need to steer clear of political controversy and act in a politically non-partisan manner. We all understand that Smith is not capable of such restraint.
What’s more – as is the stated reason for federal Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre’s refusal to get a security clearance – having learned about politically advantageous intelligence tidbits in confidential briefings would tie Smith’s hands, theoretically preventing her from using them. Again, sooner or later Smith’s blabbermouth could be expected to become a liability for CSIS.
The obvious origin of the foreign-funded misinformation and disinformation emanating from the United States raises another possibility about the kind of intelligence Smith is hoping to find, however.
Cast your minds back to the days after the UCP formed government in 2019 and then premier Jason Kenney’s claim that “for over a decade, a well-funded foreign campaign has defamed Alberta’s energy industry and sought to land-lock our oil.”
This soon led to the fatuous “Public Inquiry into Anti-Alberta Energy Campaigns” led by Calgary accountant Steve Allan, not to mention the so-called “Energy War Room.” At one point, the inquiry paid for a “research paper” that claimed groups of journalists covering climate change were conspiring “to coordinate and effectively distribute propagandized climate change issues in their reporting.”
But Kenney’s paranoid obsession didn’t come out of thin air. The fantasy of a foreign-funded conspiracy to replace good ole Alberta capitalism with a dystopic ecotopia became a virtual moral panic in the C-suites of the Calgary oil industry after the election of Rachel Notley’s NDP in 2015.
