From https://www.nationalobserver.com/2017/05/05/news/spies-our-midst-rcmp-and-csis-snoop-green-activists
Spies in our midst: RCMP and CSIS snoop on green activists
By Bruce Livesey in News, Energy, Politics | May 5th 2017
Both the RCMP (left) and the Canadian Security Intelligence Agency (right) have been caught spying on environmentalists, writes investigative reporter Bruce Livesey. File photos by The Canadian Press
This is the first installment in a two-part investigative series on governments, spies, and the oil and gas industry. See here for part two.
“Mr. Tremblay, do you remember me?”
Ron Tremblay was just walking out of the Lord Beaverbrook hotel when a young woman in a dark-blue pantsuit approached him. The Lord Beaverbrook is a beige, unremarkable edifice that sits in downtown Fredericton, kitty-corner to the New Brunswick legislature. On this summer morning last August, a panel of Canada’s federal energy regulator, the National Energy Board (NEB), was holding hearings at the hotel about the proposed Energy East pipeline – which is designed to carry oil from the tar sands of Alberta to New Brunswick’s port city of Saint John.
As the Grand Chief of the Wolastoq Grand Council – whose territory Energy East would cross – Tremblay had gone to listen to fellow opponents of the pipeline give a presentation before the NEB panel. When the young woman caught up to him, she introduced herself as RCMP Constable Joanne Spacek, working for a “Special Projects Unit” out of Moncton, NB.
“I was wondering if we could have a coffee sometime,” Spacek asked Tremblay.
A stocky, friendly, open-faced man in his mid-50s who wears dark-rimmed glasses, Tremblay agreed to meet with her.
An unmarked van parked outside his house
A couple of months later Tremblay met with Spacek in Fredericton. “I didn’t hide anything from her,” he recalls about their discussion. “I told her we want to protect our sacred ways, land and water and not want it poisoned.” Spacek, however, had her own concerns: namely the RCMP didn’t want the "wrong people" causing disturbances over the construction of resource development projects like Energy East. Tremblay understood what she was referring to: namely warriors from First Nations’ communities and other environmental activists. After awhile, Tremblay felt Spacek was trying to pump him for information about plans for any protests.
This was not the first time Tremblay has confronted the RCMP. In 2013, he was arrested by the Mounties while peacefully participating in a blockade near the village of Rexton, on the east coast of New Brunswick. For weeks, a group of mostly Native anti-shale gas protesters blocked a compound where a fracking company’s vehicles and equipment were being stored, along with other actions. This protest galvanized opposition to fracking, leading to a moratorium in the province.
During the blockade, Tremblay says he was followed by vehicles, which he presumed were RCMP, when he drove back and forth from his home in Fredericton to Rexton. And for three months after the protest ended, a white unmarked van was explicitly parked outside of his house.
“When I would leave for work, the van would be there,” he says, and then would drive off soon afterwards. “I was on their radar list,” he remarks.
Ron Tremblay, Robert Van Waarden,
Grand Chief Ron Tremblay of the Wolastoq Grand Council in New Brunswick has been followed around by mysterious vehicles that he believes were RCMP. Photo courtesy of Robert Van Waarden, Along the Pipeline project
"Do I know you?"
Yet Tremblay was not the only opponent of Energy East that Spacek approached last summer – and since then. A few days before the NEB arrived in Fredericton, the RCMP constable was in Saint John attending the Board’s hearings held at the city’s trade and convention centre. There, Spacek introduced herself to a number of environmentalists, including Lynaya McKinley, the 37-year-old spokesperson for a local group opposed to Energy East.
“All of a sudden she started talking to me and she said my first name – and she even knew how to say my first name, which is unusual,” recalls McKinley. “And she said ‘Oh you are with the Council of Canadians aren’t you’ and I said ‘Do I know you?’”
Spacek asked McKinley if she wanted to take her business card, suggesting she could call her any time. McKinley declined.
“I felt it was quite intimidating,” she says. “It makes me wonder ‘Are these people spying on me? Do they have a file on me somewhere? Why would this person know my name?’… I thought it was an invasion of privacy, really.” McKinely says Spacek told her she had seen McKinely at a march against Energy East held the previous year.
More recently, the Council of Canadians drafted a letter to the RCMP saying that this past January Spacek, “invited herself to a meeting organized by Red Head residents with the Saint John Fire Department and Police Department, a meeting dedicated to Emergency Measures (e.g. warning notices, evacuation) issues of concern to the residents.
"This meeting… was not an open, public meeting but was arranged through invitation to Red Head residents…During the meeting, Constable Spacek never introduced herself, or her role, at the meeting, and spent the meeting observing and making notes in a black hardcover note book. Constable Spacek approached some residents after the meeting and asked if she could contact them for a meeting.”
The RCMP officer also telephoned Saint John environmentalist and businesswoman Sharon Murphy several times at her home, wanting to meet with her.
“She wanted to discuss my participation in the energy projects,” recalls Murphy, “in that there were lots of things we could do which were legal, but that there were other things that weren’t and she would be happy to discuss these and meet with me. Like she wanted to be some sort of guide.” So far, Murphy has not met with Spacek.
When reached by National Observer, Const. Spacek — who is Indigenous herself — said that she's been in the Special Unit for two years and her job is: "liasioning with First Nations groups and with industry. Just sharing information. And when they organize events that everyone is safe and when they do it, they do it lawfully as well. So, really, my role is liasioning with them... It’s to build relations with industry and First Nations. On a positive note."
Spacek acknowledged there have been poor relations between First Nations and the RCMP. "I know there is a lack of trust and my role is to liase and rebuild those relations," she says, adding that she's been received positively by people she has spoken to. "I am enjoying what I am doing and have not been received negatively."
A well-funded apparatus of espionage
Still, this kind of outreach and surveillance by the RCMP of Indigenous and environmental activists is just one aspect of the work carried out by the federal government’s massive, sophisticated and well-funded apparatus that carries out espionage aimed at opponents of oilsands, pipelines, fracking and mining.
“It’s a vast network – a surveillance system of ministries and departments within the government that are all holding close hands with corporations,” says Shiri Pasternak, a Canadian studies professor at Trent University who has been studying this issue.
Documents released through Canada’s access to information laws – requested by media, academics and NGOs – reveal who the government is spying on, how they do it, whom they select as targets, and by which government agencies. The espionage network includes the RCMP, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), along with the National Energy Board (NEB), Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) and departments of Public Safety, Natural Resources, Transport, Indigenous Affairs and Defence. It also involves provincial police, such as the Sûreté du Québec and Ontario Provincial Police (OPP), as well as some municipal police forces.
Moreover, these agencies and departments share the information they gather with one another and, more importantly, with numerous energy sector companies, such as Enbridge Inc. and Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., to name two. In fact, evidence suggests the federal government has, in effect, become the security arm of the energy industry.
By far the bulk of this spying is aimed at First Nations’ activists and communities. Recently VICE News reported CSIS was monitoring the protests at Standing Rock reservation, where the Sioux having been trying to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline, worried about its Canadian implications.
“There is disproportionate targeting and criminalization of Indigenous peoples compared to the rest of the public,” says Clayton Thomas-Muller of the Mathais Colomb Cree Nation in Manitoba, who works as a tar sands campaigner with the climate change organization 350.org. Thomas-Muller has been the target of RCMP surveillance himself. This focus on First Nations, he notes, is because resource development projects “tend to be in places where Native people live.”
Clayton Thomas-Muller, a tar sands campaign and activist at 350.org, is a prominent voice in the media in the battle against the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure. He is seen here in a screenshot from the Green Heroes 'Home Lands vs. Tar Sands' video series.
More crucially, Indigenous people have proven effective at stopping or slowing down resource development projects, such as pipelines, especially in places such as BC, Quebec and on the east coast. And as pipelines such as the Energy East, Keystone XL and Kinder Morgan ramp up, Native opposition is expected to be the biggest obstacle the energy sector will face.
RCMP's Project SITKA
The scope of the espionage was revealed last year when researchers at the Ontario Public Interest Research Group (OPIRG) and Carleton University pried loose an RCMP document describing “Project SITKA”. Written in early 2015, the report says Project SITKA was designed by the RCMP to focus on providing “a snapshot of individual threats associated with Aboriginal public order events for the year 2014” as well as map out the potential networks among Native groups, identify protesters and events they attended.
In total, Project SITKA identified 313 people of interest, of whom 89 were considered to have met the criteria of “criminality associated to public order events.” This latter group had extensive profiles – including headshots, phone numbers, email addresses and details of their mobility within Canada – that were entered into a databank that could be accessed by “frontline officers”, divisional analysts and other police agencies.
“(Project SITKA) gave us a first real glimpse into how powerful the databanks were,” says Jeffrey Monaghan, a criminologist at Carleton University who has researched this espionage for years.
The report said the Mounties had asked various government departments to provide a list of activists, including their actions, in some cases going back years. “They were able to go back into the data banks, make up lists of who were at demonstrations, who were at events, who was talking on social media and they were able to backtrack for five years and make these lists,” says Monaghan.
Ottawa-based criminologist Jeffrey Monaghan has researched espionage targeting environmental and First Nations acvtivists for years. He is seen here at Carleton University. Photo by Alex Tétreault
Among the many organizations or movements Project SITKA identified as being of interest were Idle No More, the Mi’kmaq Warrior Society, American Indian Movement, the Indigenous Environmental Network, Defenders of the Land, along with the Council of Canadians, Ontario Coalition Against Poverty and media co-ops in Toronto, Vancouver and Halifax.
“It’s a remarkable little window into how much data they have accumulated on these movements and how they essentially conduct quasi-criminal investigations of people without ever notifying them, no one knows they are in there, no one can challenge the data,” says Monaghan. “So it gives a frightening idea of how much data is being stored."
In a response to questions about Project SITKA, the RCMP said in a statement to the National Observer: "Project SITKA was not a surveillance operation. Project SITKA used open-source information along with local knowledge to identify individuals for whom there was an objective means to demonstrate criminal and violent intentions. If information presented itself that one of these individuals would attend a particular protest, that information was shared with local police for awareness and to ensure the safety of all parties... As noted in the conclusion of the Project SITKA report, the information contained in it would help inform the RCMP in terms of developing a way forward that recognizes the differences in large-scale public order events that sometimes involve Indigenous people."
Harper ramps up espionage
Police and intelligence agencies like the RCMP, CSIS and Canada's signals intelligence agency, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), have a long history of spying on all manner of activists. But the current focus on Native and environmental protesters is rooted in changes to the Canadian economy.
By the mid-2000s, with the decline of its manufacturing base, Canada’s economy was shifting towards resource extraction – in particular developing Alberta’s oil sands. Soon the federal government was labeling such projects “critical infrastructure” – meaning highly important to the economy.
Moreover, Stephen Harper’s election in 2006 signaled the ratcheting up of spying against opponents of this sector. “In general what Harper wanted to do was use the state to minimize dissent and remove obstacles to resource development and resource extraction,” says Russell Diabo, an Ottawa-based analyst and consultant on Indigenous issues.
Stephen Harper, New Delhi, Donald Trump, former prime minister
Former prime minister Stephen Harper arrives at his Langevin office in Ottawa in October 2015. File photo by The Canadian Press
Indeed, by 2007, Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC) had been given a lead role on spying on First Nations’ communities to identify leaders, participants and supporters of protests. INAC shared the information they gathered with the RCMP, CSIS, Transport Canada and Natural Resources Canada, among others, holding weekly conference calls to discuss "in real time" First Nations protests, such as blockades and occupations. INAC created a “hotspot” reporting system with the purpose of “continuous information dissemination of existing and emerging risks,” according to a report they produced. The hotspots included Native bands across Canada, and were "related to lands and resources," according to an INAC report.
Meanwhile, numerous documents refer to the threat that Indigenous protesters posed to the energy sector’s interests. For example, the 2007 minutes of a meeting at CSIS headquarters with the RCMP, various intelligence services and energy company executives, reveal that one of the top items on the agenda was “Aboriginal Protests and Occupations.” In a 2014 RCMP report entitled “Criminal Threats to the Canadian Petroleum Industry” it notes that “Due to the environmental and land-use implications, the anti-petroleum movement… has been able to align itself with violent aboriginal extremists.”
Overall, such documents show the role of the government was clear: to shield the energy sector from such protests. As a 2011 RCMP report from its “Critical Infrastructure Intelligence Team” noted, it is “incumbent upon federal and provincial authorities to share responsibility for the protection of Canada’s energy sector with the private energy sector stakeholders.”
Meanwhile, the RCMP and CSIS and other government departments embraced the ideological mindset of energy companies on things like climate change, environmental activism and resource development. The RCMP often uses language in their reports to describe civil disobedience as “criminal” populated by “extremists” and refers to “violent extremists” – despite furnishing few real examples.
For instance, in the RCMP's 2014 “Criminal Threats to the Canadian Petroleum Industry” report, it says “governments and petroleum companies are being encouraged, and increasingly threatened, by violent extremists to cease all actions which the extremists believe, contributes to greenhouse gas emissions.” The document seems to suggest that climate change was a problem only of interest to groups like Greenpeace and Sierra Club of Canada – failing to mention it’s of concern to climate scientists, NASA, the United Nations and most governments around the world.
Yet, the same document references the position of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), noting that “all forms of energy production must increase to meet growing demand.”
In 2012, Tim O’Neill, a senior criminal intelligence research specialist with the RCMP’s Critical Infrastructure Intelligence Team (CIIT), wrote an email to colleagues, saying that “CIIT assesses that environmental extremists pose a significant criminal threat to Canada’s energy sector.” Among those groups he believed fit this category was Greenpeace. “Greenpeace activists engage in criminal activity targeting government offices, international conferences, and industrial complexes, to protest against the continued use of fossil fuels,” O’Neill wrote.
For the head of Greenpeace Canada’s climate and energy campaign, Keith Stewart, this sort of characterization reveals how divorced from reality the RCMP has become. “We have a 46-year unbroken history of nonviolence,” he says. “We’re very proud of that.” Stewart says the RCMP “associate nonviolent protests, that might be unlawful, with violence.”
RCMP creates the Aboriginal Joint Intelligence Group
The fact that First Nations were specifically being targeted is reflected in the RCMP creating the Aboriginal Joint Intelligence Group (JIG) in 2007, composed of members of the force’s National Security and Criminal Intelligence divisions.
The JIG billed itself as a “central repository” of information about First Nations protest activities – such as blockades, protests and demos – assisted by an “extensive network of contacts throughout Canada and internationally” and an undisclosed number of field operatives acting as its “eyes and ears”, according to a JIG slide presentation. It had the mandate “to collect and analyze information, and produce and disseminate intelligence concerning conflict and issues associated with Aboriginal communities.”
Elsipogtog First Nation, fracking, protest, oil and gas, New Brunswick
The Elsipogtog First Nation protests a fracking proposal on their native land in New Brunswic in March 2013. File photo by The Canadian Press
The JIG reported weekly to approximately 450 recipients in law enforcement, government, and the energy sector. These included CSIS, municipal police forces and the departments of Indigenous Affairs and Natural Resources. An annual Strategic Intelligence Report from June 2009 indicates the surveillance focused on 18 “communities of concern” in five provinces across the country, including Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug (KI), Ardoch, Grassy Narrows, Six Nations and Tyendinaga bands. The JIG boasted to other government personnel that the unit can “alleviate some of your workload as we can help identify trends and issues that may impact more than one community.”
Reports produced by JIG on Native communities were extremely detailed, indicating who the chief was, number of residents, and specific incidents over land issues. The JIG was particularly alarmed about potential disruptions at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, and the G8 and G20 summits in Ontario during that period.
The RCMP claims the JIG was dismantled in 2010, but further information shows its work has continued under different guises, such as the National Intelligence Coordination Centre.
How the intelligence is gathered
So, how exactly does this intelligence apparatus gather its information?
None of the documents reveal if various movements and groups are, or have been, infiltrated by undercover officers. Monaghan says they would never have received such information through access to information requests. However, “based on the historical record, there’s no reason to think that they aren’t doing these practices,” he remarks. “During the G20 in 2010, there was (police) infiltration going on, and that was documented… If you talk to groups, there is a lot of anecdotal and experiential comments about infiltration.”
Some of the information is simply culled from the mainstream media and activists’ own social media output and what they put on-line. “Social media, to a certain extent, has replaced the need to go covert," says Monaghan. "It allows the security apparatus to catalog and track the movement in real time, which other social movements have never been subjected to. Social media is mapping the activists.”
Linda Heron has seen this firsthand. In 2011, a company was proposing to build a hydroelectric project on the Vermillion River near Sudbury, Ontario, close to where she lives. Heron started the Ontario Rivers Alliance to oppose the project. On her website, she mentioned that her group had participation from “First Nations citizens”.
That summer, while attending a public hearing at a nearby town, she noticed two clean-cut men watching her. “No sooner had I got home and my phone rang and it was an Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) officer and they wanted to let me know they had been there that night and wanted to talk to me,” recalls Heron. The OPP was particularly keen to learn about the Native members in her group, she recalls, and told her: “We have these web crawlers that goes through the Internet and your press release came out and said that it had First Nations’ members.”
“It just made me angry,” says Heron. “It definitely put red flags that there was something fishy going on here.”
Information is often collected in a more direct fashion: RCMP and CSIS officers will approach people in person. Mark Calzavara, an organizer with the Council of Canadians – an organization targeted by the RCMP – says agents usually approach people in a friendly, non-threatening manner. “All of them are very charming and interesting people and want to draw you into conversations,” he explains. “There’s no whiff of intimidation. They say they are trying to help you, they will offer to get you permits for your next protest. It’s a way to form relationships.”
Not that this always goes smoothly. One day in the fall of 2013, Mohawk activist and lecturer Clifton Nicholas received a telephone call at his home at Kanesatake. This Mohawk community near Montreal was at the center of the 1990 Oka crisis. The person who rang him introduced himself as Francois Allard of CSIS, asking if Nicholas would have a coffee with him.
“For what end?” asked Nicholas (who taped most of the conversation).
“There are a couple of things I would like to talk to you [about],” said Allard.
When Nicholas said he wasn’t interested because he didn’t trust CSIS and “and I am not a rat,” Allard replied he wanted to discuss a trip Nicholas had taken to Greece. Earlier that year, the activist had spoken at a festival in Athens about mining, the tar sands and its impact on Indigenous communities. Nicholas also visited a village in northern Greece that was being affected by a mine built by a Canadian company.
When Nicholas still resisted, Allard suddenly got aggressive, his tone turning derisive. “Wait, wait, wait one more thing I want to talk to you [about], how do you reconcile your Native roots with your anarchist activities?”
“That is my business,” said Nicholas.
“How can you reconcile both?” said Allard. “I would like to have your information on that.” Allard then went on to suggest that Nicholas was exaggerating the role he played during the Oka standoff. “Why do you claim all the time you were behind the barricades in 1990 when the people involved back in 1990 say you weren’t involved at all, why do you keep making that claim?” said Allard, who fastened on this issue, saying “I am telling the truth, admit it.”
The conversation was soon over. Today, Nicholas said the CSIS agent’s aggression was puzzling. “I thought it was really a mind fuck,” he says. “Either it’s a ‘You don’t want to answer my questions? Well then fuck you.’ Or else it’s they were trying to figure out what are my soft points - what points do I feel sore about.”
Nicholas says this was not his first encounter with CSIS. In 2007, after giving a lecture at Concordia University in Montreal, an agent approached him and asked to have a coffee. But when he discovered she worked for CSIS, “I got so spooked I just left…They were kind of trying to recruit me.”
Barbara Low also had a curious run-in with a CSIS agent in the late spring of 2014. She is a Mi’kmaq who lives in picturesque town of Antigonish, Nova Scotia, and is a long-time Native and environmental activist. Low had participated in the anti-fracking blockade in New Brunswick the year before.
Low says she first noticed something was amiss when her garbage and recycling bags went missing. “I thought that’s weird because no one else’s garbage had been taken,” she says. Then in mid-June, she says a man knocked on her door, carrying a clipboard and flashed a CSIS badge. He said his name was Andrew McGinty.
Low says that what followed was a bizarre conversation. “I know there are two reasons why they are there,” she remarks. “They are there to intimidate or to turn. And I thought that they might be trying to turn me.”
Low says McGinty refused to say what exactly was the purpose of his visit, other than to explain that CSIS was concerned about “critical infrastructure and border security.”
“He was a bad spy, I am telling you,” says Low. “He asked that I not tell anyone he had been there. And impressed upon me that RCMP did not know he was there.”
Afterwards, Low made an access to information request to CSIS to find out why McGinty visited her – and was denied any information on the grounds that “it relates to the efforts of Canada towards detecting, preventing or suppressing subversive or hostile activities”, according to the letter she received back.
In response to questions from National Observer about conducting such surveillance, CSIS spokesperson Tahera Mufti noted: "CSIS does not investigate lawful protest or activism. It should be noted that the 2009/2010 SIRC review recognized that CSIS had long exercised special care when undertaking intelligence investigations that affect — or even appear to affect — fundamental societal institutions. SIRC found that CSIS’ fundamental institutions policy and its implementation were strong."
The RCMP, in a statement to the National Observer, said that "As part of its law enforcement mandate the RCMP does have the requirement to identify and investigate criminal threats, including those to critical infrastructure. The RCMP, through the National Critical infrastructure Team, assists in the identification of criminal threats to Canada's critical infrastructure and develops information products that may be used by first responders and the private sector to assess and mitigate risks associated to these threats."
Low, on the other hand, observes: "My assertion is that the Canadian government is working specifically for the oil and gas industry. It is completely intertwined. And that needs to be exposed."
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&PART 2 &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
This is the second installment of a two-part investigative series on government, spies and the oil industry
In the fall of 2013, Jason Augustine was in the thick of one of the most important standoffs First Nations activists have ever had with energy companies.
As a district war chief with the Mi'kmaq Warriors Society, and a member of the Elsipogtog First Nation near Rexton, a village on the east coast of New Brunswick, Augustine and his band were engaged in a protest against fracking. For weeks he and his fellow activists blocked the entrance to a compound where a fracking company had stored equipment, among other protests. Augustine notes that they did this because with fracking, "the gas (that is released) contaminates drinking water."
In October of that year, RCMP officers, with guns drawn and dispatching pepper spray, descended on the blockade, arresting 40 protesters, Augustine among them. Five RCMP vehicles were set on fire during this final confrontation. Augustine was later sentenced to 18 months of probation, and pled guilty to assaulting a police officer, two counts of obstructing a police officer, and one count of mischief. This standoff, however, galvanized attention to the issue of fracking and the province soon placed a moratorium on it.
November 1, 2013 photo of Jason Augustine outside Moncton Law Court from twitter by Jessica Doria-Brown, CBC
Yet Augustine's problems with the RCMP have continued: the 42-year-old is frequently followed by what Augustine believes are government vehicles. “And it’s just not me that’s been followed,” he remarks. “A lot of our Warriors Society members get followed. It’s just going to a different reserve and they still get followed. They are always monitoring us and trying to figure out what we are doing.”
“I see it as harassment,” he continues. “Why can’t we live our lives without being watched? We stood up for our water and our land, you know. We did that, and under our treaties we have the right to do that.”
As discussed in Part One of our two-part series, the federal government has created a massive and sophisticated spying apparatus – overseen primarily by the RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) – designed to track the actions of First Nations and environmental activists opposed to so-called "critical infrastructure" projects, namely the tar sands, pipelines, fracking and mining. But critics of this network say it does more than just spy on people – it tries to intimidate too. More importantly, the fruits of all of this espionage are often shared with the energy sector.
As an example of intimidation, in May of 2012, the Yinka Dene Alliance in BC decided to take a “Freedom Train” across Canada to Toronto, bringing attention to Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway pipeline, which was slated to connect the oilsands to the BC coast (last year, the Trudeau government canceled the pipeline after former PM Harper had approved it). The Alliance planned to arrive in Toronto in time for Enbridge’s annual shareholders’ meeting. Among the 37 band members who left BC on the train was John Ridsdale, the Hereditary Chief of the Na'Moks, Tsayu Clan, Wet'suwet'en, who lives in Smithers, BC.
On the train with them, recalls Ridsdale, were undercover officers, presumably RCMP or CSIS, or both. “When you have people going up and down an aisle of a train – you know you are being watched,” he says. “They were easy to pick out. They were not really trying to be undercover – they wanted us to know we were being watched.” The trip went off without incident, culminating in a rally and march in downtown Toronto.
Ridsdale says that First Nations people protesting resource development “take it for granted we are all monitored… (but) we are nonviolent and we are here to protect the land and water and freedom. We are not against development – we are against the manner (in which) they do it.”
In response to questions furnished by the National Observer, the RCMP said as part of its mandate "the RCMP does have the requirement to identify and investigate criminal threats, including those to critical infrastructure." They also noted "the RCMP has instituted a measured approach to large-scale public order events."
Wet'suwet'en First Nation Hereditary Chief Na'Moks (John Ridsdale) signs the Treaty Alliance Against Tar Sands Expansion in Vancouver, B.C. on Thurs. Sept. 22, 2016. Photo by Elizabeth McSheffrey
Idle No More panics the intelligence bureaucracy
Yet the culmination of this type of espionage and intimidation occurred after the birth of Idle No More. Founded in late 2012 by four Saskatchewan women in response to Harper’s omnibus bills that gutted laws designed to protect the environment over resource development projects, Idle No More led to teach-ins, blockades, protests and rallies as well as a National Day of Action. It even sparked solidarity protests in other countries.
Yet Idle No More caused panic within the federal government’s intelligence and surveillance bureaucracy, which swung into action. “Idle No More was, as far as I know, the most completely surveilled social movement in Canadian history,” says Carleton University criminologist Jeffrey Monaghan, who has studied this issue. “Every single event had intelligence gathering about it. Whether it’s open source or more covert methods. We’re talking about very remote events in like Prince Albert, Saskatchewan to the more contentious ones, like Sarnia. Every single event was being scrutinized, was being monitored and was being cataloged."
Idle No More protesters march against then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper's policies on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on December 22, 2012. Photo by Isabeau Doucet.
“On top of that, you had formations of national security working groups at the highest level of the bureaucracy having regular updates and streaming information directly to the prime minister and national security adviser and cabinet in real time.”
Indeed, a heavily-redacted 11-page report obtained by the National Post in 2014 shows that CSIS was involved in preparing an all-of-government approach to dealing with the First Nations protests. The report, and a PowerPoint presentation, revealed that Ottawa was planning for every eventuality, concerned by the decentralized, leaderless nature of Idle No More. Moreover, says Clayton Thomas-Muller, a former Idle No More organizer: "There were multiple reports of CSIS and RCMP agents contacting individuals at their homes and in public over participation in Idle No More. Any time an officer of the settler colonial state... approaches an Indigenous person, it is considered threatening, given the statistics around the criminalization of Indigenous peoples and our over-representation in Canada's jails."
Intelligence shared with energy sector
What happens to all of the information and data gathered about activists?
For one thing, some of it is shared with the energy sector. Starting in 2005, Natural Resources Canada, in collaboration with CSIS and the RCMP, began hosting twice-yearly classified briefings with executives from energy companies at CSIS’s headquarters in Ottawa - which continue to this day. “You have the RCMP and CSIS giving these briefings to the private sector – but the private sector wanting those briefings to be driven by the demands of those receiving the information,” says University of New Brunswick sociologist Tia Dafnos, who has researched this topic.
File photo of CSIS sign by the Canadian Press
In 2012, Tim O’Neill, a senior criminal intelligence research specialist with the RCMP’s Critical Infrastructure Intelligence Team, wrote an email in which he said the purpose of these meetings “is to provide intelligence briefings to select energy representatives so they are able to implement the required security precautions to protect their assets. The briefings also provide a forum for the private sector to brief the Canadian intelligence and law enforcement community on issues we would not normally be privy to.” This email noted that the energy sector executives possess at least a “Level II (Secret) Security Clearance.” Indeed, Keith Stewart, head of Greenpeace Canada’s climate campaign, estimates “there are over 200 executives in the natural resources sector who have security clearance from CSIS and RCMP around these things like critical infrastructure.”
Agendas for these briefings, that have emerged through access to information requests, show that items of discussion include issues such as “security challenges presented by Radicalized Individual Groups to Canada’s Energy Sector” and “Extremist Activities within Aboriginal Communities”, and topics such as "Improvised Explosive Devices”, or on specific projects, such as the oilsands and Northern Gateway pipeline.
These briefings are well-attended, too. On the government side, they include people from the RCMP and all of Canada’s intelligence services, as well from the departments of Natural Resources, Defence, Public Safety, Transport, Industry Canada, National Energy Board (NEB), Atomic Energy Canada Ltd., the governments of New Brunswick, Quebec and Alberta, and the federal Office of the Auditor General, among others.
On the corporate side, however, it's unclear who attends. All federal documents have been censored prior to release under access to information legislation to remove the names of companies that send executives to the meetings.
Nonetheless, in 2013, minutes to one meeting reveal that networking and coffee receptions at the briefing was sponsored by the pipeline company, Enbridge Inc., along with the (US) $250-billion Toronto-based global conglomerate, Brookfield Asset Management Inc. (Enbridge did not respond to requests for a response while Brookfield says it has been a number of years since they have participated in the briefings, and did so only because they were concerned about cyber-security and loss prevention).
Meanwhile, Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., which operates the Horizon oilsands project in Fort McMurray, Alberta, was an invitee to the briefings, according to one RCMP email (the company refused to discuss its participation in these briefings when approached by National Observer). “This is how the energy companies have become part of the national security bureaucracy themselves,” observes Monaghan. “They are embedded within the bureaucracy because now, for the most part, 'critical infrastructure' is privately owned… It’s a two-way street: the police and CSIS have deputized the companies and their security actors to provide intelligence as well. This emerges from the energy companies putting pressure on the governments saying ‘You are not doing enough to stop these activists from disrupting whatever’.”
Jeffrey Monaghan, Carleton University, Ottawa, spies, Canada, oil patch
Ottawa-based criminologist Jeffrey Monaghan has researched espionage targeting environmental and First Nations activists for years. He is seen here at Carleton University. Photo by Alex Tétreault
Astonishingly, it seems that some of the information collected has been passed on to the companies before it’s even seen by all divisions of the RCMP. In a 2010 email from O’Neill, he mentions that another RCMP officer “was very concerned that the private sector was receiving intell prior to the Detachments, which of course should not be the case as the Divisional CICI (Critical Infrastructure Criminal Intelligence) analysts should be disseminating our products within their Divisions.”
CSIS spokesperson Tahera Mufti does not deny the agency shares intelligence with other parties, saying in a statement to the National Observer: "The role of CSIS is to investigate activities suspected of constituting threats to the security of Canada, and to report on these to the Government of Canada. CSIS collects and analyzes threat-related information, which is typically disseminated to government partners through intelligence reports and other intelligence-related briefings."
In a response to question by National Observer on these briefings, the RCMP said that they, "through the National Critical infrastructure Team, assists in the identification of criminal threats to Canada's critical infrastructure and develops information products that may be used by first responders and the private sector to assess and mitigate risks associated to these threats."
National Energy Board (NEB) collects intelligence on activists
The intelligence gathered is also shared with the federal energy regulator, the National Energy Board (NEB), which is supposed to be a neutral tribunal over the approval and oversight of pipelines and other projects.
Yet documents released by the NEB show that its security staff have been alarmed about protesters showing up at hearings – and gathers intelligence on who they might be. To this end, CSIS and the RCMP provides the NEB with information. In 2013, the NEB’s head of security, wrote in an email that the Board’s security team had consulted with CSIS “at national and regional levels,” noting that they would continue monitoring all sources of information with police and intelligence partners.
Emails that have come to light through access to information requests show that the NEB security staff have been in constant contact with the RCMP's Critical Infrastructure Intelligence Team (CIIT) about potential protests at hearings, too.
In 2013, for instance, a member of the CIIT wrote to NEB staff and at least one CSIS official, Tom Lanzer, regarding the risk of interference with the Board’s hearings by groups opposed to oil sands and pipeline development. Despite acknowledging that CIIT had no intelligence indicating a criminal threat to the NEB or its members, the email advises that CIIT “will continue to monitor all aspects of the anti-petroleum industry movement” and said this information was also being shared with CSIS.
In response to a query from the National Observer, the NEB did not deny it monitors people who appear before the hearings. Sarah Kiley, a communications officer with the Board, said "we are required to continuously assess any potential security risks and take the appropriate steps to make sure that our staff, our Board Members and those attending our hearings, are safe and can freely participate in our hearings. Advice, guidance and other services provided by lead security agencies support federal agencies, such as the National Energy Board, in maintaining acceptable levels of security."
Is spying on peaceful protesters legal?
But is all of this espionage and sharing of data actually legal?
Paul Champ doesn’t think so. The Ottawa-based human rights lawyer is involved in two on-going complaints launched by British Columbia's civil liberties association against the RCMP and CSIS over their role in spying on peaceful protesters. Launched in 2014, Champ says the complaints have become "bogged down... These processes are ridiculously slow and unresponsive and obviously lack transparency" and he says there is no end in sight.
Champ argues that the Mounties and CSIS have no legal grounds to spy on people who are opposed to projects that don’t even exist – which is true for most of the pipelines being discussed.
“It’s one thing if it's a pipeline that’s already been built and people are protesting that, than maybe, theoretically, there’s a threat to that critical infrastructure,” says Champ, “but here these environmental and Indigenous groups are opposed to the policy of a pipeline. And a policy, in my mind, cannot be viewed as an aspect of national security. Therefore the jurisdiction of national security by CSIS cannot be engaged.”
Lawyer Paul Champ responding to questions in the House of Commons on March 12, 2015, on Bill C-51. Screencap from Vimeo
Champ notes that in order to justify this surveillance, “there is a legal threshold that must be crossed before an individual or group can be actively investigated... We think they need some kind of grounds to suspect, in the case of the RCMP, that someone has committed a criminal offense, is about to commit a criminal offense or, in the case of CSIS, that a group is, or might be, a threat to national security as defined by the act. We have a set of legal thresholds and until they are met CSIS and RCMP should not be getting themselves involved in gathering information about groups that are otherwise lawfully exercising their democratic rights.”
Champ also notes that “there’s no authority to be a sharing their intelligence reports with third parties such as corporations. Or the NEB, for that matter. Sharing information in that way is outside their jurisdiction and the CSIS Act and is a breach of (people’s) Charter rights.”
Has this espionage under the Trudeau government continued? In fact, evidence suggests nothing has changed. After all, Trudeau has approved or supports the Kinder Morgan, Keystone XL and Energy East pipelines, and greenlit a $11.4-billion liquefied natural-gas (LNG) mega-project in British Columbia. And the twice-yearly briefings held at CSIS's headquarters with the energy sector continue.
“The bottom line is that Canada’s entire economic paradigm is fundamentally based on the oppression of Indigenous people’s collective rights, the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands to provide open-door access to extractive companies to get resources to international markets to sell to the highest bidder,” says tar sands campaigner and Manitoba Cree, Clayton Thomas-Muller, who has been the target of RCMP surveillance himself. “When we look at all of the pipelines and all of the oilsands and all of the mining and all of the mega-hydro dams and the places where Canada’s most toxic and destructive industries are placed, it's in the backyards of First Nations peoples. So it’s a very big issue.”
Indeed, shortly after the Kinder Morgan and Enbridge Line 3 pipelines were approved by the Trudeau government late last year, Natural Resources Minister Jim Carr gave a speech to a group of business leaders in Edmonton, where he assured them: “If people choose for their own reasons not to be peaceful, then the government of Canada, through its defence forces, through its police forces, will ensure that (your) people will be kept safe.”
A few days later, Carr said he regretted his remarks and apologized.