Activist warns of ‘propaganda’ as CSIS officials tout agency’s new approach to Indigenous people
Intelligence agency says it's working to repair broken trust left by 'Native extremism' era
The Canadian Security Intelligence Service acknowledges its past investigating of Indigenous people has left a legacy of mistrust that persists today, but officials at the spy agency say the organization is mending its ways.
That’s the main message two CSIS officials, speaking on the condition they not be identified, impressed on CBC Indigenous during a recent sit-down discussion at the agency’s Ottawa headquarters.
Long gone are the days, they said, of CSIS’s expansive “Native extremism” program, in which CSIS officers labelled Indigenous activists as domestic extremists and potential terrorists in sweeping countrywide investigations.
“What you saw in the 1990s is not the situation today,” said the first CSIS person, who described recent reporting by CBC Indigenous as “a portal to the past” and “a learning experience for us.”
Newly declassified documents have shown this shadowy Indigenous surveillance program became more intrusive over more than a decade between 1988 and 1999, and included previously unconfirmed involvement during the contentious Ipperwash and Gustafsen Lake standoffs in 1995, respectively.
The agency maintained a “network of directed sources, protected contacts and police liaison” in place as late as 1998-99, according to one document. Academic analysts described the program as overreaching and biased.
The CSIS officials touted a new approach, where the agency aims to repair that broken trust and partner with organizations like the Assembly of First Nations and Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami. The agency embarked on this program in 2022 with outreach to Inuit leaders, amid concerns about foreign interference and espionage in the North.
In the past, CSIS would have taken “an intelligence-collection approach” in that scenario, they said. That is, CSIS would have simply snooped on Inuit affairs. Now CSIS shares information instead.
Even so, the reception has been “quite mild," the second official said. There’s been even less progress building bridges with First Nations, the person added.
“Mistrust, you hear it more,” they said.
Katsi'tsakwas Ellen Gabriel can explain why. The Kanien'kehá:ka (Mohawk) activist questions whether it’s possible for Canada’s security intelligence service to change its ways.
When presented in an interview with CSIS’s latest comments, she said bluntly, “I don't believe them.”
“It's just another form of propaganda. This is their specialty,” she said by phone last week.
“The national interest has always been the excuse for the violence and brutality conducted by the state. So we have no reason to trust CSIS or the government of Canada.”
Gabriel was the Kanien'kehá:ka spokesperson during the Canadian military’s 1990 siege of Kanehsatà:ke and Kahnawà:ke, commonly called the Oka Crisis in Quebec. In the aftermath, she was repeatedly surveilled and says CSIS passed a dossier on her to the Japanese consulate in Montreal, in a bid to stop her from travelling to that country.
“It's their job to protect the national security of Canada and as the trend is going nowadays, anyone who stands in the way of resource development, particularly for rare earth minerals, will be considered a domestic terrorist or whatever,” she said.
She also questioned CSIS’s motivation for contacting the Assembly of First Nations, a national advocacy organization that represents chiefs across the country. Grassroots people have often accused the organization of being out of touch.
“To go through the national Aboriginal organization means nothing because they're not the ones on the front line." she said.
"It's the grassroots activists who are on the front line.”
The first CSIS official said the main message to such organizations is one of partnership —that national security is no longer “just the purview of guys in grey suits” in Ottawa. The person said CSIS has a standing invite for AFN to meet, but that the national chief hasn’t taken them up.
A spokesperson for National Chief Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak didn’t respond to emailed questions about whether she intends to take such a meeting.
Asked what prompted this shift, the CSIS official listed several events over the last decade: prime minister Justin Trudeau’s reconciliation agenda, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015, and the impact of the late Murray Sinclair.
Then came the reckoning with racism that followed the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, by a Minnesota police officer in 2020. After that, the locating of potential unmarked graves at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia in 2021 shocked the country’s conscience, the person said.
The Trudeau Liberals then passed legislation implementing the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and the CSIS officials were keen to cite commitments CSIS made under the law. They said this makes theirs the only intelligence agency in the world to have adopted such progressive policies.
But Gabriel was equally keen to point out what’s missing. There is no apology, no voluntary transparency (CBC News had to file a court application before getting access to the requested internal documents), and no guarantee CSIS won’t backslide into old habits should the political situation shift.
“Everything that CSIS has done and said is unforgivable,” she said.
“There's no apology from CSIS for invading our privacy, for labelling us as criminals or terrorists.”