It’s still not clear to me what people think a public inquiry would achieve. Necessarily, much compelling evidence would be classified and unreleasable.
Just spitballing, but what we could expect of a public inquiry:
- Testimony from advocates and dissidents from diaspora communities about pressure tactics by home countries on Canadian soil.
- Testimony from academic researchers about same.
- Heavily redacted unclassified summaries of classified intelligence.
What we wouldn’t get:
- Any classified intelligence. CSIS wiretaps, CSIS HUMINT reporting, SIGINT. Or foreign material of this nature shared within Five Eyes.
- Ongoing or concluded sensitive police investigations.
I suspect that the latter category of information is likely to be by far the most informative, and absolutely the government should have a classified inquiry into all that. NSIRA and NSICOP may already have embarked on that but I haven’t paid close attention. This would inform law enforcement and intelligence collection efforts and priorities (and maybe CSIS’s use of its relatively new power to take actions to disrupt?). But I don’t expect the rest of us to get to peel behind that curtain. Going public with much of that could potentially burn sources and methods, and tip the government’s hand to both what it does but also what it doesn’t know.
This is a major problem, and I’m with all of you in wanting to see it worked- hard. I just don’t think much of that can gainfully be done publicly.