The Military Spied on Canadians During the Pandemic. Six Years Later, Carney Still Hasn’t Closed the Legal Vacuum.

On April 7, CBC News published the contents of an internal Canadian Forces Intelligence Command compliance assessment report — a document the Defence Department had withheld for more than four years after the original access-to-information request was filed. The report confirms what the Ottawa Citizen first began reporting in 2020 and what successive military reviews have since acknowledged: Canadian Armed Forces units gathered intelligence on Canadian citizens during the pandemic, broke their own rules while doing it, and operated for months in what national security expert Wesley Wark calls a “legal vacuum.”¹

“Everything you could imagine in a military operation went wrong in this case,” Wark told CBC. “It was a nonsensical operation from beginning to end.”

The compliance report identified three military units that were non-compliant with directives between March and July 2020, during the early months of Operation Laser — the Canadian Armed Forces’ domestic pandemic response. Each unit failed in distinct ways, but the pattern was identical: military personnel collected information on Canadians without the training, oversight, or legal framework required to do it lawfully.²

One team, operating under Canadian Joint Operations Command, wrote more than 50 reports on “political discourse around COVID-19, misinformation and non-government statements about the pandemic online.” The team was ordered to create dedicated social media accounts to monitor what it called “key regional actors.” It “deliberately disregarded” that order and used personal accounts instead. The same unit captured Twitter screenshots of statements from Canadian political leaders and failed to log the information it inadvertently collected on those leaders.

A separate unit monitored the Black Lives Matter movement during the pandemic — gathering information on protest organizers and movements that had nothing to do with the military’s stated mission of supporting long-term care homes. The internal report said the scope of the unit’s analysis “exceeded that which was necessary” and that “a clear nexus between the products and the requirements of the mission was difficult to discern.”³

All three units failed to use tools that would conceal their identities. None conducted the risk assessments their own rules required. Some military members did not have enough laptops, so they used personal computers and home networks. They scoured Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, and Instagram “to measure public opinion about the military’s work in Canada.” The report found that some of these personnel gathered intelligence “without even knowing it constituted intelligence.”

The pandemic intelligence-gathering was part of a broader set of activities that successive military investigations have already documented. In December 2020, retired Major-General Daniel Gosselin completed an investigation into a parallel propaganda effort developed by Canadian Joint Operations Command in April 2020. His report — obtained by the Ottawa Citizen through access-to-information law — concluded that the federal government “never asked for the so-called information operations campaign, nor did cabinet authorize the initiative.” Military commanders believed they did not need approval from higher authorities to develop and proceed with the plan.⁴

Vice Admiral Brian Santarpia, then chief of staff of CJOC, was quoted in the Gosselin report describing the moment as “a learning opportunity for all of us and a chance to start integrating information operations into our routine.” The propaganda plan, drawing on techniques developed for use against adversaries during the Afghan war, was directed at Canadian citizens. Then-Chief of the Defence Staff Gen. Jonathan Vance verbally shut it down in April 2020, but elements of it carried on for another six months until Vance issued a written edict.

Bermix Studio / Unsplash — Military members used their own personal social media accounts, personal computers, and home networks to collect information on Canadians. None used identity-concealing tools. None conducted required risk assessments. The unit gathering information on Black Lives Matter protesters operated for months.

On June 9, 2021, acting Chief of the Defence Staff Gen. Wayne Eyre and Deputy Minister Jody Thomas signed an internal directive that conceded the operation had gone too far. The directive stated that the military had conducted information operations on a domestic mission “without explicit CDS/DM direction or authority to do so, as well as the unsanctioned production of reports that appeared to be aimed at monitoring the activities of Canadians.”⁵

The Canadian Armed Forces is permitted to conduct psychological operations while deployed abroad. It is prohibited from doing so domestically without specific permission from federal cabinet. That permission was never granted. The military acted anyway. The legal framework that should have prevented it does not exist — there is no specific Act of Parliament governing what defence intelligence is allowed to collect about Canadian citizens.⁶

This is not a new finding. In 2019, the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians released its first annual report and recommended the federal government draft legislation to govern military intelligence missions, including what the military is authorized to collect about Canadians. The committee noted that National Defence “conducts a broader range of intelligence activities than any other Canadian intelligence organization” — and operates with less legal constraint than CSIS or the RCMP. The Department of National Defence resisted the recommendation. No legislation followed.⁷

Seven years later, the recommendation remains on the table. The Trudeau government did not act on it. The Carney government has not acted on it either. “This operation took place in a kind of legal vacuum,” Wark told CBC this week. “And whatever lessons have been learned, the legal vacuum still fundamentally exists.”

No one has been disciplined publicly. No one has resigned. The compliance report was completed years ago and held back for more than four years before the Defence Department released a single copy in response to a single CBC access-to-information request. The full set of internal investigations into the related propaganda activities has never been comprehensively released. Whether any Canadians had their privacy meaningfully breached — and how many — the Defence Department has not said.⁸

Retired Col. Brett Boudreau, a former senior military public affairs officer now with the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, told CBC he believes the intelligence-gathering non-compliance happened unwittingly because of outdated policies and the chaos of remote work in the early pandemic. But the larger pattern of activity — the propaganda planning, the BLM monitoring, the surveillance of political tweets — “showed willful negligence,” he said. “Defence can’t afford a negative balance in their public trust account. An institution like Defence that wants big budgets and big expensive equipment, and large numbers of recruits, needs to be significantly more open and transparent about its intent, activities and operations, or it risks its reputation and credibility.”⁹

Canadian Blood Services was created in 1998 because a previous public health disaster — the tainted blood scandal — was traced to the absence of a clear legal framework. The Krever Commission’s response was a new institution and new rules. The military intelligence problem is structurally similar: a federal agency conducting sensitive activities in the absence of specific legislation, with predictable consequences. Parliament has had the recommendation since 2019. Two governments have ignored it. The military has now been documented spying on Canadians, monitoring civil rights protesters, and surveilling political leaders’ social media. And the legal vacuum that made all of it possible is still there.¹⁰

Three Canadian military units gathered intelligence on Canadians during the pandemic. They monitored Black Lives Matter protesters. They captured tweets from political leaders. They used personal social media accounts and home computers. They wrote more than 50 reports on Canadian political discourse. None of them concealed their identities. None of them conducted the required risk assessments. Some of them did not realize what they were doing was intelligence work. The Chief of the Defence Staff shut down the related propaganda operation in 2020 and the Deputy Minister conceded in 2021 that the military had “eroded public confidence.” In 2019, a parliamentary committee told the government to legislate. No government has. The Trudeau Liberals didn’t. The Carney Liberals haven’t. Six years after Operation Laser began, the Defence Department is still releasing reports four years late, and the law that would prevent the next operation from happening still does not exist. The military spied on Canadians. Nobody resigned. Nobody was disciplined publicly. And the legal vacuum is still wide open.