Rob Stewart, former deputy minister of Public Safety, appears as a witness at the Foreign Interference Commission in Ottawa, on Tuesday, Oct. 8, 2024.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
The public inquiry into foreign interference heard testimony Tuesday that it took “some time” for then Public Safety minister Bill Blair and his staff to get “comfortable” with authorizing an eavesdropping and entry warrant in 2021 directed at Liberal powerbroker Michael Chan.
The inquiry has already heard that it took 54 days for Mr. Blair to sign the Canadian Security Intelligence Service warrant in the months leading up to the 2021 federal election campaign, a delay that the minister has reportedly blamed on his former chief of staff Zita Astravas.
Ms. Astravas, a former top official in the Prime Minister’s Office, has been called to testify before the inquiry Wednesday to explain the 54-day delay.
In a pre-hearing interview tabled at the inquiry, Rob Stewart, the deputy minister at the time, was asked why it took nearly eight weeks for Mr. Blair to sign the warrant against Mr. Chan, a former Ontario cabinet minister and key Liberal fundraiser and organizer in the Chinese-Canadian community. He is currently deputy mayor of Markham.
“Mr. Stewart testified that there were questions and it would have taken CSIS some time to get the minister and his staff comfortable with this particular warrant. Mr. Stewart surmised that questions would probably have been asked about certain processes related to the execution of the warrant,” according to pre-hearing interview transcripts.
Under questioning at the inquiry Tuesday, Mr. Stewart said he could not discuss what could have made Mr. Blair’s office uncomfortable with aspects of the warrant. He did not know whether Ms. Astravas informed the Prime Minister’s Office of the warrant.
Mr. Blair’s office declined to comment Tuesday. His press secretary Simon Lafortune said Mr. Blair will abstain from comment until he testifies Friday at the inquiry, headed by Justice Marie-Josée Hogue. As recently as last week he was blaming Ms. Astravas for the delay. “I was not advised by my Chief of Staff of a pending warrant application until it was presented for my signature,” Mr. Blair said in a statement provided by his office to Global News and the National Post.
Gib van Ert, the lawyer for Conservative MP Michael Chong, asked Mr. Stewart whether it would have taken Mr. Blair and his staff time to “be comfortable with this particular warrant due to the Vanweenan list” that would have presumably accompanied the application.
Mr. van Ert was referring to a list of all individuals CSIS believed could also be intercepted talking to the target during the surveillance period – one that presumably could have included Liberals, including elected politicians.
“That’s an interesting term of art: the Vanweenan list,” Mr. Stewart replied. “I would say, sir, that is generally a concern of the minister’s office,” he said.
The former public safety official then said he’s not in a position to discuss the substance of the warrant.
Thirteen days after the warrant arrived in Mr. Blair’s office, CSIS provided a briefing to his staff about the warrant. Mr. Stewart was not part of that meeting. He later learned of a briefing note sent to the CSIS director. In pre-hearing testimony released Thursday, Mr. Stewart said: “Had he known about this information at the time, it would have raised concerns.”
Mr. Blair has previously denied that his office delayed approving the warrant. He told the inquiry in April that he signed the Chan warrant some three hours after it landed on his desk.
The public inquiry was looking into a report last year by The Globe and Mail that Mr. Blair took several months to sign off on the surveillance of Mr. Chan. The lag led to operational frustration from CSIS officers because it left little time to get the final approval of a federal judge to plant bugs in Mr. Chan’s cars, home, office, computers and mobile phones before the 2021 federal election campaign got under way.
Mr. Stewart and then-assistant deputy minister Dominic Rochon, who handled national-security matters, said CSIS director David Vigneault had requested a quick turnaround for the warrant. It normally takes four to 10 days to sign a warrant, the inquiry heard.
Mr. Stewart said Mr. Blair “would not have known there was a warrant for his signature unless his chief of staff told him so.” He added that he would have also flagged every warrant to the minister’s office to be dealt with but not the minister himself.
As well, Mr. Stewart said the department’s liaison officer maintained a list of outstanding items and he would periodically flag the chief of staff about what needed actioning, including CSIS warrants.
Approximately five weeks after the warrant was sent to Mr. Blair’s office, Mr. Vigneault testified on Sept. 27 that he raised the issue directly with the minister. A week later Mr. Blair signed the warrant at CSIS’s Toronto office.
Mr. Stewart also contradicted testimony from Ms. Astravas that he stopped sending binders of classified intelligence to Mr. Blair’s office during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“That is not consistent with my recollection,” he said.
He testified that the public safety minister’s office received packages of intelligence usually twice a week. If Mr. Blair was in Toronto there was an arrangement that would enable intelligence briefs to be delivered to his home or he could go the CSIS office in Toronto to read them.
Inquiry counsel was asking about those binders because the minister said he did not read a CSIS document that outlined how China was targeting Conservative MPs Michael Chong and Kenny Chiu in May, 2021.
Mr. Rochon said the understanding was Mr. Blair’s chief of staff would have access to the intelligence packages and pass the material on to the minister.
“My expectation would have been that it would have made its way to the minister’s office and the chief of staff, when she would have been in the office, would have retrieved it from the safe and then passed it on to the minister as appropriate.”
Mr. Stewart, who received the same intelligence packages as the minister, said he had “no particular memory” about the targeting of the two Conservative MPs but said the intelligence on this would have been in the binders that would also have been provided to him.
