Clause and Effect

In 2017, during the early days of Donald Trump’s first term, the world was riveted both by his reality TV presidency and by the salacious rumours about the way he had obtained it. Insistent tales circulated about how Vladimir Putin’s troll army had engineered the Republican candidate’s victory by hacking into the Democratic Party’s servers and then releasing thousands of embarrassing emails on the eve of Hillary Clinton’s nomination. What followed was a stormy season of investigations and counter-accusations about Trump’s Russian proclivities.

“Foreign interference,” particularly social media disinformation campaigns, rapidly became a DEFCON 1 political concern, and many Western governments, including Canada’s, responded. Justin Trudeau’s Liberals passed the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians Act, which allowed a group of MPs and senators to vet the government’s spook operations, with a couple of caveats.

One was a proviso...