The CSIS Leaks That Rocked Parliament Didn’t Tell the Whole Story

“Leak” once had a singular meaning: danger, even death, as a ship floundered, water rushing in. By the mid-nineteenth century, the word caught up with politics, signalling a different kind of peril: the seepage of government secrets through strategic disclosures by officials or whistleblowers.

• Breaches of confidentiality are often the source of media-reported government scandals
• Leaks may not always be true or credible, and the rush to publish stories can overwhelm verification efforts
• Journalistic best practice is to remain skeptical, consider witness credibility, and demand proof

One of the earliest major leaks in Canada turned into the Pacific Scandal. In 1873, newspapers published telegrams showing that Prime Minister John A. Macdonald and his allies accepted campaign funds from railway financier Hugh Allan in exchange for the Canadian Pacific Railway contract. It triggered a parliamentary inquiry and brought down Macdonald’s government.

Start looking, and you’ll find breaches of confidentiality behind nearly every major political embarrassment. The Airbus bribery scandal tied to former prime minister Brian Mulroney (those cash-stuffed envelopes!). The Sponsorship scandal that devastated the federal Liberals’ reputation in Quebec and contributed directly to the collapse of Paul Martin’s government in 2005. Mike Duffy’s senate expenses scandal that embarrassed Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives. All involved leaks. In 2019, leaks to the Globe and Mail alleged officials in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s office pressured attorney general and justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould to intervene in the prosecution of SNC-Lavalin. This set off a national crisis, an ethics investigation, and cabinet resignations—including her own.

Leaks are not just confined to politics. They can involve matters of national security too. Take reporting on the F-35 fighter jet contract. The issue is highly sensitive, because it bears on the future of Canada–United States relations but also reflects on the prime minister’s promise to diversify our defence expenditures. Inevitably, the purchase decision is surrounded by high walls of secrecy.

Leaks were bound to seep out of such a pressure cooker. They reflect signs of major internal disagreements within the Canadian government, which pits proponents of the F-35 against those who would opt for the alternative Swedish jet. In 2025, anonymous sources fed Reuters a narrative that defence officials supported buying the full fleet of F-35 fighter jets, while subsequent leaks to Radio-Canada included a selectively framed comparison chart favouring the F-35 over the Saab Gripen-E. The leaks appeared to some (including me) to originate largely from pro-F-35 actors seeking to covertly influence government decision making. Whatever the public interest rationale, promoting a particular leak narrative should not be the role of the media.

As a national security expert, I know something about leaks and how they circulate. I have been the recipient of some, including some that fed a false and damaging story, and some that I judged were true, highly secret, harmful to Canadian security interests if revealed, and should not be published.

That said, I appreciate how valuable leaks can be to journalists. “My job is to find secrets,” says American reporter Seymour Hersh in a recent documentary. Hersh won a Pulitzer Prize in 1970, at the age of thirty-three, for his remarkable pursuit of a story that the US army tried to keep secret—the devastating tale of the My Lai massacre perpetrated by US soldiers against Vietnamese villagers. Hersh was proud that he “broke that game up” with the help of some willing to tell him what they knew.

But journalism based on leaks, especially relying on sources who are granted anonymity, also raises important questions about truth itself, and how we know whether we are in its presence. In times of democratic distrust and information warfare, we have to ask: How should we expect the media to interrogate leaks and their truth quotient, their value? How do we know whether they have done so and made the right call when going public?

To see what’s at stake, it helps to return to a case that still sits heavily in the public memory. This leak involved a rare commodity: highly classified intelligence, much of it drawn from reporting by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), about what it had been telling the government about Chinese interference in Canadian federal elections.

The true scale of that breach has never been fully reckoned with, especially given that much of the information ended up misconstrued, overstated, or misunderstood, causing real harm along the way. It warrants a closer look.

Between the Fall of 2022 and the Spring of 2023, two major news organizations, the Globe and Mail and Global News, published leaked intelligence from sources in the Canadian intelligence community. The Globe and Mail had a print empire. Global News combined online reporting and TV. What developed was a contest between the two rivals for scoops that ran for months.

Global News had the early lead. Sam Cooper’s reporting, which had been highly critical of the Trudeau government, ultimately zeroed in on allegations against named individuals who he alleged acted as key proxies in Chinese foreign interference. The most notorious of Cooper’s attacks was levelled against a sitting Liberal member of Parliament, Han Dong. On February 25, 2023, Cooper described Dong, based on what sources told him, as a “witting affiliate in China’s election interference networks.” Cooper published this despite confessing in the same article that “Global News has not confirmed the CSIS allegations in this story.”

Cooper continued to hammer away at the Dong story. In a report published on March 22, 2023, he made the stunning allegation that Dong had suggested that Beijing delay freeing hostage diplomacy victims Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, because the Conservative Party would benefit from any such action. The story was based, Cooper wrote, on “two separate national security sources.”

Interestingly, the Globe and Mail also had access to information about the intercepted Dong conversation with a Chinese diplomat but decided not to publish it because they could not obtain confirmation of the contents of the conversation. A right move, as it turned out.

The fallout? Dong left the Liberal caucus the day after Cooper’s article to sit as an independent and then decided to leave politics and not run in the 2025 federal election. He sued Cooper and Global News for libel. Cooper left Global News in June 2023, in the early stages of the libel suit. The legal action was ultimately settled by Global News two years later.

Global News released this statement, following the settlement: “The stories published by Global were based on information provided by confidential intelligence sources. Mr. Dong has always denied the accuracy of this intelligence. In reporting on the sources’ allegations concerning Mr. Dong, Global News’ intent was to report on matters of significant public interest and to qualify that the allegations were unproven and subject to different interpretations.”

There is no mea culpa here, and it doesn’t pass muster. It suggests that Cooper and Global did nothing wrong in their reporting, even though they peddled falsehoods. The effort is even balder in light of what was revealed about Cooper’s journalistic practices in court proceedings. The Ontario Superior Court established that Cooper had two confidential sources, one a CSIS source, the other a “senior Canadian intelligence officer,” who had informed him about the Dong conversation with the Chinese consulate. These sources refused to give Cooper a transcript or summary of the intercepted phone call.

The Court determined that Global News had “no tangible and no documentary corroboration of the information derived from confidential sources.” The confidential information provided to Global News was hearsay. Cooper’s notes of his conversation with his sources “did not reflect what he was told.” Cooper “may not have accurately reported what he was told.”

Cooper’s reporting on alleged Chinese foreign interference landed him in a second libel suit, this time brought by Ontario Conservative member of provincial parliament Vincent Ke, which has yet to be settled. Cooper alleged in stories published in March 2023 that his confidential sources “asserted” that Ke “served as a financial intermediary in Chinese Communist Party interference schemes.” Global has lost its effort to have that suit thrown out.

In this age of rampant falsehoods, the Ke lawsuit raises not just legal questions but also epistemic ones. Today’s leaks exist in a highly charged grey zone between truth and falsehood, where the adrenaline rush of unlocking government secrets and getting at hidden truths, along with deadline pressures, can overwhelm the practice of verification.

Ke’s lawyer, Jonathan Lisus, has argued that news organizations should “deal with incendiary allegations from anonymous sources with a lot more discipline than in this case.” He went on to say, “I think they’re going to also have to take a very serious look at the way they evaluate [the] reliability and credibility of anonymous sources.”

Astonishingly, Cooper’s stories remain on the Global News website as originally published, without any qualifications or admission that they contain falsehoods.

The media duel was ultimately won by the Globe and Mail’s reporting, led by Robert Fife and Steven Chase. Most of the attention they gained, especially in early 2023, was tied to insights the two men delivered on how the government had allegedly failed to respond to Chinese foreign interference.

The high point came in a story published on February 17, 2023, which stated that “China employed a sophisticated strategy to disrupt Canada’s democracy in the 2021 federal election campaign.” That “sophisticated strategy,” we were told, was designed to back the re-election of Trudeau’s Liberals—“but only to another minority government—and worked to defeat Conservative politicians considered to be unfriendly to Beijing.” It was an explosive claim.

The story, based on leaks of highly classified intelligence, included selected snippets quoted from the CSIS documents. None of the original documents “viewed” by the Globe were published at the time or later. Many questions about this leak remained unanswered, including how many documents the Globe had “viewed”; the implications of only being able to “view” (as opposed to possess) the documents; how the Globe connected with the leaker; what access the leaker had; the leaker’s motivation; and how reporters interrogated the truthfulness of their source and their material.

Instead, it ignited a political firestorm. The Conservative Party leader, Pierre Poilievre, immediately claimed at a press conference on the day of the Globe’s story that: “Justin Trudeau knew about this interference, and he covered it up because he benefitted from it.” Conservative MPs jumped on the story to ask questions in the House about whether the prime minister had turned a blind eye to foreign interference. “Cover-up” was officially in the air.

A parliamentary committee, engaged since the Fall of 2022 in a study of foreign interference, abruptly cancelled a scheduled two-week break to turn its full attention toward what it called the “shocking revelations” in the Globe’s story.

The Globe and Mail tried to part the curtain on the leaks by taking the rare step of publishing an anonymous opinion piece by the key leaker. The full-page column appeared on Saturday, March 18, and purported to tell the story of why the leaker “blew the whistle.” The column was accompanied by a note from editor-in-chief David Walmsley, who underscored the paper’s belief in the leaker’s veracity. For Walmsley, the decision to publish the anonymous column struck “a balance between providing readers with more insight into our work, and our responsibility to protect the individual’s identity.”

To protect a leaker’s identity is surely a responsibility of a free press. But how much insight did we gain from this article? Does it close the gap in our ability to weigh the significance of the evidence and arrive at some form of truth? Those who offer leaks are never innocent; they can be whistleblowing angels, lying devils, or acting from a range of motives in between. As Dean Beeby, a veteran journalist who worked for the Canadian Press for over three decades before joining the CBC’s Parliamentary Bureau, told me, “Not all leaks are created equal.”

The anonymous leaker of the CSIS documents presented themselves as apolitical, acting as a responsible whistleblower on foreign interference. According to the leaker, “it had become increasingly clear that no serious action was being considered.” Worse still, they said, “evidence of senior public officials ignoring interference was beginning to mount.”

The letter served as a further pressure point on the minority Liberal government. Efforts to address what columnist Andrew Coyne called a “full blown, five-alarm national security crisis” relied on appointing an independent special rapporteur to investigate Chinese foreign interference in federal elections. They also involved asking two national security and intelligence review bodies to produce public reports. These measures failed to satisfy the opposition parties. The government ultimately had to acquiesce to demands for a full-scale public inquiry, which was officially announced in September 2023 and produced its final report in January 2025. All because of leaks—which no one could verify.

It seemed a Seymour Hersh moment. A cover-up exposed; malfeasance brought to light. Except it wasn’t.

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The costly, resource-intensive public inquiry, led by Justice Marie-Josée Hogue, found that the impact of foreign interference on federal elections was negligible, that the government had been paying ever-increasing attention to the threat, that the systems to protect electoral integrity were robust, and that intelligence resources devoted to the problem were sufficient.

Justice Hogue did uncover problems, but they were not the ones exposed by whistleblowers. She found that intelligence reports were not always landing on the right desks and that there was no real practice in place to monitor the circulation of intelligence. She chronicled how the government, over a number of years, had failed to move forward with the publication of a strategy for dealing with foreign interference. She castigated the government for failing to properly inform Canadians about the threat—a failure of transparency. These, Justice Hogue deemed “systemic” problems, and fixable, not the product of any behind the scenes mal-intent.

If we try an overlay of these findings—the result of rigorous investigation conducted over seventeen months—with the leaker’s published outlook, what do we get? A very imperfect fit. The leaker’s main contention that foreign interference had not received serious consideration and that intelligence was being ignored was not borne out. Nor was the leaker’s concern about the “growing impact” of foreign interference on the electoral process. Instead, the commission found that “our democratic institutions have held up well against these threats so far.”

As for the general tenure of media reporting on foreign interference, the final report did conclude that the public’s confidence in Canadian democracy had been undermined. Why? The media “did not offer a full and accurate picture of the phenomenon,” Justice Hogue wrote. “That said, one cannot blame the media since they worked with what they had. However, they had only incomplete pieces of information.”

A similar judgment was reached by David Johnston in his only report as the independent special rapporteur on foreign interference. In his comparison of leaked media reporting alongside the classified record, he concluded that “the specific instances of interference are less concerning than some media reporting has suggested, and in some cases, the true story is quite different.”

One cannot blame the media? Maybe not. But one can fault a system that turns fragments into headlines.

Are there lessons to be learned? Journalists that I spoke to argued two things. First, there are professional practices and standards that need to be adhered to. Second, there are ways to make one’s reporting more clear-sighted and rigorous.

Jim Bronskill of Canadian Press has worked for the wire service for over two decades. A colleague once told him the most important question to ask of a source is “How do you know that?” You have to be curious about motivation and, where possible, explain to readers what you know about it. Beeby goes further. In his view, media organizations should provide a public statement about how they handle source-based material, including the vetting.

What are journalism students told about using confidential sources? I asked Chris Waddell, former director of Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communications. He had a distinguished career as a practising journalist with CBC TV and the Globe and Mail, and then served as the Globe’s national editor. Waddell has told generations of students: “Remember that someone is sharing information with you, not because they like you or think you are a good person, but because you are a conduit to allowing them to get the information out to a broader group of people.”

The general advice when approached by a leaker is be skeptical and demand proof. As Waddell says, “You need to figure out as much of the context as you can before you actually decide to report it.” That can also help to avoid being spun.

The leaker who wrote the anonymous column in the Globe and Mail said they were willing to take their lumps. Will they? Their identity has never surfaced, nor has the Royal Canadian Mounted Police investigation into the leaks led, as yet, to any charges. Jody Thomas, the national security and intelligence adviser to the prime minister when the leaks reached the media, remains confident that those responsible will be uncovered. She added: “I don’t blame the media in this; however, I do think they need to be responsible in how sensitive information is handled. Partial stories, as we saw, can misinform rather than inform.”

There will always be leaks and leakers. News organizations will always be servants of secrets. It’s an essential mission for the fourth estate and essential for a healthy democracy. Public interest will always be a driver in publishing reports based on anonymous sources.

But leaks mustn’t mislead. Journalists and their editors must figure out who the leaker is, what their motivations are, what their access is, what they know and don’t know, how reliable they are, and whether they can be trusted. Journalists, like spies, have to be their own subject-matter experts, do the research, be patient in coming to their findings. Avoid distortion and sensationalism. Keep political agendas and received wisdom at bay.

When intelligence agencies produce reports, they provide their judgment on the veracity of sources. News organizations should do the same. Never just be a conduit. Tell us why you think a leak is truthful. Put down your bet.