Spy chief wrote minister secret letter

Former CSIS head warned that wave of harassment allegations was likely to follow initial report

- DARRY LGREER

VANCOUVER When Canada’s spy chief wrote a secret letter to the public safety minister last December — the week after a report emerged that two young women in the service had been sexually assaulted by a senior colleague — it came with a warning.

David Vigneault, then-director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, told Dominic LeBlanc that he expected “more cases to surface in the coming weeks,” and that he had to be “transparent” about this with the minister.

“(We) will continue to make the difficult decisions required to make a safe workplace,” he wrote, saying that the report by the Canadian Press had left staff “reeling.”

Vigneault, who stepped down in July, had reason to be concerned.

In the days after the report was published, Vigneault’s staff compiled tables for him showing there had been 49 alleged “occurrences” of workplace harassment and violence at CSIS since 2021.

Only eight of these were deemed to have been “founded.”

The Dec. 9 letter to LeBlanc, stamped “secret,” and the tables in a Dec. 4 email were among documents provided to the Canadian Press in response to an access-toinformation request.

The documents show how Vigneault and his staff responded to the Canadian Press report published on Nov. 30, in which CSIS officers made allegations of rape, bullying and harassment in the service’s B.C. physical surveillance office.

The statistics about workplace sexual harassment and violence were compiled as part of Vigneault’s preparations for an all-staff town hall meeting about the allegations on Dec. 5.