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

What happens when reporters don’t question their sources

“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........

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