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Earlier this month, on Canadian Thanksgiving, a significant story about the country emerged from the neighbor that doesn’t do Thanksgiving until November. The Washington Post reported, citing Canadian officials who spoke anonymously given the “sensitivity” of what they were alleging, that members of the Indian government—up to the country’s home affairs minister—have been involved in a broad campaign of intimidation against Indian dissidents on Canadian soil, which included the assassination last summer of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh community leader in British Columbia. “We know they are involved in the Nijjar killing, in other murders and in ongoing violence—actual violence—in Canada,” a senior Canadian official told the Post. The officials also told the paper about a meeting that Nathalie Drouin, Canada’s national security adviser, and David Morrison, the deputy foreign minister, recently took with an Indian counterpart—a meeting the Indian official said should remain secret, but was quickly leaked to pro-government Indian outlets in ways that made India look tough.
Last week, the Globe and Mail, which is sometimes referred to as Canada’s newspaper of record, splashed its own front-page story about the revelations. The focus of the story, however, was not some new development in the Nijjar case, but the identities of the anonymous Canadian officials who had spoken to the Post: namely, Drouin and Morrison. The Globe reported—citing, somewhat head-spinningly, anonymous sources of its own—that the pair had briefed the Post before Canadian police made a public statement about the Nijjar case, also on Thanksgiving; the Post was reportedly told to hold off on publishing until after the police had spoken, but its story contained certain sensitive details that were not in the public statement. The Canadian government denied that any classified intelligence had made its way into the public domain, but a former official with a Canadian intelligence agency told the Globe that some of the information reported by the Post would be considered classified, “unless there is some special regime” under which Canadian officials “can release stuff to certain designated persons.”
One paper naming another’s anonymous sources is not common, let alone in a splashy front-page story. “As with any capital city, there’s a lot of second-guessing; we read stories that break news, and if it’s an unnamed source, there’s a lot of speculation about ‘Who is that?’” Steve Scherer, a former bureau chief for Reuters in Ottawa, told me—but he’s never seen such speculation make print, and told me that he’d never have been allowed to put a comparable story up on an international newswire. And the Globe’s article did not sit well with some journalists. On X, Matina Stevis-Gridneff, the Canada bureau chief at the New York Times, wrote that it was “really disturbing and strange to see a national Canadian paper out the Washington Post’s sources.” Others (including Scherer) speculated that the Globe may have acted out of jealousy after being beaten to an explosive story. There were suggestions that the paper had made a mountain out of a molehill—unnamed officials, after all, brief reporters all the time—and that it would have run the Post’s story if it had been the paper briefed.
Others, however, saw things differently—arguing that the issue was one not of professional pride, but of exposing hypocrisy on the part of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his government when it comes to the dissemination of sensitive information. “The story speaks for itself and has nothing to do with personal jealousy,” Robert Fife, the author of the Globe’s article, told me in an email. “I have enormous respect for the Washington Post. The point I was making is that national security officials who provided intelligence on China’s foreign interference activities to the Globe were branded as criminals by the prime minister. He had no problem authorizing his national security adviser to provide similar intelligence to the Washington Post. When it benefits him, it’s okay. When it embarrasses the government—and eventually leads to a public inquiry—then the leaks are criminal.” (Asked for comment on the Globe’s story, a Post spokesperson told me that the paper does not discuss its newsgathering practices.)
Whatever you think of the Globe naming the Post’s sources, the issues at play here are much broader than those of a mere spat over journalistic courtesy; as Fife alludes to, the controversy has, at the very least, played out against the backdrop of not one but two major story lines about alleged foreign interference in Canadian affairs—both involving major world powers, both emblematic of growing international concerns about political meddling and transnational repression (even if the details, particularly in the case of Indian state-sponsored violence, have a very local context). The controversy also speaks to how news about such matters increasingly plays out across borders, and to debates around the handling of sensitive information that themselves resonate across Western democracies.
The China-related intelligence that Fife referenced in his email to me has been the subject of a string of stories in the Globe, starting in 2022, alleging, among other things, various Chinese schemes to meddle in Canadian elections and even to collect intelligence on a lawmaker’s family; last March, the Globe took the unusual step of running an anonymous first-person essay by a national security official—whose revelations, the paper said, had “formed the backbone” of its reporting—in which the official wrote that they’d decided to contact the press because leaders weren’t taking the threat of interference seriously enough. (Another outlet, Global News, also reported on intelligence about China.) Under mounting political pressure to launch a public inquiry, Trudeau initially tapped a special rapporteur to report back on the issue. The rapporteur acknowledged that there were real concerns around foreign interference and officials’ handling of it, but also suggested that news reporting on the matter had drawn misleading conclusions from partial intelligence, and that a full public inquiry was not needed. But the pressure continued, and last fall, Trudeau set up the inquiry.
While this was going on, Canadian police opened an investigation into the source of the leaked intelligence, and the Canadian government stressed that those responsible would be caught and punished; last summer, Jody Thomas, Drouin’s predecessor as national security adviser, told Canada’s public broadcaster that the leaks had risked the country’s intelligence methods and the trust of its allies, adding, when asked whether the source had sparked a necessary public debate about national security, that she would “never concede there’s a benefit” to leaking. Earlier this month—two days after the Post story on India appeared—Trudeau addressed the inquiry on foreign interference and himself repeatedly referred to the China-related leaks as “criminal.” Fife pointed out in the second paragraph of his subsequent story that this language stood “in contrast” to his government’s “leak” to the Post. In a scathing editorial, the Globe accused Trudeau of “crying wolf,” arguing that the “guiding principle” of his administration’s decisions to either withhold or disclose sensitive information has been the political “needs of the Trudeau government, not Canada’s security.”
In the editorial, the Globe also drew a contrast between government officials briefing the Post on India’s involvement in violence on Canadian soil and an episode last September, when the Globe said that Trudeau’s office asked it to hold off on publishing a story about similar, earlier allegations, citing national security concerns, before himself outlining the thrust of them to Parliament. “The delay gave the prime minister time to come up with a communications strategy,” the Globe editorial continued. “It was just one more instance of using national security concerns for partisan advantage.”
Trudeau’s statement that there was credible evidence of Indian complicity in Nijjar’s killing was a significant moment in that story of foreign interference, one that has unspooled roughly alongside the China story, albeit with very different, much more violent specifics. In particular, India has been accused of intimidating members of its diaspora in Canada who, like Nijjar, have advocated for a Sikh state to be carved out of territory in northern India. (India branded Nijjar a terrorist.) Canada has a particularly large population of Indian Sikhs. But India’s alleged campaign of violence has played out on US soil, too. Last year, officials there reportedly warned a number of Sikh residents (including a New York–based journalist and commentator) of threats to their safety, and said that they had foiled an assassination plot targeting one of them. (The proposed hit man in the plot was an undercover US agent.)
Even before its Thanksgiving Day article, the Post had broken open key parts of this wider story, including when it reported, back in April, that an Indian intelligence officer gave the order to kill the US-based dissident, and that the country’s national security adviser may have been aware of such plots. As various observers noted to me, Canadian officials may have chosen to brief the paper for its recent story to put their new allegations about Indian official complicity in front of eyeballs in DC, given the international stakes of the story and the greater diplomatic clout of the US. But this, too, seems to have been a point of frustration among some Canadian observers. Replying to Stevis-Gridneff on X last week, Mercedes Stephenson, the Ottawa bureau chief at Global News, argued that while her main issue with officials briefing the Post was the double standard with its criminalization of unauthorized leaks, it’s “very frustrating to be told national security we can’t comment…but we can brief media in Washington.” Patrick White, a journalism professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal, told me that it was “quite distressing to see a Canadian government news leak about such a sensitive matter to a foreign newspaper” before the official police statement.
In light of all this, did the Globe cross an ethical red line in naming the Post’s sources? The experts I consulted suggested that it probably did not, at least not in any hard-and-fast sense. White told me that the “Globe article is well-sourced” and that publishing it was “sound, since it is in the public interest to better understand this huge diplomatic matter between Canada and India.” Jane Kirtley, a professor of media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota, added that she doesn’t “see how you can seriously argue that the Globe and Mail would be bound by a promise of confidentiality made by the Washington Post.”
Still, both acknowledged that the Globe could have pointed to the government’s perceived double standards without actually naming the Post’s sources. “I can understand being angry and upset and writing a blistering editorial,” Kirtley said. “But this is the nuclear reaction.” (Fife did not respond to a follow-up email on this point.) In general, identifying another paper’s sources is rare for good reason. As Stephenson, of Global News, noted on X, the officials named by the Globe seem to have spoken to the Post with authorization and thus aren’t at risk of losing their jobs, as an unauthorized leaker likely would be (and worse besides). And yet, if journalists rely on leaks and briefings of all shapes and sizes to do their jobs, anything that could feasibly disincentivize those in the future risks becoming self-defeating—especially when legitimate complaints about governments’ practice of strategic leaking can be made just as powerfully in general terms.
At the end of the day, ensuring public enlightenment about issues of substantive concern always matters most—and foreign influence in Canada is certainly one of those, even if its exact characteristics and parameters are up for discussion. Yesterday, I spoke with Gerald Butts, a former top adviser to Trudeau who is now vice chair of the Eurasia Group, a political risk analysis firm. After the Globe named the Post’s sources, Butts sparked a debate about it on LinkedIn; he told me that, in his view, the Globe’s story was “kinda petty” and that he would agree with other critics who have argued that the paper sensationalized its broader reporting on the China-related intelligence. And yet Butts was “one of the first people seen as an ally of the government” to call for the public inquiry into foreign interference, he told me, seeing it as an opportunity to educate Canadians on “the very real threats we face in the world.” Canadians can “be a little naive about the attractiveness of Canada as a target,” Butts said. “If I were the Russians or the Chinese, and I had [the chance] to cause chaos on a ten-thousand-kilometer border with the United States, I’d take it.”
Other notable stories:
- Yesterday, fallout continued from the decision by Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Post, to block the paper from endorsing Kamala Harris for president. Two more Post columnists, David Hoffman and Molly Roberts, resigned from the editorial board; per NPR’s David Folkenflik, more than two hundred thousand subscribers canceled—a “colossal number,” as a former Post editor put it. At a staff meeting, David Shipley, the opinion editor, told employees that he’d tried and failed to persuade Bezos to let the endorsement go ahead; later, Bezos himself weighed in, insisting in an op-ed that his decision was about reader trust, and not, as speculated, self-interest. Meanwhile, for CJR, Roger Rosenblatt, who was a Post columnist in the seventies, argues that the paper has departed from the values of its former owner Katharine Graham.
- Also for CJR, Jake Lahut explores the logic behind Donald Trump’s recent strategy of touring podcasts popular with young men who don’t consistently vote. “These low-propensity voters, as they’re known, tend not to consume much traditional news; they do, however, consume exactly the kinds of shows where Trump has recently appeared: Andrew Schulz’s comedy podcast Flagrant; The Joe Rogan Experience; and the sports-themed Bussin’ with the Boys,” Lahut writes. “The interviews are typically jocular and casual, and rarely focused on the finer points of policy. And the audiences—not to mention the hosts—are disproportionately male.” Trump’s strategy, Lahut adds, is “unorthodox” but may be “surprisingly well conceived.”
- Last night, Mehdi Hasan, a Muslim British American journalist, was sparring with Ryan Girdusky, a conservative commentator, on Abby Phillip’s CNN show when Hasan referred to himself as “a supporter of the Palestinians” and Girdusky replied, “Well, I hope your beeper doesn’t go off”—an apparent reference to Israel’s recent move to blow up pagers carried by members of the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon. After a break, Phillip apologized to Hasan and said that Girdusky had been removed from the show (Hasan also left the panel, seemingly by choice); later, CNN confirmed that Girdusky will not be welcomed back on the network. (I profiled Hasan in 2021.)
- In the UK, Keir Starmer, the new prime minister, wrote an op-ed for The Guardian in which he pledged to protect journalism, calling it the “lifeblood of British democracy”; Starmer said that there is “no direct threat to press freedoms” in the UK, but pledged to recognize that publishers should “have control over and seek payment for their work” when dealing with AI firms and to tackle nuisance defamation lawsuits, known as SLAPPs, among other steps. In both areas, The Guardian reports, Starmer appeared to be offering reassurances amid concerns over earlier policy moves.
- And the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration dropped an investigation into Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that it opened earlier this year after an old magazine interview resurfaced (seemingly in the context of the “Bennifer” divorce frenzy) in which Kennedy’s daughter Kick recalled him driving the family from Massachusetts to New York with the severed head of a whale carcass strapped to the roof of their car. NOAA said that it had “determined the allegation to be unfounded.”
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