With Trump in charge, Canadians need to know Americans won't give up our secrets

The recent bombing in Manchester, England, which killed 22 people (including children) and wounded dozens more, was followed shortly after by a temporary (though very unusual) severing of intelligence-sharing by the British with the U.S.

The reasons behind this odd move by the British highlights the stark changes in the ways that intelligence is being handled by U.S. authorities in the Trump era, and there are lessons to be learned here by all U.S. allies, particularly those that share intelligence with the Americans as part of the Five Eyes alliance.

British Prime Minister Theresa May approached Donald Trump soon after the decision at a NATO summit in Brussels.

She complained about how the U.S. had mishandled important intelligence that British agencies had shared with the Americans regarding  the Manchester bombing.

The shared intelligence had, to the chagrin of the British, made it to the U.S. media before being properly vetted, thus damaging the integrity of the post-bombing investigation. And though the two countries have since patched things up, the episode, along with an earlier incident when Trump carelessly declassified (to the Russians) intelligence shared with his government by the Israelis, should trigger a reassessment of how intelligence gathering and sharing works within the Five Eyes sphere.

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This would of course include Canada, which is a prolific consumer of American intelligence. Given the seemingly amateurish ways in which the Trump administration has handled and mishandled vital security intelligence in the past few weeks, it's obvious that whatever similar mishaps might unfold in the future can have a tangible impact on Canadian national security.

Now, more than ever, the Canadian people have a right to know how their country's intelligence agencies have been collecting their information, as well as how such collection has been or is being used and shared (with the U.S., particularly) to aid counter-terrorism efforts.

That an inexperienced and bumbling executive now heads the U.S. government — certainly the most important government in the Five Eyes alliance — poses a worrying threat to the way in which Canadian intelligence will be handled once it has been shared with its partners, particularly the Americans. That Canadian signals-intelligence gathering, along with its agencies' counter-terrorism methods, has remained mainly in the dark doesn't help matters.

If Canadian agencies are sharing intelligence with a U.S. administration that doesn't really know how to keep secrets, then it means Canadian national security might end up being compromised. That in turn can mean compromising the safety of each Canadian, depending on how the intelligence is related to people on the ground.

It's this vital relationship between intelligence and people that needs to be made more transparent given this present state of affairs where Donald Trump has made the intelligence sharing apparatus seem so much more precarious.  

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It's a well-known fact that Canadian agencies share intelligence with the Americans and it's also now a well-known fact that the current U.S. administration doesn't know how to handle this information.

How will these facts impact Canadian assets on the ground in strategic places where future attacks on Canada might be launched?

Will these assets, cultivated by CSIS over a long period of time, be as forthcoming and willing to share vital intelligence with our agencies from a counter-terrorism perspective?

How will the Canadian handlers of these on-the-ground assets then respond to reassure these informants that their security won't be compromised due to the carelessness and stupidity of American allies?

More honesty and transparency may not wholly solve these emerging problems from a national security perspective (Canadians have very little sway over how Donald Trump and his advisors act), but the urgency of Canadians' right to know has just been increased.

Those who have their information collected by agencies that may not even have the know-how or technology to sift through the huge piles of metadata, deserve, within reason, to know how their information might be shared with an American administration that prefers to declassify on the fly and with little regard for others.

Whether this shared intelligence can then be compromised to the point of backfiring on the source (or those around the source) is now a more urgent issue that needs to be incorporated into the thinking and operations of Canadian agencies and institutions.

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Several reports have come out in recent days that urge the Canadian government to implement more oversight over the country's intelligence and security structures. These recommendations often centre on issues of transparency and lawfulness on the part of security agencies, which handle and collect very sensitive material.

If this material will continue to be shared with an intelligence alliance headed by the Trump administration, then the least Canadian agencies can do is to be more honest about the way they collect, share and treat this material on a daily basis.