Q: Overall thoughts?
A: One thing that struck me, in some ways it’s more sophisticated than I might have thought. My view while I was reading it was that this is definitely not an American-made TV series, partly because you have get debates or discussions characters are having, there’s nuance in issues, there’s some reference to history in issues, there’s dialogue between characters that’s not necessarily central to the plot but it’s an interesting side point. It’s politically as well, it’s quite up to date. I don’t know the timelines between production and final screenwriting, but I was struck by okay, it’s quite up to date. Overall, I thought it’s actually not bad, not bad at all. It gives a flavour of some of the main issues there, the tensions between bureaucracies, the importance of having to consider politics in decision making, but it’s also as you would expect in the one sense a very simplified structure. The idea of virtually no liaison between this group and other agencies and organisations in Canada—you never see that apart from the occasional dropping-in of the single CSIS character. You don’t see this individual really having to report upwards or get instructions from his upper management team, whoever is in charge of his organisation. The direct dialogue with the Minister, which is kind of possible but not quite actually because it would involve ADMs or DMs usually.
Q: One of the things that wasn’t really in either of those two episodes was that they actually do have a Deputy Minister character who often will call down from Ottawa, and he’s usually the one who gives instructions or tells them to back of a case, or something.
A: Exactly, and that’s a key sort of power point in the reality. I mean, obviously there are all sorts of other TV-friendly sorts of issues. Everybody has nice offices overlooking nice places. Government buildings don’t generally look like that. There’s also a sense of rarefied—everyone you need is in your team, so you’ve got your computer IT expert there, literally just at your beck-and-call, and it’s just like well no, we live in competing resources kinds of environments. Yes, you can have a specialist attached to you, but it’s not necessarily that kind of simplified. But it’s entertainment, it’s trying to tell its audience something as well as be entertaining and tell a story, so you’re going to have to knock off some of the less-attractive edges of reality. That’s one thing. There was also a couple of—in fairness, I’m only dealing with a couple of episodes—but certainly in the episode dealing with the terrorist plot, they were pretty lax with the whole sharing of information thing. They had the Imam in, ‘do you know these people?’ Now in a time-sensitive thing I can see yes, they might do that, sharing photographs of individuals, not necessarily saying why they’re interested. But having conversations while somebody who would probably not have any clearance whatsoever is in the room, even if you’re in another corner of the room or a door, no. Not even with real time-sensitive information. When the guy got called down to reception to see [Yvonne Castle], and the baby was crying and she could hear it—yeah, that really wouldn’t work in a government building. All these things are kind of necessary and adds to the TV plot, but it can give it a false impression. But in fairness, from the two I watched, I thought ‘this is really quite politically savvy. Yes, it’s simplified, yes it looks nice, yes things are difficult but run smooth most times in the end, but there’s nuance in there, there’s a recognition of difficulties in different interpretations of views or political views of the characters. It’s not this straight line, ‘let’s sell this and no punches are pulled’ attitude, which I thought was quite good. It kind of reminded me a little bit—I was trying to think ‘what are my reference points?’ Have you ever seen the BBC series Spooks?
Q: Yeah.
A: It reminded me a little bit of that, and differed greatly from the equivalent in the US, say 24. They were going to be my two reference points. At least there you see there’s a team—there’s a team effort within a government effort, whereas in 24 it’s an individual world saving the United States of America. And Spooks has that kind of same—it’s a team who seems to exist and do everything on their own without necessarily too much interference within the bureaucracy, the head of that team deals with ministers and governments and everything else like that, and you get that same picture here. The reality is, obviously there’s more fingers in the pie and more complex reporting structures, but that does not make for entertaining television.
Q: In terms of the kinds of issues that it raised, you watched one on a terrorist threat, and one on stop-loss as a cross-border issue, one in which we’ve got a lot of press right now with war deserters with deportation orders and so on. Judging from that particular aspect of how the issues are being looked at, how did you feel the show handled it?
A: I think they handled it reasonably well. I mean, the terror attack was—I thought it was going well until I realised they were dealing with anthrax and they really went for the big scary ‘what might these terrorists do’ which was a bit playing to the TV gallery, whereas a truck bomb or something else would have been more realistic based on actual terrorist methods, or maybe a suicide bomb or something like that. But the tensions between—there was a reference to okay, there’s an imminent attack, and one of the characters—I think it’s the CSIS character—says ‘oh, I got bored after the fourth imminent attack didn’t happen,’ and those kinds of things, and there is that sort of thing that you can see that. There was a reference at least that one of them said that Canada is overdue, and you do have that feeling here in one sense. Canada has been named since at least 2002, and if you look at everyone else who has been named in that note coming out of al-Qaeda or statement, everyone else has been attacked, Canada has yet to be—so that’s where I think it’s kind of politically savvy and up to date. The connections in the terrorist one between what was going on in Toronto and the neat connection with what was going on in Afghanistan with the two held soldiers was a nice sort of, it wraps it up for the TV. Having to make the trade-off in the end was I thought quite an interesting addition. The woman goes to jail, the warlord’s son gets sent back to Afghanistan with the child and he was going to be persona non grata in Canada anymore, and that’s the deal—that was kind of interesting. Saying that yes, it’s a murky world of there has to be a deal here—we get two Canadian soldiers alive, and suspected terrorist gets off free and goes back to Afghanistan. So that was kind of interesting I thought. Dealing with the stop-loss one, that played quite nicely I thought with the psychological aspects. There’s a number of things reporting in the press with different parts of the media from Time magazine to Newsweek, to I think the New York Times has also done a piece in the past eighteen months of the US military’s trialing of basically unproven drugs to assist soldiers under psychological pressure, and a tension of what happens when that necessarily goes wrong, and the guy leads him across the Canadian border, one of them is responsible for saving his life so he things he’s due. It works out quite nicely. It’s got its fingers on the right pulse, I don’t think it’s barking up the completely wrong trees, and it handles them in quite a sophisticated manner in fairness to it, works out some of the difficulties faced by Canada as well as some of the moral questions and the political realities of issues. I mean I looked through that show when I went to the CBC online to look through the episodes, and I see there’s a rendition flight that crashes, organised crime issue, there’s a drug issue—it touches all the main bases which are of concern to most Western democracies in terms of security issues.
Q: Do you think that it presents a fair face as to what Canada is doing on these issues, or do you think that it’s a bit too idealised?
A: I think that in some ways it can be a bit too idealised, but I think that what’s important is that there’s a sense that we’re dealing with actions within Canada. I think that if we were trying to portray a picture of what Canada is doing outside of its borders, that would become difficult. But it’s quite a clever focus on okay, we’re dealing with things that come into Canada and problems that arise in Canada have to be addressed. It’s a reasonably fair picture. I would imagine that CSIS aren’t too happy with being portrayed as the attack dog of this TV program. I can’t say to what extent other characters who are brought in from other agencies are portrayed, but you have these clearly personal tensions, and there are also bureaucratic tensions. That said, no one who looks at any history of intelligence or bureaucracy in making national security policies in any country can avoid the issue that individuals to matter. If two individuals who are supposed to liaise and work with each other can’t get along, that does affect the overall quality of work. I mean that’s quite a nice point—it may be overplayed, but it is quite a nice point that individuals do matter in these relationships.
Q: I was speaking with one of the writers and producers who said that they do have someone in CSIS who is trying to correct them about their portrayal, but they have people from other agencies who say that it’s a pretty accurate portrayal.
A: It can be difficult when you are the public top-dog, if you like, according to the way people think either politically or within the media, to work with everybody else. And everybody else feels like they’re doing the nitty-gritty work here, and sometimes these people get parachuted in and not always sharing information within or not always getting the full story, etcetera. There are always tensions between organisations in bureaucracies in every country, and it’s not just turf war and jealousy—there are reasons for those tensions, and there are different mandates and different jobs to be done by them. But I would imagine that yeah, CSIS was trying to steer that ship a little more to a fairer portrayal.
Q: The fact that the show created a fictional agency with which to situate it’s main characters. Do you think that enhanced its ability to tell these kinds of stories, or do you think it detracted?
A: I actually thought it was quite clever because you then didn’t have to worry about trying to portray the agency that’s already in existence. You’re not going to be compared to anybody else or another program that involves that agency or organisation, and it avoids having to sort of think about the obvious, ‘we never work like that,’ the agency might write. ‘We don’t do that, it’s an incorrect portrayal,’ so it sidesteps some of those issues. It’s quite a wise move on the writers’ part because they can say ‘okay look, we’ve got this fictional agency within this much broader gamut of organisations and agencies within Canada, and it allows us to portray certain things like different responsibilities and mandates, turf wars, political reporting, how teams work, etcetera, without getting too bogged down in how to accurately portray an existing agency.’ I thought it was probably a wise move, and I think in fairness, based on what I’ve seen, I think it worked. You always run into these kinds of problems, these lead characters seem to be involved in everything, but that’s the nature of a TV drama.
Q: How do you think a show like this contributes to the national discussion in terms of the questions it’s raising like terrorism, border security, immigration and so on?
A: I’m not sure it does, but I’m not sure that’s a fault of the program itself. I’ve found this as someone who’s fairly new to Canada—two years here now—but it’s something that I’ve heard a sufficient number of times from people who have been working in the Canadian security and defence world across all kinds of sectors of government and non-government, who’ve said to me, and I think it’s correct, that there isn’t a security discourse or discussion in Canada that’s active all the time. I think that’s true. What might be interesting here is that if it is classic ‘water cooler TV’ and gets people talking at work ‘did you see what happened last night,’ that might add to the sort of general consciousness and might get people thinking. To the extent that there’s a sustained outcome from that—it’s impossible to judge I think at this stage. I don’t see anything necessarily filtering upwards, but I think it’s early days—it began January of this year. Looking at the awards its won and the reports its had, it could prove useful. If it gets people thinking about security and national security of Canada, it can sometimes be a necessary and compromising business, just as the security of any state can be a necessary and compromising business—that’s a good thing. Things aren’t always clear cut, and that is one thing that it’s good that people can understand that. It’s not always a simple question of what’s right and what’s wrong. Tough decisions have to be made.
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