Parliamentary Committee Notes: Questions and Answers – National Security Guidelines for Research Partnerships

1. How does the national security review process within the National Security Guidelines for Research Partnerships protect Canadian interests?

As this committee is already aware, there are plenty of malicious actors out there that are attempting to leverage federally funded research partnerships to gain access to Canadian intellectual property.
The national security review process within the Guidelines program is our best defence against those malicious actors.
Public Safety, and our partners in the security and intelligence community, provide national security advice to granting agencies where they refer a grant application.
There are time where this review leads to the discovery of a malicious partner. When that happens, we notify the granting agency that the given application is high risk and they act accordingly.

We examine whether the partners listed on any particular application have any problematic links with entities that may pose a risk to Canada’s national security.
For example, if a private sector entity that is known to supply or support a foreign military or state security apparatus that is a direct threat to our national security, we will make note of that in the context of the science of the research project.
If the science is deemed sensitive, then the application will be labeled as high-risk by our process. Hypothetically in cases where the science on a given project is not sensitive, then an application will carry medium risk and it will be up to the granting agency to decide whether it gets funded.
This, however, is exceedingly rare. Our adversaries are targeting our most sensitive research and the work we’ve done to date on the national security reviews has shown this.

The national security review process is relatively new, having only started in July 2021. As a result, it has gained much attention from the research community, and for good reason. Putting guard rails around academic research is not something we have done in recent times.
However, Public Safety has only received roughly five percent of all applications processed by the granting agencies thus far. We are looking at a very narrow slice of the total number of research collaborations that are funded partially by the federal government.
With that context in mind, we do not believe that we are causing a chill on research and collaboration. However, the Research Security Centre must continue to provide advice and outreach to universities and researchers on how to best navigate this new reality.

Canada, like its allies, is currently rapidly augmenting its research security posture to mitigate the threats to our sensitive research.
We are in constant conversation with our Five Eyes partners as well as other likeminded countries where we share our best practices and strategies on how to mitigate the threats to our research.
While some countries are ahead of others on this journey, Canada is often looked to as a leader in the research security space by our allies as many of our partners have reached out to us because they are interested in replicating what we are doing.