In July, news broke that a Canadian intern at NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) in Belgium had been apprehended and accused of espionage on behalf of a third-party country and of participation in a criminal organization. Later reporting revealed the accused as Biwei Zhang and the third-party country as China.
Revelations about Zhang’s past raise concerns about Canada’s screening processes. Prior to her internship, Zhang worked in other sensitive agencies, including Statistics Canada and the Canadian Space Agency, despite being found to have committed fraud in 2019 when she wrote the Canada Border Services Agency job exam twice in two days under different names. While not evidence of espionage, this incident reveals the limits of Canada’s existing screening process, governed by the Treasury Board’s Directive on Security Screening. The process assigns a clearance level, from “reliability status” to “top secret,” based on a position’s sensitivity. The corresponding status determines what screening measures will be employed, ranging from background and criminal record verification to a CSIS loyalty assessment. Screenings are subject to renewal and recurring checks at 5- to 10-year intervals depending on status or external factors changing in one’s life.
Zhang’s recorded fraud within the Canadian civil service before her NATO posting is a damning indictment of Canada’s vetting process and raises serious concerns about the portability and comprehensiveness of the current system. Canada’s vetting failure is not isolated; it is a structural vulnerability that imposes costs on NATO as a whole and undermines Canada’s credibility at a moment when it is trying to reassert itself within the alliance.
The threat to Canada’s credibility within the alliance arises from NATO’s decentralized screening processes. National authorities are expected to vet applicants and grant them security clearance, meaning NATO’s operational effectiveness depends on members trusting one another’s vetting processes enough to share sensitive information. This design reflects a rational choice, as building a supranational screening apparatus capable of vetting across all 32 sovereign member states would impose significant coordination costs, since varying laws and protections within each member state make a uniform vetting process difficult. Decentralization avoids these costs, making it, in transaction-cost terms, the most efficient design. However, efficiency and security can sometimes pull in opposite directions.
In this dynamic, vetting functions as a shared good: members rely on other members’ screening, and no single member bears the full cost of its own lapses. Hence, while vetting might be decentralized, its consequences are not. Canada’s failure therefore endangers not just itself, but also the collective alliance, making it a potential liability and harming its position within NATO.
This comes at a poor time as Ottawa has been trying to assert itself as a strong middle power within NATO. Since the end of the Cold War, Canada’s investment in its defence sector has declined as it benefited from its secure geographic location and chose to allocate budget toward domestic social programs rather than military buildup. While appropriate given Canada’s strategic interests at the time, changing geopolitical contexts have resulted in “butter over guns” nations being labelled as “free riders” within NATO. Yet, since Prime Minister Carney’s arrival, Ottawa has made a concerted effort to reprioritize defence spending and reposition Canada as an indispensable alliance member. Only weeks before Zhang’s arrest, Prime Minister Carney said at the NATO Summit in Ankara that Canada passed the NATO 2 percent GDP defence spending threshold and was moving toward a goal of 4 percent by the end of the decade. Furthermore, Canada is currently leading the project to establish the Defence, Security, and Resilience Bank (DSRB), a multilateral financial institution meant to “deploy private capital and support collective security.” These efforts, however, could be curtailed by Canada’s image as a liability resulting from the espionage fallout.
What can be done to rectify this? As noted above, NATO cannot easily replace domestic vetting processes, so the solution must come from within Canada. Canada’s vetting issues are structural; former CSIS director Richard Fadden has since said the Zhang case is not an anomaly and that “it’s going to happen again.” The government has been aware of Canada’s vulnerabilities; the 2024 NSICP Special Report on Foreign Interference in Canada’s Democratic Processes and Institutions — a report submitted to the Prime Minister — found that Canada is seen as a “permissive environment” for foreign interference because it is perceived as “low-risk” and “high-reward.” The report also noted that intelligence leaks caused “significant damage to intelligence collection efforts and to Canada’s reputation as a trusted foreign partner.”
Despite advances since the 2024 alarm sounding — such as Bill C-70 aimed at countering foreign influence and the establishment of the foreign influence registry — the Zhang case highlights that not all gaps have been closed. Bill C-70 and the foreign influence registry aim to identify and disrupt foreign interference as it occurs, but they do little to address the more basic problem of how individuals like Zhang can slip through Canada’s screening processes in the first place. Despite being flagged for fraud in 2019 by the Public Service Commission of Canada, Zhang cleared security checks conducted by CSIS and the RCMP for Global Affairs Canada. This suggests the current vetting process lacks institutional coherence and portability, allowing a previously flagged individual in one department to receive clearance from another. Moreover, given Canada’s recent history of foreign assets penetrating sensitive agencies, the problem appears systemic. Jeffrey Delisle, a member of the Canadian Armed Forces who had top secret security clearance, spied for Russia between 2007 and 2011. As with Zhang, alarming signals fell through the cracks, as later warrants revealed that CSIS had not reassessed Delisle’s security clearance as it should have after five years.
The Zhang and Delisle cases highlight the need for institutional change in Canada, not only to protect Canadian interests but to protect its image on the international stage. First, the gap between employment misconduct and security clearance needs to be closed. The Public Service Commission — which uncovered Zhang’s fraud — operates under the Public Service Employment Act, whereas CSIS security screenings operate under the CSIS Act. The government should increase inter-institutional coordination to ensure that matters, even if not of criminal concern, are shared fluidly between these bodies. Secondly, the government should institute mandatory re-screening triggers. Rigorous preliminary screening is paramount. However, it has a lag effect; cleared individuals can engage in espionage before the next periodic screening. The case of Delisle exemplifies this: he became a Russian asset after already being granted security clearance. To address this, mandatory re-screening intervals should be shortened from 5 or 10 years to 2-3 years to better reflect how quickly an individual’s circumstances can change. Further, where re-screenings exist for trigger events such as a new promotion or personal troubles, these screenings ought to be rigorous and not passed over.
Encouragingly, the Zhang case is triggering a reckoning in Ottawa. A Parliamentary committee has agreed to examine Canada’s security screening processes to determine what errors occurred. Moreover, Prime Minister Carney affirmed that “lessons” must be learned from the Zhang situation, while also noting that Canada has been involved “from the start” in the investigation. Absent proper institutional change, structural vulnerabilities will persist, eroding Canada’s standing within NATO and, with it, the intra-alliance trust that NATO’s operational efficiency relies upon.
Disclaimer: Any views or opinions expressed in articles are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the NATO Association of Canada.
Photo: “NATO Secretary General attends G7 meeting” by NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
