Juno News - November 30, 2019


New docs confirm CSIS took an interest in Danforth shooting

Mentioned
Ralph Goodale Faisal Hussain Julianna Kozis Rhys Fallon Danforth
New Conservative deputy leader was Liberal until last September Conservative journalist gets assaulted by union activist

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

187.75

Word count

996

Sentence count

17


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

CSIS files reveal a six-month investigation into the Danforth shooting, and a possible link between the agency and the investigation of Faisal Hussein, the suspect in last year's shooting that left five dead and 13 wounded.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 I want to chat to you today about some documents I've recently received from
00:00:09.320 CSIS concerning last year's Danforth shooting. At the time it was a story that
00:00:14.680 people had a lot of questions about. It captured the national imagination. Why
00:00:19.680 did this happen? Everyone wanted to know. And right in the immediate aftermath of
00:00:24.760 the incident there was quite a cone of silence around it. A lot of questions not
00:00:28.880 being answered. Denials or refusals to answer by national security officials by
00:00:33.880 Toronto police on the ground and people just said come on just answer these
00:00:37.520 questions. Now there's been a lot of speculation even conspiracy theories
00:00:42.260 throughout all of this and I always obtained look law enforcement whether
00:00:46.220 it's in this story or any other story that comes around they should tell us as
00:00:50.240 much as possible. Maximum disclosure right out of the gate because otherwise human
00:00:55.460 nature abhors a vacuum and people are going to start to speculate and ask
00:00:58.700 what is going on here? Well I have new documents from CSIS that show that they
00:01:04.140 took a six month interest in the case so they have various reports and
00:01:09.160 correspondence dating from the very morning right away after it happened 7 a.m.
00:01:13.320 the next day following that evening attack dating all the way until December.
00:01:17.940 Six months of heavily redacted documents and by heavily redacted I mean as you can
00:01:23.500 see in some of these pages there's very little information that's that's actually
00:01:28.100 on these pages but what they give you is a sense that there's dates and time
00:01:31.820 stamps and yes they were talking to each other some of these documents are
00:01:35.100 classified top-secret for Canadian eyes only and you can tell sort of the
00:01:40.400 general gist that there were situation reports being compiled there were
00:01:44.840 meetings being had but you don't know what was discussed in those meetings what
00:01:48.020 was found in all of those reports. So what is noteworthy about this and what
00:01:52.760 can we say from it? Well there's not a lot we can say from it but what is
00:01:56.420 interesting is at the time Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale's office was asked
00:02:00.140 hey is CSIS involved in this in any way? Now they had said there's no national
00:02:04.800 security nexus to this at all they remained firm about this and everything
00:02:09.080 we have out there facts about this case suggest that that is an accurate
00:02:12.560 statement and then they were asked hey is CSIS involved and they would not
00:02:16.400 confirm they wouldn't say yes or say no kind of very odd because look if they're
00:02:20.920 involved just say yeah they're doing routine stuff. It's unclear from these
00:02:25.040 documents and I've spoken to a few people in intelligence circles whether
00:02:29.000 or not this means this was a routine thing natural protocol you see a guy
00:02:33.280 doing a shooting and you go okay well let's get CSIS involved because there
00:02:36.920 are shootings all the time and we know they're sort of local gangs and so forth
00:02:41.180 and CSIS does not at all get involved in them there's no documentation nothing's
00:02:46.280 going to show up so this confirms for the first time CSIS did have some interest in
00:02:51.440 looking into this the only sort of specifics we know from the information
00:02:54.860 that was not redacted is that they sought atmospherics on the shooting can't
00:03:00.940 really tell you any more about what that means basically you know specifics about
00:03:05.080 about the actual moments when the shooting went down and also that they were
00:03:09.440 running checks whatever that means presumably some sort of checks on Faisal
00:03:13.240 Hussein and backstory and him and so forth he of course is the deceased shooter one of
00:03:18.800 three not one of three shooters other two deceased were tragically the victims
00:03:22.720 Julianna Kozis and Rhys Fallon and 13 other people in Toronto unfortunately
00:03:27.800 wounded by this shooting so a small snapshot into how responses to all of this
00:03:34.220 unfolds and just a little window into answering some more questions about one
00:03:39.380 little question one little issue that I don't know Ralph Goodall maybe could have
00:03:42.680 just answered at the time the former public safety minister and stop there being
00:03:46.620 this other window of people asking further questions so we don't know
00:03:49.920 exactly what CSIS found what they were doing seems like they wrapped things up
00:03:55.200 after six months and the most amount of their action was in the days
00:03:58.800 immediately following which seems to be typical protocol here although it is
00:04:02.900 interesting as I noted in the write-up reports I had done on this that they
00:04:07.620 certainly dragged their feet in releasing these documents they went through
00:04:11.100 all the you know running the clock they could to beat the traditional rules and
00:04:14.520 access to information laws and they cited many half a dozen provisions in the
00:04:19.320 Access to Information Act as to why they should be disclosing a lot of this
00:04:23.460 material so there's also stuff that they have that I just did just not get so
00:04:28.980 there you go a small little snapshot and window into one new kind of angle of the
00:04:34.460 way people are still asking some questions about this stand for shooting
00:04:37.680 getting a lot of the particulars but as the Toronto Police Service report that was
00:04:41.880 released not too not too long ago a number of months ago this calendar year a
00:04:46.800 year after it had taken place they said they've looked everywhere to find things
00:04:50.940 about motive to find whether there are other people involved and they just say
00:04:54.540 no there's really nothing we know about this to this date it seems like this was
00:04:58.380 just one guy acting alone they found the 9-11 conspiracy videos in his
00:05:02.980 apartment that was kind of news found another couple sketchy things to suggest we
00:05:07.060 had an oddball here but still those questions kind of remain what is the
00:05:11.380 motive still to this day the families ask and still there is no answer