NATIONAL SECURITY: CHINESE-BORN BUREAUCRAT REJOINS CIVIL SERVICE
Alleged spying risk earns full pay — for no work
COLIN FREEZE
May 7, 2007
A bureaucrat born in China who was fired from her job in the nerve centre of the Canadian government on allegations of being a potential spy has since been reassigned to a less sensitive department and has been awarded a pay raise.
Haiyan Zhang is not allowed to go to work because of persistent security concerns.
Ms. Zhang, a 44-year-old naturalized citizen, launched a wrongful-dismissal grievance after the Privy Council Office declared her a threat to national security, stripped her of her security clearance and fired her in 2003. (The PCO, an arm of the Prime Minister’s Office, is among the most sensitive federal offices and is a repository of closely guarded secrets.)
With the support of her union, Ms. Zhang launched a grievance of that firing and won her case before a federal adjudicator who ordered that she be rehired. She rejoined the civil service, but within a few weeks she was placed under another internal investigation and was suspended.
A former foreign correspondent for China’s state-owned Xinhua news agency, who immigrated in the mid-1990s after marrying a Canadian, Ms. Zhang remains on full salary but has not reported to work since October.
The adjudicator found that a job at the PCO was “not legally possible” yet ordered officials to put her back to work in a place where she’d be far away from state secrets.
So, last fall, Ms. Zhang started a new communications job at an agency known as Service Canada but lasted only two months before that department launched its own security probe and sent her home pending the outcome of that investigation.
“The federal government can’t seem to let it go,” Edith Bramwell, a Public Service Alliance of Canada lawyer, said. The union lawyer argued that her client is no spy, no matter how much government actions insinuate otherwise.
“The allegations are as tenuous as possible,” Ms. Bramwell said, adding that her client has been recognized for her work as a United Way volunteer in Ottawa and “would very much like to return to work.”
Chinese spying is increasingly a concern for Canada. The current head of CSIS last week told senators that up to half the time the agency devotes to foreign espionage cases involves spies who answer to Beijing.
A speaker of English, French and Mandarin, Ms. Zhang obtained Canadian citizenship in 1999 and started working for the government in 2002.
Her problems started when the PCO recruited her a year later from Industry Canada. Her plans to join the brains of the government soured as CSIS performed background checks to determine whether she could get the requisite top-secret security clearance. Documents in the case show CSIS turned up “adverse information regarding [Ms. Zhang’s] loyalty to Canada.”
The details are partly shielded, but her past work for state-controlled Xinhua raised red flags and there was a further concern from CSIS that she appeared to maintain “regular contact with foreign representatives who may be involved in intelligence collection activities.”
Normally a civil servant whose security clearance is yanked is reassigned to a less sensitive job, but the PCO invoked the “exceptional circumstances” of the case in order to try to oust Ms. Zhang from the entire federal bureaucracy.
The Public Service Labour Relations Board thought better of her. An adjudicator found that the threshold of “exceptional” had not been met – meaning she was still owed a job.
“Reinstatement to her former position at the PCO is not legally possible since Ms. Zhang no longer meets the security level required for the position,” adjudicator Ian MacKenzie wrote in his 2005 decision. But he said the government still had “to conduct a diligent search for an alternate position at the equivalent (her substantive IS-5) or a lower level.”
After a long hunt for a suitable position, Ms. Zhang found a home at Service Canada, at the higher IS-6 pay level. It appears the plan was that she would be involved in “branding” communications about employment insurance.
Yet her work lasted only from September to October of 2006. That’s when, according to her lawyer, Ms. Zhang was asked to go home and await Service Canada’s internal review of her security status.
“The investigation is now getting to be rather old,” Ms. Bramwell, the union lawyer, said in an interview. She added that despite all the “litigation levelled at her head,” her client still “continues to believe that Canada is a wonderful, welcoming place.”
This spring, Crown lawyers tried and failed in their attempt to overturn the adjudicator’s decision. In Federal Court, lawyers for the government even made noises about hoping to recover $200,000 in wages paid to Ms. Zhang.
Two years ago Ms. Zhang told The Globe and Mail that “I fell in love with this country.” She refrained from commenting for this story except for this e-mail:
“At this time, I do not wish to make a public statement until a final resolution other than to express my gratitude to fellow citizens who have continuously validated my choice of Canada as my country.”
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20070507.ZHANG07/TPStory/?query=chinese
