Failure to communicate: what week two of the foreign interference inquiry revealed
Commissioner Marie-Josée Hogue's mandate for the foreign interference in‐ quiry is sprawling - but one of her key tasks is to exam‐ ine and assess the flow of information related to al‐ leged meddling in the pre‐ vious two federal elections.
Testimony and documen‐ ts published during week two of the inquiry's public hear‐ ings suggest Canada's ap‐ proach to safeguarding those elections was plagued by fail‐ ures to communicate impor‐ tant information.
From a top bureaucrat tasked with safeguarding the integrity of those elections, from political parties and from candidates who al‐ legedly were targeted, a com‐ mon question emerged: Why were we not informed?
Parties kept in the dark
The inquiry, led by Quebec judge Marie-Josee Hogue, ex‐ pects to hear testimony from more than 40 people, includ‐ ing community members, po‐ litical party representatives and federal election officials.
Former Conservative leader Erin O'Toole, who led the party during the 2021 federal election, received a classified briefing on foreign interference activities by the Canadian Security Intelli‐ gence Service (CSIS) in May of 2023.
When he was asked by se‐ nior counsel for the Foreign Interference Commission during a public hearing of the foreign interference inquiry earlier this week if he found that briefing useful, O'Toole said he would have appreci‐ ated getting the briefing "a few years earlier."
O'Toole said the Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections Task Force (SITE) the federal body tasked with safeguarding Canadian elec‐ tions - told a member of his election team at the begin‐
ning of the campaign that there were no real problems in the 2019 election cam‐ paign and SITE didn't expect any serious problems in the 2021 campaign.
"We were kind of lulled in‐ to a sense of complacency, that everything should be fine ... there were no real problems in 2019," he told the inquiry. "We now know that not to be the case."
O'Toole said his election team then started seeing what appeared to be Chinese state media-backed disinfor‐ mation reports targeting his leadership, the party and specific Conservative candi‐ dates during the campaign.
O'Toole said his team raised their concerns with SITE but the task force down‐ played them - and did not disclose to the Conservative team an intelligence assess‐ ment that appeared to sup‐ port what the campaign was observing.
That intelligence assess‐ ment was drafted by the Rapid Response Mechanism Canada, a body established in 2018 to identify and re‐ spond to foreign threats to democracy. It was dated Sept. 13, 2021, seven days before Canadians cast their ballots.
The top-secret document said RRM had "observed what may be a Chinese Com‐ munist Party (CCP) informa‐ tion operation that aims to discourage voters from vot‐ ing for the Conservative Party of Canada."
A redacted version of the document was published by the inquiry. But O'Toole told the inquiry the assessment was never shared with his campaign.
The assessment added that RRM was unable to de‐ termine whether there was coordination between Chi‐ nese Communist Party media and WeChat news accounts serving Chinese-speaking Canadians that were amplify‐ ing the narrative.
The Liberal, Conservative and NDP 2021 campaign rep‐ resentatives who liaised with SITE all told the inquiry this week that the task force's briefings were generic and didn't provide useful or ac‐ tionable information.
Lyall King, who served as chair of SITE during the 2019 and 2021 elections, told the inquiry Friday that the pur‐ pose of the task force briefin‐ gs was to educate the parties and make them aware "in greater detail what foreign interference was, how it was conducted and in what spaces it was being con‐ ducted so that they would be able to look in their own campaigns and their own spaces to try and see if they could potentially identify ac‐ tivities of that kind."
When asked about the criticism coming from the party representatives, King told the inquiry that while he understands their frustra‐ tion, it was "never intended" that SITE would share specific intelligence with the parties.
He also noted that briefing political parties on classified information was a new endeavour for SITE. "There's learning processes on both sides," he said.
Secrets in silos
According to another redacted top secret docu‐ ment published by the in‐ quiry this week, King himself was frustrated with the flow of information from Canada's intelligence agencies to SITE during the 2019 election.
On October 31, 2019 - 10 days after election day - King wrote an email to a CSIS rep‐ resentative on the SITE task force expressing dismay about a CSIS national secu‐ rity briefing that was re‐ vealed to the task force after election day. It's not clear what the briefing revealed; the email is heavily redacted.
"This document is mas‐ sively problematic from my perspective. And will raise many questions," King wrote to the CSIS representative, whose name also was redacted.
"SITE had no visibility of this reporting," King wrote. "I have to question why this was not shared in advance with SITE - particularly given the severity of the alleged ac‐ tivity."
King said in the email that the limited distribution of the briefing effectively rendered the intelligence useless.
"How can we identify and understand the complete pic‐ ture and explore ways to mit‐ igate the problem if only five people receive the informa‐ tion - and no-one in an oper‐ ational capacity," King wrote. "Silos do not help."
King went on to describe a specific statement in the top secret document as "massively problematic."
"This will raise so many questions - and one week af‐ ter the election - when this information was clearly known beforehand and built up over time. There will be questions as to why this was not brought forth sooner," King wrote.
"The whole purpose of SITE was to review, share, as‐ sess and respond to foreign interference. This puts us in a very difficult spot, and brings into question the integrity of SITE."
CSIS assistant director Cherie Henderson was asked at the foreign interference in‐ quiry about King's 2019 email on Thursday. She said it was an issue of timing and the re‐ port in question was the cul‐ mination of an investigation that began before the 2019 election campaign. SITE only manages issues that arise during the election period.
Henderson said the topsecret report that was was fi‐ nalized and shared with SITE after the 2019 election in‐ cluded a line that said "the actor has already had an im‐ pact on the 2019 federal election and will remain a foreign interference threat after the election."
"When we took a look back at the report and the as‐ sessment, we felt internally that that was a bit of a leap too far. The threat actor would have had an impact on that particular time frame, and that particular issue, but that would not have im‐ pacted the integrity of the 2019 election. It was just a lit‐ tle bit too strong of an as‐ sessment," Henderson told the inquiry.
Henderson said CSIS rewrote that section of the re‐ port and resubmitted it.
SITE: An informed public is the 'best' defence
In an interview with CBC
News, national security and intelligence expert Wesley Wark said that sharing se‐ crets with the public goes against the core instincts of intelligence agencies.
"There's always a chal‐ lenge for intelligence agen‐ cies to kind of dial back their concerns about secrecy and protection of secrets, particu‐ larly if they have to reach a public audience - whether it's a general Canadian public audience or a public audi‐ ence in the form of securitycleared representatives of the political parties," said Wark.
"It's just not in the DNA of the intelligence agencies to do that. So they have to get over that."
SITE itself acknowledged after the 2019 election the level of communication with the public on foreign interfer‐ ence was insufficient.
"There was an over-re‐ liance on a single set of talk‐ ing points, agreed to before the election period, which re‐ sulted in a lack of nuanced messaging that actually ad‐ dressed the media's ques‐ tions or allowed SITE-TF to tell its story," says a post2019 election SITE document published by the inquiry.
"A more nuanced ap‐ proach to public messaging, and a greater willingness to share more information, will help the public better under‐ stand both the relevant threats and the government's response to those threats.
"An informed public is the best line of defence against foreign interference."