PM’S top aide cites ‘obvious errors’ by intelligence agencies
TESTIFY THEY WERE UNAWARE OF MANY OF THE CHINESE MEDDLING CLAIMS UNTIL REPORTED IN THE MEDIA
Senior staffers in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s office said they have come across “obvious errors” in intelligence assessments that have taught them to not blindly trust whatever information is presented to them.
Katie Telford, who has served as Trudeau’s chief of staff since 2015, told the Public Inquiry on Foreign Interference on Tuesday that she had seen “reports on alleged events that had not, in fact, occurred” and inaccurate threat assessments about elected officials.
Her testimony, alongside that of three current or former top Trudeau advisers, sheds new light on tensions between the political operators and the intelligence agencies on what information should have been flagged to the Prime Minister’s Office on foreign interference during the 2019 and 2021 federal elections.
It also revealed that top PMO officials were not aware of many of the allegations of China’s attempts to sway the 2019 election until they were reported in the media in November 2022.
Former Trudeau senior adviser Jeremy Broadhurst told inquiry counsel that “obvious errors in intelligence reinforced healthy skepticism about the accuracy of subsequent intelligence” in the PMO, according to a pre-hearing interview summary produced by the commission. In one instance, Telford recalled that an intelligence agency had “mistakenly identified a threat linked to an MP.”
She said it “didn’t seem right” and asked officials to “do whatever work they could to further substantiate” those claims.
IT TAUGHT US NOT TO HAVE BLIND FAITH OR FIRST BLUSH TRUST
“To the credit of the officials involved, they went and they worked through the night, and they came to us the next day and reversed the assessment because they had made a mistake in how they were looking at the information,” she said.
Telford maintained that had she not pressed for more information, this person’s political career would have been stalled without valid reason.
“It taught us not to have blind faith or first blush trust in the information that we would see because we watched that reversal of the assessment happen and it would have had a significant impact on this person’s career,” she added.
In her pre-interview summary, Telford said she discussed the issue of faulty intelligence with CSIS Director David Vigneault, who allegedly said that “it is important to not correct mistaken raw intelligence as incorrect information could be useful.”
Broadhurst, who was the Liberals’ national campaign director in 2019, said he briefed Trudeau on the alleged irregularities surrounding the Don Valley North nomination process in the weeks preceding the election that led to Liberal MP Han Dong winning the Toronto riding.
He said at the time Trudeau decided that “there was no action for him to take.”
Broadhurst said he asked party officials if they had observed anything out of the ordinary, such as people who voted illegally or if there had been complaints about the meeting, and they said no.
“At the end of the day, there’s a limit to what the party can do. We’re not a forensic organization,” he said.
There were other alleged instances of foreign interference during the 2021 election where Trudeau was kept in the dark by senior public servants before they determined they did not need immediate action on his part, but he was informed by his political team.
Former clerk of the Privy Council, Janice Charette, testified that she did not brief Trudeau on specific matters related to foreign interference during the 2021 election.
That was the case for a classified briefing done by CSIS and the Privy Council Office to a cleared representative of the Liberal Party of Canada “on a matter that was relevant to that particular party.” What CSIS told the Liberal representative has not been publicly disclosed.
Broadhurst said the information arrived late in the campaign and that he was unable to reach Trudeau in the final week as he was on the road but shared the classified information related to the Liberal party shortly after election day.
Charette also did not brief Trudeau on the concerns raised by the Conservative Party of Canada during the 2021 election until two years later when the opposition party’s former campaign cochair, Walied Soliman, made public comments on social media on Feb. 17, 2023.
Former leader Erin O’toole said his party might have lost up to nine seats in 2021 because of a disinformation campaign on Chinese social media suggesting that he and some of his candidates were anti-china because of their policies and former MP Kenny Chiu’s proposed bill to create a foreign agent registry.
Charette said the Critical Election Incident Public Protocol, of which she was the chair at the time, determined the situation did not meet the threshold to make a public announcement because it did not compromise the integrity of the election.
Broadhurst said he was not aware of any allegations of a disinformation campaign targeting the Conservatives but argued that the party’s stance on China was well-known.
The sense of urgency on foreign interference shifted dramatically after media leaks started casting doubt on Canada’s reaction to foreign interference.
The inquiry saw a handwritten note from a May 18, 2023, meeting that Trudeau requested with cabinet ministers Bill Blair, Dominic Leblanc, Mélanie Joly and Marco Mendicino to detangle who knew what and when on different instances of foreign interference.
“At this point in time, there was a fair degree of public attention, media attention, attention in Parliament to matters of foreign interference,” said Charette.
The notes show that a CSIS representative briefed Trudeau and the cabinet ministers at that meeting on foreign interference efforts by China, India and Pakistan in the 2019 elections.
Trudeau’s then-national security adviser Jody Thomas’s “immediate focus” upon reading media reports divulging information about foreign interference based on leaked top-secret documents was to identify the source of the leaks, according to her pre-hearing interview.
That did not mean that the prime minister and his team were not regularly briefed about foreign interference.
An Oct. 26, 2022 note of talking points for CSIS Director Vigneault ahead of a briefing for Trudeau reveals that the spy agency believed that the government wasn’t doing enough to fight foreign interference, leaving the field wide open for Canada’s adversaries to act with “no consequences.”
The note also said Canada was lagging behind its Five Eyes intelligence allies (U.S., U.K., Australia and New Zealand) in terms of dealing with the threat of foreign interference through legislation or proactively publicizing known interference activities to deter future efforts.
“Ultimately, state actors are able to conduct (foreign interference) successfully in Canada because there are no consequences, either legal or political. (Foreign interference) is therefore a low-risk and high-reward endeavour,” reads the note.
“Until (foreign interference) is viewed as constituting an existential threat to Canadian democracy and the Government forcefully and actively responds, these threats will persist,” it continues.
But two top PMO officials testifying Tuesday afternoon said that they had never heard much of the alarming information on Vigneault’s talking point memo.
“These bullet points... have very little resemblance to what the prime minister was told in that briefing of October 27,” said Trudeau’s deputy chief of staff, Brian Clow.
Trudeau and a range of ministers are set to testify at the public inquiry on Wednesday.