The shrug heard around the world
Liberals dispute, deny, dismiss CSIS warnings
There are two peculiar and paradoxical things about the disturbing revelations that have emerged over the past few days from Justice Mariejosée Hogue’s public inquiry into foreign interference in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections.
The first is that the most disturbing evidence entered into the record isn’t even really news. Pretty well all the bombshell revelations coming out of Justice Hogue’s commission hearings have been the subject of headline stories, one after the other, over the past five years.
What’s genuinely newsworthy about the proceedings is that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service documents now on file with the commission confirm pretty well all the shocking news reports about Chinese election subterfuge that the Trudeau government, from the beginning, has variously disputed, denied, or dismissed as outbursts of anti-asian racism or Conservative sour grapes.
The second paradox involves the pathology that the public inquiry has inadvertently allowed Canadians to witness, in real time. It’s the Liberal government’s cynical indifference to Beijing’s orchestration of interference operations across the country, a crippling pathology CSIS has been shouting about for years.
That same indifference fairly oozed from Prime Minister Trudeau and his officials this week at the inquiry — proceedings the Liberals fought tooth and nail, by obstruction and filibuster, in the effort to prevent the commission from even getting off the ground.
In just one of the 34 briefings about foreign interference that CSIS has provided the Prime Minister’s Office, various cabinet ministers and other senior officials in the years since 2018, a briefing note from last February, tabled with Hogue’s commission this week, contained this warning: “Until (foreign interference) is viewed as an existential threat to Canadian democracy and governments forcefully and actively respond, these threats will persist.”
Here’s one newsworthy thing that has emerged from the hearings: either by design or incompetence, the Trudeau government did not forcefully or actively respond to Beijing’s interference operations in the 2019 or the 2021 elections. Not by way of the Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections Task Force, and not by way of the panel of five senior public servants attending to the “Critical Election Incident Public Protocol.”
Another thing: Trudeau, his chief of staff Katie Telford and Jeremy Broadhurst, the Liberals’ national campaign director during the 2019 election, all went out of their way this week to impugn the various CSIS findings about the breadth and scope of Beijing’s subterfuge in Canada as unreliable, implausible and sometimes even inaccurate.
According to CSIS, though, China’s efforts included a slush fund of $250,000 that China’s Toronto consulate funnelled into “a group of known and suspected” Mandarin-bloc “threat actors” in the Greater Toronto Area to “covertly advance PRC interests through Canadian democratic institutions.”
Beijing’s exertions included a campaign targeting former Conservative leader Erin O’toole, former Conservative MP Kenny Chiu, New Democrat Jenny Kwan and Conservative shadow foreign minister Michael Chong. The operation targeting Chong and his family was so brazen it eventually forced Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly to expel Wei Zhao, a Chinese Ministry of State Security operative working out of the Toronto consulate. CSIS had been warning the Liberals to stay away from the guy for at least three years.
CSIS surveillance and wiretaps suggest that 11 political candidates and 13 political staff members were “either implicated in or impacted by this group of threat actors,” prior to and during the 2019 election.
As CSIS assessments, independent investigations and open-source evidence have consistently shown, Beijing’s operations in 2019 and 2021 were primarily intended to prevent the Liberals from losing to the Conservatives, leaving the Trudeau government in a minority position. Even so, on Wednesday, Dominic Leblanc, who held senior cabinet posts related to elections and national security in 2019 and 2021, threw his own shade at CSIS. He said he was skeptical that CSIS could discern “the shifting partisan preferences” of the Chinese government.
Trudeau similarly feigned surprise to learn that CSIS director David Vigneault’s talking points for an October 26, 2022 briefing with him articulated the agency’s view that the government’s unconcern about Beijing’s subversions was leaving Canada wide open to foreign disruption because there were “no consequences, either legal or political,” and that interference in elections was a “lowrisk and high-reward endeavour.” Consequently, Canada had become an outlier in the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing arrangement with the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.
Trudeau insisted that Vigneault had expressed no such concern to him during the 2022 meeting. Trudeau’s deputy chief of staff, Brian Clow, said he too had no recollection of Vigneault expressing any such concerns. Justice Hogue decided that the apparent contradiction was sufficient to summon Vigneault to respond on Friday. Wednesday was supposed to be the last day of hearings in this round of the commission’s proceedings. This was all a bit too surreal. Two years ago, Adam Fisher, the CSIS director-general for intelligence assessments, told the House Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs that Canada was in desperate need of a total “rethink” on foreign interference, and that CSIS was hobbled by legislation that has remained largely unchanged since 1984. Canada’s intelligence agencies don’t even have “the tools to understand the threat.” A week later, Trudeau was insisting that everything was under control: “There are already significant laws and measures that our intelligence and security officials have to go against foreign actors operating on Canadian soil.”
Four years ago, the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians reported that Canada had become an “attractive and permissive target” for Beijing to the point that its interference operations endangered the “foundations of our fundamental institutions, including our system of democracy itself.” In contrast to Canada’s Five Eyes partners, Ottawa hadn’t responded with any significant countermeasures, the national security review concluded.
In the case of Don Valley North MP Han Dong, whose Liberal nomination win was assisted by instant Liberal voters formed up from a group of Chinese high school students who CSIS says were threatened to do what they were told or lose their student visas, that too, was no big deal. The CSIS intelligence was fuzzy, Trudeau said, and besides, Liberal party functionaries decided that CSIS had nothing conclusive about Beijing’s role in the caper.
This is politics as usual in Canada now. It’s normal. And it’s been this way for a long time.
In 2010, CSIS director Richard Fadden issued a public warning that cabinet ministers in two provinces and several city-level politicians had been brought under Beijing’s influences. For his trouble he was hauled up before committees and hounded by Liberals and New Democrats for having been impertinently candid.
You could go back 20 years if you wanted. Back in 2017, the Financial Times got a hold of a training manual issued by the United Front Work Group, Beijing’s mammoth foreign-influence and overseas strong-arming agency. The manual boasted that six of its candidates were elected in the GTA in 2003, and in 2006, 10 out of its 44 favoured candidates won election to public office.
The UFWG recommendation: “We should aim to work with those individuals and groups that are at a relatively high level, operate within the mainstream of society and have prospects for advancement.”
If the Trudeau government’s theatre of the surreal at the Hogue inquiry this week is any indication, you have to hand it to them. Mission accomplished.
As CSIS warned: “Until (foreign interference) is viewed as an existential threat to Canadian democracy and governments forcefully and actively respond, these threats will persist.”
THIS IS POLITICS AS USUAL IN CANADA NOW. IT’S NORMAL.