PM continues damage control around election interference
The crux of the foreign interference inquiry is to discover whether Justin Trudeau danced with the devil in the pale moonlight.
In other words, did the prime minister put partisan interest ahead of the national interest by turning a blind eye — or worse, encouraging — China’s meddling in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections to benefit the Liberal party’s electoral fortunes.
There are people within the security services who say he did. One senior source told me last year he considers the Liberal party to be “a co-conspirator” with Beijing because it failed to act on information provided by the security agencies.
Trudeau was the star witness on Wednesday as the first phase of hearings into foreign interference at the public inquiry before Commissioner Marie-josée Hogue wound up.
It is clear that some attempts at foreign interference were made. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service briefed Trudeau that China “clandestinely and deceptively interfered in both the 2019 and 2021 general elections.”
But the takeaway from the prime minister’s appearance is it is extremely difficult to get a clear picture of the impact of those attempts — or whether there was any witting complicity.
Trudeau made the case that both elections were free and fair, and his government did all it could to ensure the integrity of federal votes.
It was a disciplined, businesslike performance, absent the standard theatrics.
He pointed to his government’s efforts to protect the integrity of the electoral process: the establishment of a national security parliamentary committee and the Security and Intelligence Threats to Election (SITE) task force, as well as the panel of five public servants charged with monitoring interference during elections.
The prime minister downplayed the suggestion that Chinese officials expressed a preference for a Liberal party victory in the 2021 election.
He said relations with China were strained over the detention of the two Michaels (Spavor and Kovrig) and Canada was “extremely active” in drumming up support for their release from around the world. “It would seem improbable that the Chinese government had a preference (for the Liberals) in the election,” he said.
Commission counsel raised the case of Don Valley North MP Han Dong. Evidence already heard by the commission has suggested he won the nomination with help from busloads of Chinese international students.
Trudeau said he was briefed by Liberal campaign director Jeremy Broadhurst during the 2019 election that CSIS was concerned about possible Chinese government interference to help nominate Dong.
Trudeau asked if there was evidence the plan had been enacted, or whether Dong knew about the busloads of foreign students.
He said the answers from CSIS were not clear and, since he and Broadhurst agreed the threshold for overturning the nomination process was high, they decided not to remove Dong as the candidate. His testimony suggested a textbook definition of wilful blindness.
It is tempting, as the Liberals clearly desire, to dismiss the whole foreign interference affair as immaterial.
Last spring’s report by Trudeau’s hand-picked special rapporteur, David Johnston, exonerated the prime minister of blame and said specific instances of interference were “less concerning than some media might have suggested.”
There were certainly no signs of alarm during the 2021 election from the panel of senior public servants, which decided the interference it discovered did not meet the threshold of issuing a public warning.
(One of the positives that may yet emerge from this inquiry is a recommendation that the bar be lowered to warn voters in particular ridings or ethnic communities about smaller-scale incidents, such as the voter-suppression tactics allegedly used in Vancouver in 2021.)
But the foreign interference allegations are important because they have done immense damage to the integrity of our core institutions.
Beijing’s support for the Liberal party — and possible Liberal party complicity — does not have to be proved beyond reasonable doubt to make voters queasy.
The allegation in a recent Globe and Mail article that Dong was warned by someone in the Liberal party that he was being watched by CSIS will hardly reassure the public.
As Johnston noted, democracy is built on trust and that priceless commodity is in short supply when it comes to the electoral system. A Leger poll last spring said one in five Canadians does not trust the reliability of elections and nearly one in three does not believe they are open and fair.
Trudeau was persuaded to do the right thing, in the form of a public inquiry — only after all his other options had been exhausted.
He has tried to resist all external scrutiny of the issue.
He maintained on Wednesday that this was because of a reluctance to discuss security tradecraft in a public forum.
Yet that is only the latest pretext. When the allegations of foreign interference were first raised, he said the media reporting was false and that even discussing the issue was damaging to democracy.
When the specifics of Dong’s nomination were leaked last year, Trudeau all but played the race card and said it was not up to unelected security officials to dictate to political parties who could or could not run.
But a more plausible explanation is that the prime minister does not want a light shone on an association with China that has proved to be mutually beneficial.
Liberal officials have done their best to limit the damage.
Conveniently, Trudeau’s chief of staff, Katie Telford, said she doesn’t place much stock in intelligence assessments after discovering errors on one previous occasion. Trudeau gave every indication that he rarely read intelligence briefings and that they fail to register unless he is given a verbal update.
Broadhurst testified there was nothing inherently wrong with allowing foreign students to vote — under Liberal party rules, anyone over the age of 14 who lived in the riding could take part, even if they weren’t Canadian citizens.
China has for at least a quarter of a century tried to engineer the nomination of people sympathetic to Beijing by stacking meetings with paid-for supporters. CSIS even has footage of one candidate receiving cash from a Chinese official.
The difference in more recent years is the scale of the efforts and the apparent willingness of the government to look the other way — a tendency that has become a habit when it comes to this country’s diaspora politics.
There can be little doubt that China wanted a Liberal victory in 2021, despite tensions with Ottawa over the two Michaels.
The commission heard repeatedly there is no evidence that Beijing was behind misinformation and disinformation in ridings with large Chinese communities, but there was a clear backlash against the Conservatives. The government’s Rapid Response Mechanism, which monitored interference, noted that Canada’s Wechat social media was full of anti-conservative activity, popularizing the view that Erin O’toole’s party wanted to break off relations with Beijing and that MP Kenny Chiu’s foreign influence registry bill would require all individuals with ties to China to register. O’toole testified he believes that his party lost up to nine seats in 2021 because of the disinformation campaign, including Chiu’s seat in Greater Vancouver.
Beijing must be delighted with the way things have gone: a minority Liberal government in Ottawa and a slump in confidence in Canadian democracy.
David Mulroney, a former Canadian ambassador in Beijing, put it well on the X social media platform when he said China’s preference for the Liberal party is “rock-solid and unchanging.”
“The CCP (Chinese Communist Party’s) assessment is that the Liberal Party leadership is astoundingly naive, remarkably uninformed and reliably unprincipled,” he said.
Trudeau may not have danced with the devil, but he has at the very least given him a saucy glimpse of his Star Wars socks.