Trudeau has lost the plot on foreign interference

As polls show Liberals losing ground and calls for an inquiry grow, his MPs must be worried

These must be anxious times for backbenchers in the federal Liberal party.

Their leader — whose coattails they cling to — is digging a hole. And Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has either forgotten or ignored the adage that if you’re stuck in a hole, the first thing you should do is stop digging.

The hole that he and his government are in is, of course, the uproar around allegations of Chinese interference in the federal elections in 2019 and 2021.

As reports in the Globe and Mail and on Global News revealed more and more instances of foreign interference, Trudeau has tried to brush them aside by dismissing them or lashing out at his critics.

If you want a sample of the prime minister’s obfuscation and combativeness, there’s a telling three-minute-plus clip online in which reporters push him to answer about what he knew and when he knew it. He talks over and around their questions with repetitive but unrevealing talking points about the sanctity of elections.

This week, the Liberals tried to lower the temperature by agreeing to allow Trudeau’s chief of staff, Katie Telford, to be questioned at a parliamentary committee. Before that, government MPs had been filibustering opposition demands.

Implications that a foreign power tried to influence a Canadian election are more than enough fodder for a public inquiry, but Trudeau has steadfastly refused. Instead, he hoped to quell the uproar by appointing a rapporteur. The woman or man who would take on that job, he said, would be an “eminent Canadian.”

But his choice — David Johnston, a former governor general — has been panned by many. His background and experience are impeccable, but he has a close relationship to Trudeau. Naming the former governor general as the special rapporteur was supposed to put all this on the back burner for at least the foreseeable future. But hand-picking Johnston has only raised more questions.

The NDP wants an inquiry. The Bloc Québécois wants one.

And the Conservatives are itching for a public investigation that would give their leader, Pierre Poilievre, a daily platform to bash Trudeau.

And Trudeau is not playing from a position of strength. Polls this week show the gap between Liberals and Conservatives is negligible. One poll, by Nanos, has Poilievre and Trudeau tied in voter preference for prime minister.

“Of course, usually the incumbent PM has an advantage by merely being prime minister,” noted Nik Nanos, chief data scientist for the company.

For the opposition parties an inquiry isn’t solely an opportunity to see the Liberals squirm. It is also the best way to find out just how far foreign influence invaded Canadian elections, and whether that affected the outcome. In short, the sanctity of Canadian democracy.

In 2015, Trudeau carried a party that had been relegated to the parliamentary hinterland all the way to a majority government.

His political savvy, and that of his closest aides, executed a campaign that promised change. Canadians — even some in Alberta — embraced it.

Almost eight years later, on one of the most critical and important issues he has faced, the 2023 version of Trudeau seems to have lost the plot.