O’Toole claims election meddling
Former federal Tory leader says Canadians should have been warned
Warnings ought to have been issued to the public about foreign interference efforts underway during the 2021 federal election and the failure to do that represents a failure for democracy, former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole said Wednesday.
Appearing at the public inquiry into foreign interference, O’Toole maintained Beijing-backed campaigns twisted his party’s positions on China and could have cost the Conservatives as many as nine seats in the 2021 election.
While that number of seats would not have been enough to win the Conservatives the election — which returned Justin Trudeau’s Liberals with a minority — those losses did form part of the reason he was kicked out as leader a few months after the vote, he said.
O’Toole testified he regrets that during the campaign he did not go public with the misinformation efforts his team was seeing.
He chose not to speak out over concerns anything he said would be misconstrued “as our attempts to save the campaign,” he told the inquiry.
But now that documents tabled for the Hogue commission show that security agencies were tracking the same information, in hindsight he should have said something, he said.
“I regret not doing that for those candidates that ended up losing, I feel, because of the level of foreign interference.”
Among them was Kenny Chiu, the defeated Conservative candidate in the riding of Richmond Steveston-East, who told the commission he was subject to a “tsunami” of misinformation around his party’s platform on China, and felt he was deliberately shunned and ignored by Beijing-friendly groups disinterested in his attempts to correct the record. He described it as a feeling of drowning while the government watched and did nothing.
“I thought I would be protected by my country and I was deeply troubled, disappointed that I was exposed and the government doesn’t seem to care and now that through the commission I’ve learned they’ve known all about it,” Chiu testified Wednesday.
The commission, led by Quebec judge Marie-Josée Hogue, is probing the scope of foreign state meddling in the previous two national elections, how much was known about it before and after, what security agencies, bureaucrats, politicians and parties were told, and how they all handled the information.
The inquiry has previously heard that none of the representatives assigned by the main political parties to meet with the Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections Task Force (SITE) — the body charged with election oversight — were given specific details around what foreign interference activities were happening during the 2019 and 2021 campaigns.
Documents tabled with the commission, however, show that information was held by SITE, as well as by a department within Global Affairs Canada known as the rapid response mechanism (RRM) which tracks online misinformation specifically.
“RRM Canada has observed what may be a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) information operation that aims to discourage voters from voting for the Conservative party of Canada (CPC),” reads a SITE update dated Sept. 13, 2021 and introduced Wednesday.