On witness stand, PM wore two hats
Justin Trudeau arrived at the foreign interference inquiry this week wearing two hats: one of the prime minister, the other of the leader of the Liberal party.
Over more than three hours of testimony, Trudeau exchanged those hats frequently, sometimes within one answer.
He was prime ministerial as he explained what he could and couldn’t reveal about national security. But he was also a purely partisan Liberal, especially when he used the occasion to take shots at the Conservatives — the harshest ones aimed at how they deal with foreign interference, or even whether they traffic in it.
The first shot came moments after he was sworn in as the marquee witness at the inquiry. Trudeau went all the way back to when Liberals were in opposition, and frustrated by how Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper was keeping MPs in the dark on matters of national security.
“One of the things that we had grown concerned about as a party when we were in opposition before the 2015 election was the lack of oversight by parliamentarians into what was going on in our national security universe in this country,” Trudeau said, citing the controversy over Canada’s treatment of detainees in Afghanistan.
He noted — as did his ministers and advisers from the Prime Minister’s Office during their testimony — that the current Liberal government was the first to establish a system to monitor foreign interference in elections. It was built “from scratch,” Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc said.
Harper’s government was also described as far too tight with the Indian government when Trudeau was being cross-examined by a lawyer with the Sikh Coalition, who asked how much the Liberals had redacted from inquiry documents to keep diplomatic peace with India.
“I think that’s certainly a question one needs to ask of the previous Conservative government, that was known for its very cosy relationship with the current Indian government,” Trudeau said.
But his most pointed barbs were aimed at Harper’s successors, especially the current Conservatives under Pierre Poilievre. That’s when it became obvious that Trudeau was going out of his way to take some pokes at his political rivals. During questioning about the degree of Russian meddling in Canadian democracy, Trudeau minced no words when he said Poilievre’s Conservatives had fallen victim to the Russians.
“Ukrainian-Canadians, like all Canadians, need to remain vigilant to Russian disinformation and to the amplification of pro-Russia narratives in contexts and coming from places that one wouldn’t suspect, pro-Russian narratives to be amplified,” Trudeau said.
“I’m very pleased to see that Ukraine just passed the updated Canada-Ukraine free trade agreement over the past days, and I am continuing to be bewildered at the fact that the Conservative party voted against that update because they fell prey to pro-Russian narratives.”
Trudeau has taken every opportunity to remind listeners that Conservatives voted against the Canada-Ukraine free trade deal, including during an interview with me earlier this year. But I’m pretty sure that’s the first time he’s come out and accused them of being played by Russia.
I’m also sure this was the first time we’ve heard Trudeau give voice to his feelings about the rumours that circulated on the dark web about him in the 2019 campaign, featuring wild and unproven allegations about him ending his teaching career in B.C. because of an incident with a student.
I won’t repeat all of it here, but one of the main channels for that smear was a website called The Buffalo Chronicle. We learned this week that Canadian security officials had some success in limiting how much that article was circulated by more reputable online platforms in 2019.
Trudeau was asked about this bit of meddling from a U.S.-based website, which he said was imported to Conservative campaigners in 2019 — and beyond.
“I was, of course, aware of the quite disgusting, false conspiracies or allegations being shared by both the Buffalo Chronicle and a significant number of Conservative politicians,” he said.
What Trudeau didn’t say was that this bit of mischief lingers, and not only online. Just last May, during a testy exchange in the Commons, Poilievre alluded to Trudeau leaving his teaching job early — a wink and nod to those still trading on that baseless rumour. Harper’s former communications director Andrew McDougall noted that strategy with no pleasure in an Ottawa Citizen column, describing it as a play for conspiracy theorists.
Trudeau doesn’t show up at inquiries unprepared, so one can safely assume he was waiting for a chance to take these shots at the Conservatives this week. They went beyond further display of his combativeness of late, which I wrote about recently.
He was sitting at a foreign-interference inquiry, raising not-so-subtle questions about whether Conservatives have been helping some meddlers. Was he doing that as a prime minister or a Liberal leader? Probably both.