Foreign interference may have `impacted' 2021 result in Richmond riding, inquiry finds
Foreign meddling attempts didn't change who won the past two federal elections in Canada, but may have changed the result in a Richmond riding in 2021, a public inquiry concluded Friday.
A preliminary report by commissioner Marie-josée Hogue said the extent of the impact of foreign interference is unknown, though the number of races involved is small.
“The ultimate effects of foreign interference remain uncertain,” she said in her interim report.
She singled out the 2021 results in Steveston—richmond East, where she said there is a “reasonable possibility” that a foreign interference campaign targeting Conservative candidate Kenny Chiu may have cost him the seat.
In her report, Hogue wrote that the campaign “could have impacted the result” in Chiu's riding in 2021. But in a subsequent statement, she appeared to go a step further.
“There is one riding where disinformation may have led to the election of one candidate over another,” said Hogue, who did not take questions Friday. “But I cannot say for sure.”
Misleading information about Chiu and former Conservative leader Erin O'toole appeared in media outlets and social media sites with ties to Beijing, painting them as anti-china and trying to dissuade Chinese Canadians from voting for them.
The actual impact of that campaign on the final vote is “difficult to determine,” Hogue found.
“In Canada, how someone votes is secret. It is therefore not possible to directly link the misleading media narratives with how any given voter cast their ballot,” the report said.
“And even if I were to assume that some votes were changed, there is no way to know whether enough votes were changed to affect the result.”
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said last month that several intelligence and security agencies found “not a single riding ” was impacted or changed as a result of foreign interference.
Conservative foreign affairs critic Michael Chong said Hogue's report doesn't support what Trudeau told the public.
“This report is a damning set of conclusions and findings in the first phase of this inquiry, about what the Trudeau government has indicated over the last 18 months and contradicts much of what the government has told us over that period of time,” Chong said Friday.
O'toole testified during the inquiry's public hearings that he believed the misinformation may have cost him as many as nine seats in the 2021 election.
That was not enough to change the overall results — the Liberals won 160 seats to the Conservatives' 119 — but O'toole said he thinks wins in those ridings would have allowed him to stay on as leader. He was ousted by the Conservative caucus in February, less than five months after the election.
Hogue said the evidence she has seen doesn't allow her to make any conclusions about the wider impact of the interference.
“I do not mean to minimize the legitimate concerns of those who raised these issues. My findings are limited to the evidence before me,” she said.