Is the frenzy on Parliament Hill over foreign activity in election campaigns the fallout from a legitimate national security scandal – or is it, as I will contend, much ado about nearly nothing, another example of the political playacting and hyper-partisanship that has marked the House of Commons in recent years?
It has some trappings of a big-time scandal. Two parliamentary committees – the Commons Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs (known as PROC) and the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP) have been on the case for two weeks. They are conducting separate investigations, hearing essentially the same testimony from essentially the same witnesses, learning precious little that they didn’t already know, and are so consumed by partisan sniping that their chances of agreeing on anything useful border on nil.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has faced repeated calls for a public inquiry. He’s been fending them off, but the pressure is mounting. Last Thursday, the opposition majority on PROC passed an NDP resolution calling on the government to launch a public inquiry into allegations of foreign interference in all corners of our political system, not just election campaigns. The resolution is not binding on the government.
To back up a bit, this all began on Feb. 17 when the Globe and Mail reported that a whistleblower had allowed the paper’s Ottawa Bureau Chief Robert Fife and reporter Stephen Chase to view (but not copy) a highly classified document that described the activities of Chinese agents during the 2019 and 2021 federal election campaigns. The document was real, and the leak was a serious one. The story was a valuable reminder that foreign agents (from Russians in the Cold War to Chinese today) are spying in Ottawa, as they are in Washington and other capitals.
The fact that China has agents prowling around Canada in search of political and corporate secrets is not news, nor is the fact that Beijing has intensified its efforts in recent years to the point that, according to published reports, its foreign affairs department is spending more money on espionage than on traditional diplomatic representation.
Three assertions in the original Globe story touched off the frenzy in Ottawa. First, that Prime Minister Trudeau, who receives regular security briefings, had been informed by the director of CSIS that the Chinese had attempted to interfere in the outcome of the 2021 and/or 2019 election in the hope of electing Liberals (or defeating Conservatives); both elections returned Liberal minority governments. Second, that the prime minister was not interested in information about election interference and said he did not propose to act on it. Third, that Trudeau was told or warned by CSIS not to allow certain compromised individuals to run as Liberals, and he did nothing to stop them.
The Feb. 17 story did not ring right to me. I did not believe that Trudeau would ignore credible information from the head of the government’s spy service that foreigners were trying to interfere in election outcomes; I felt sure that Trudeau, or any of his predecessors in my experience, would have taken swift action to stop the foreign activity and expel the offenders. Nor did I believe that CSIS would try to prevent the nomination of candidates in any party. The Globe story did not mention that the organization’s mandate specifically bars it from any involvement in domestic politics. I suspected that if CSIS Director David Vigneault had attempted to tell the prime minister whom he could not choose for his party’s slate, the director would have been looking for new employment the next morning.
My suspicion about the Globe story – that either the reporters had been misled by a whistleblower with an axe to grind who wanted to maximize the damage to the government, or that someone at the newspaper had torqued the story and inflated it to national scandal proportions – seemed warranted five days later. On Feb. 22, the Globe disappeared the original version from its website and replaced it with an “updated” story, also dated Feb. 17, from which the three contentious assertions had been removed.
I do not know what happened. I would simply note that when Vigneault, the CSIS director, was questioned at last Thursday’s PROC committee hearing, he said he had not mentioned election interference when he briefed Trudeau because CSIS had concluded that the Chinese activities had not approached the threshold of interference. That conclusion was supported by the RCMP. It follows that if Vigneault did not mention the subject in his briefing, Trudeau could scarcely have brushed it off. And there has been no evidence that CSIS tried to block any candidates in any party.
Although the New Democrats may well be genuine in their concern for national security and in their desire for a broad inquiry into foreign political activity in Canada, the Conservatives have a narrower focus in their demand for a public inquiry. Their concern is less about safeguarding national security than it is about seizing partisan advantage. I thought Michael Cooper, the Alberta Conservative who is leading the attack at PROC, gave his party’s game away when he said: “This scandal is about what the prime minister knows about this interference, when he first learned about it, and what he did about it or failed to do about it.”
The Tory strategy is unrelenting. Find an issue, any issue will do, and blame the prime minister personally.
Neither CSIS nor the Mounties are investigating interference by China in Canadian elections. As RCMP Deputy Commissioner Michael Duheme says, “We did not receive any actionable intelligence that would warrant us to initiate a criminal investigation.”
On balance, I’ll go with much ado about nearly nothing.
Cambridge resident Geoffrey Stevens is an author and former Ottawa columnist and managing editor of the Globe and Mail and Maclean’s. He welcomes comments atgeoffstevens40@gmail.com