The Thursday Question 2:13 - You have got to be kidding
Foreign interference: Still low risk. Still high payoff.
Last week’s budget was not the most important political development of April. Developments at the Hogue inquiry were.
As a result of the inquiry, it is now clear that:
· CSIS and the two high-profile committees of public servants that Mr. Trudeau put in charge of tracking foreign election interference were well aware of the PRC’s efforts against Jenny Kwan, Kenny Chiu, Erin O’Toole’s national campaign, and others, in the 2019 and 2021 general elections.
· Mr. Trudeau and his staff tried to downplay how much *they* knew about China’s interference when they appeared before Hogue. The intelligence wasn’t shared, no one told them it was important, the reports weren’t clear, the intel wasn’t well grounded, in some cases it was wrong.
· When CSIS Director David Vigneault was recalled to the inquiry, he did not back down. His reiterated that reports on China’s activities were briefed upwards, that these reports were widely known at the centre, and that his assessment - foreign political interference was a “low-cost, high-payoff strategy” - had been repeated by other officials. He had recommendation the Trudeau government take foreign interference far more seriously.
If Mr. Trudeau and his staff were unaware of what was going on, they put some effort into being unaware. Certainly, by the beginning of last week, Mr. Trudeau and his staff had caught up.
So, it was stunning when only two days after Mr. Vigneault testified, the government let it be known that its most senior professional diplomat, deputy foreign minister David Morrison, was heading to Beijing. Apparently, Mr. Morrison’s mission is to offer up whatever concessions are needed to get Foreign Minister Melanie Joly an invitation to visit China.
The planned trip is a stunning rebuke to the Hogue inquiry and the CSIS assessments. Yes, Canada should have a dialogue with the PRC regime. After all, the US Secretary of State is visiting. But the Trudeau government could not have found a better way to prove Mr. Vigneault’s point.
It has been hard to find media coverage of this development. The well-resourced CBC parliamentary bureau prepared this overview of the issue and missed the development entirely. CBC even repeated disinformation that the inquiry has ignored election interference from India. (CSIS briefings released by the inquiry describe China’s election interference as the more serious problem. The police investigation into the murder that Mr. Trudeau claims was conducted on India’s behalf should be allowed to run its course.)
Two teams of public servants reviewed foreign interference in the 2019 and 2021 campaigns. The inquiry has heard, and Mr. Trudeau has repeated, that these teams concluded China’s actions did not change the outcome of either campaign. But we do not know *anything* about the expertise the public service relied upon or the modelling they used to arrive at such a firm conclusion. We are supposed to be reassured that the former head of the Trudeau Foundation reviewed the work. I submit that despite decades of political science research on electoral behaviour, no one can explain how many votes are moved by a particular tactic during an election. I see no reason to accept the conclusion of these public servants on the matter.
The only foreign interference that *did* get officials moving was an obscure American web posting with wild allegations about Mr. Trudeau. In that case, PCO pressured Facebook into suppressing the posting.
Hogue has not heard anything to suggest that the government will take effective steps when China interferes in the next election. The opposition parties have to start seeding the ground soon to get ahead of those efforts. They therefore missed an opportunity to home in on Mr. Vigneault’s testimony and Mr. Morrison’s trip last week. Given the targeting of Jenny Kwan, the NDP should be kicking up a fuss about their coalition partner.
When Mr. Poilievre decides to speak out on this issue, he will have credibility. Why?