Front Burner - What we know from Canada’s foreign interference inquiry so far

Episode Date: April 12, 2024

Politicians, staffers and intelligence officials have been testifying in Ottawa over the last several weeks in a public inquiry into foreign interference in Canadian elections in 2019 and 2021. While many details remain classified, it appears from the testimony that China, India and even Pakistan made attempts. But did those attempts have meaningful impacts?CBC senior parliamentary reporter Janyce McGregor explains what the inquiry has shown about Canada's ability to recognize and repel foreign interference in its elections — and what that could mean for the next one.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. So did foreign governments interfere in the last two federal elections? That's the question a public inquiry has been trying to answer for the last few weeks in Ottawa. And so far, the answer seems to be, well, they did. But how far and how much? There are still a lot of questions about that. The decision to remove someone needed

a high threshold. But in this case, I didn't feel that there was sufficiently credible information that would justify this very significant step as to remove a candidate. That's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau testifying at the inquiry on Wednesday. We also heard from cabinet ministers and staffers, intelligence officials, and from former Conservative Party leader Aaron O'Toole. To suggest that an election is free and fair from foreign interference is not accurate if some people are impacted. My colleague Janice McGregor has been following this story closely. She's going to walk us through what we've learned about those last two elections and what the implications could be when we head to the polls next. next. Janice, hi. It is such a pleasure to have you on FrontBurner. Thank you for stopping by.

Oh, you're really welcome, Jamie. So before we start today, I wonder if we could just do a little bit of a definition. And so I'm hoping that we can start with defining what exactly foreign interference is in the context that we're talking about it here. Right, because there are a lot of different forms of foreign interference, right? You can have it in the business or economic sense, espionage, stealing tech, you know, cyber warfare. That's not what we're talking about at this inquiry, as serious and important as it is. This is about specifically election interference. And important to know the difference also, when you're talking about foreign meddling, the difference between influence and interference. And this is something that

came up at the inquiry. Maybe giving some examples kind of helps. But as a general rule, what we're talking about is what happens in the daylight and what happens in the darkness. So if I'm a diplomat and I want the country I'm stationed in to buy my country's cheese or buy my country's helicopters or maybe spend more on defense or maybe I'm Team Canada in Washington and I really want the U.S. not to pull out of NAFTA, I'm giving speeches. I'm issuing press releases. I'm being really obvious in my lobbying. Everyone knows I'm there. I'm attending public events. I'm not sort of sneaking around. I'm just making the case for my country's national interest. If you are doing interference, this is more clandestine. This could be happening online. This could be happening in terms of cultivating kind of secret networks of people, maybe your agent in a country that would do your bidding indirectly. It can also happen in the form of financing, donating to people to do what you want to do, threatening people, bribing people. But it's not showing up on the audits for a campaign at the end of the day. It's happening secretly under the table.

So given that, this inquiry was looking at whether the interference that you're talking about actually happened in the 2019 election and the 2021 election, right? And maybe the easiest way for us to try and break this down today would be to go through each of those elections. And let's start with 2019. Just to refresh people's memories, this was the second election with Justin Trudeau as liberal leader. And he went from a majority government to a minority. One of the main points of interest there has been the Toronto riding of Don Valley North and the liberal candidate in that riding, Handong. And what did the inquiry hear in terms of allegations of what happened there? meeting that happened inside the writ period. And that has ended up mattering here. The key allegation has to do with who voted at this meeting. And this is where the buses come in. When Handong himself was in front of this inquiry, I'm going to say it was a bit painful

listening to lawyers kind of drag out details on this because his memory of how many buses there were and who paid for the buses was not good. On the stand, Dong was asked what he knew about that. I didn't see them. How many students were involved? I don't remember. It's very vague. Or who commissioned the bus? I don't remember. don't remember. Which was kind of amazing because when this first came to light in the media, it was all about this story of busloads or at least a busload of foreign students brought in potentially

with some kind of false ID, some of them, the allegation that they weren't actually from the riding and that they were speaking Chinese and somehow doing kind of foreign interference by supporting Han Dong because someone wanted him to win, as opposed to the other candidate in this riding. Now, subsequently, partly through Dong's testimony of this inquiry, we've learned a few things, that these students were apparently from an international school, that they were living in a residence that is in his riding, although the school itself isn't in his riding. And there's been some question about who paid for this bus exactly. So I can't tell you for sure who paid for the bus,

but it does seem that there is some question about whether all the organizing behind that nomination meeting was domestic, or whether there were some Chinese consular officials involved in organizing on Don's behalf. Right. And what has the intelligence services said that they knew about this situation, CSIS, and what they told the liberals about the situation? Wouldn't we like to know exactly, right? And here we are, right? This is classified stuff. And this is the problem at this inquiry.

They haven't opened their files to tell us exactly what they saw at this meeting or why it so concerned them that extraordinarily in the middle of the campaign, they felt they needed to brief liberal party officials who specifically were given security clearance. brief Liberal Party officials who specifically were given security clearance. We know from the testimony of David Vigneault, the spy agency's head, that they didn't feel it was their job to explicitly hand over, for example, a list of people at the nomination meeting that they were concerned about. It was interesting, though, because when people sort of from the Liberal Party were talking about this,

they pointed out that they weren't given specific enough details from the spy agency to even help them understand who at the nomination meeting sort of was sparking such concern. So it was sort of both of them pointing at each other saying, well, you know, it's not my job to do this. And the other side saying, well, it's also not my job to do this. And you haven't really given me any lists. How am I supposed to do this? In Justin Trudeau's evidence summary, there is a reference to Trudeau himself finding some kind of a mistake in the intelligence about Don Valley North and asking for it to be corrected. And when I saw that yesterday, I was like, whoa, what? Because one of the most sensational things about the testimony that came from CSIS about Don Valley North was that they ended up recalling an assessment of the intelligence on this.

They wouldn't say why, but this recall apparently happened after a conversation with the Prime Minister's National Security and Intelligence Advisor. So what was in their assessment that was wrong? Was this the same mistake as Trudeau was referring to in his evidence? We can't necessarily make that link, but it does seem like there were questions about what CSIS thought it saw at that nomination meeting and some serious pushback. Talk to me a little bit more about what Trudeau said when he testified at the inquiry earlier this week about this incident in Don Valley North, right, about these buses. This is happening all during the campaign. It was extraordinarily briefed to the Liberal Party through their officials. And then Trudeau described how he was actually pulled aside at the airport, actually put into a secure room there. And these concerns of CSIS were explained to him. He said he had questions about this. I asked the extent to which they were certain that it happened, the extent to which they were certain that China was indeed behind the mobilizing of

the bus or buses. And I also asked whether or not CSIS had information that Han Dong knew about this. And what they found was that this intelligence was not corroborated or not kind of confirmed to the level where they would feel like they needed necessarily to pull this candidate in this riding. They said the bar for doing something like that needed to be very high, and they didn't feel that the information put in front of them went over that bar. I didn't feel that there was sufficiently credible information that would justify this very significant step as to remove a candidate. The other thing though, he seemed to question

whether when the spy agency went into the nomination meeting, they really understood what they were looking at. One of CSIS's concerns was there were bus filled with Chinese speakers showing up at the nomination. And my response, as I sort of alluded to in my previous testimony, was, well, I had buses filled with Greek speakers and Italian speakers because in my nomination in Papineau, those were the communities that were mobilized.

He talked about how at his own nomination meeting, buses of supporters kind of came in, and that's what you have to do. Political organizers will tell you that's what you have to do. And when it came to this busload of students, liberals would say that's a feature, not a bug, that they like having a party where they can have supporters who are young people or who are new to this country.

But the issue, or the potential serious problem here is that those buses could have been organized by a foreign government, right? Exactly. Nomination meetings can be close and they can be tense and very exciting for everyone involved, but ultimately they're a secret ballot. tense and very exciting for everyone involved, but ultimately they're a secret ballot. And there's no way of knowing after the fact whether those votes that kind of pushed Handong over the edge and helped him win at that meeting came from the students on the buses or, you know, who knows? Like, it's very hard to prove after the fact. And some have suggested that that is exactly why it's a perfect place for foreign interference. Another thing that came up regarding the 2019 election,

so we were just talking about potential Chinese interference, and we learned in this inquiry about potential interference from Pakistan. So what happened there? So this inquiry extraordinarily isn't seeing raw intelligence reports, but is seeing summaries, especially prepared for Commissioner Ugg, that in very general terms describe things that were previously classified. And one of these reports says that in 2019, there was some kind of a threat from someone representing the government of Pakistan, and that CSIS took some kind of an unspecified action, what they call a threat reduction measure, to stop this threat. And after they did, they were satisfied that it was dealt with, and it didn't ultimately end up impacting the election in any way. Trudeau himself,

he apparently was never even briefed on this. It was just kind of quietly dealt with by CSIS, but now has come out as a result of this inquiry. So now let's move on to the 2021 election. So this was the third election with Trudeau as a liberal leader. And people might remember that very little changed here in terms of seat count. But the conservative leader at the time, Aaron O'Toole, he says that his party was specifically targeted by China in that election. And so let's start here. Tell me what he tells the inquiry about that. do feel that there were certain ridings, a limited number of ridings, not enough to tip the balance of the overall result, where the conservatives believe they saw enough evidence to make them

suspect something was going on and working against them. And they thought that for two reasons. One, they looked at their own data. So parties love data, right? And they usually, if you have a handle on your own campaign and you've crunched enough numbers, usually have a range for what you think your voter turnout is going to be and what your vote might be on election day. And they had some writings where what actually happened in terms of voter turnout and the turnout of their vote was outside of their model. And that had them scratching their heads a bit. And then they got looking. And the writings where that happened also lined up with some kind of grassroots reports they had from their own people on the ground of their candidates being targeted specifically on Chinese language social media. So WeChat, for example, the leader, Aaron O'Toole, but also about specific candidates like Kenny Chu in Richmond, for example,

Aaron O'Toole, but also about specific candidates like Kenny Chu in Richmond, for example, became of grave concern in a campaign that's ultimately about information and making arguments based on facts about what's really in your campaign. And if you have other people making up nefarious suggestions of what you would do if you were elected, you know, it's a very difficult battle. So their local campaigns knew that they were working against this. Chu himself described it as feeling like you were drowning. It's almost like I was drowning and they are watching. And the best they could do, by the way, is to let me know that I'm drowning. I don't need their notification. I need their help.

And of course, the argument that Aaron O'Toole is making is that there was a motivation on the part of China to not want the conservatives to come to power because, you know, his argument was that they took a much more hawkish position vis-a-vis China. Yeah, and they did. Like, famously, we even talked about this during the campaign. China appeared a lot in their platform. They had taken some positions like sort of advocating for Uyghurs, wanting a ban on forced labor from places in China where that is known to happen, wanting to ban exports coming from that region of China. All those sorts of things, you know, would anger Beijing, right? And I have to say, powerfully, at the very start of this inquiry, a representative of the Uyghur minority, lives in Canada now,

pointed out that he feels that this interference worked beyond just the election result worked beyond just the election result, because he says now that the official opposition no longer talks about things like a Uyghur genocide in parliament. The implication being that the conservatives learned what happens if they lean too hard into that hardline position on China, and that they've now kind of backed away from that because it didn't go well for them in the last election. And just like in the 2019 election, we talked about China and Pakistan. Here in the 2021 election, the issue of China, of course, came up as we've been talking about. But also, there has been a suggestion in the inquiry that India might have tried to influence this election too.

And just very briefly, I wonder if you could tell me what we heard about that and how the prime minister responded to that. This, again, only came up in these bespoke summaries that they're preparing for the inquiry. But it was quite sensational when that summary was released and we saw that they believe there is evidence that India sought to interfere in several ridings, but they didn't tell us which ridings. We don't know what candidates are involved. The information presented said even the candidates themselves may not know that some kind of an actor linked

to the government of India was seeking to influence perhaps with clandestine financial payments. So we had that information kind of sitting there. It appears that this information about India's meddling only came out after the 2021 election. The lawyer that represents the Sikh coalition, which has standing at this inquiry, he specifically asked about redactions in foreign interference reports where we haven't seen details, because it's all blacked or whited out, about exactly what intelligence officials know about India's interference. And the perspective of the Sikh coalition was that this is actually very harmful and actually

enables Narendra Modi's government, perhaps, emboldens it to do more harm in Canada and behave more and more aggressively towards Canada because it's not being talked about. There's no sunshine disinfectant on this behavior. It's all kind of being kept secret, not discussed. I think you would agree that the lack of meaningful steps to expose and stop foreign interference activities when they first arise, including deliberate actions to redact any failures that may have been included in the NSICOP report could play a role in India's increasingly aggressive interference and repression activities over this period. And Trudeau was asked about that,

and his answer, somewhat extraordinarily, I thought, said that that question should be put to the former Conservative government, which cultivated a very cozy relationship with the Indian government. Whereas our government has always stood up to defend minorities in Canada and the rights of minorities to speak out, even if it irritates their home countries overseas. We've been told that there were only two countries that were seriously interfering in the elections this inquiry is considering, China, but also India. The proportion of information that we're getting at this inquiry about India is far less than what

we've been hearing about China. So one unanswered question I have in my mind is, why aren't they telling us more about India? Is that not safe for us to hear in a public forum? Is Commissioner Marie-Josée Ugg hearing a lot more about India behind closed doors because they don't feel that it's in Canada's interest to have that part of the inquiry happening in public? Right. And of course, she is hearing a lot that we are not able to hear in this public inquiry. I'll just emphasize that, what you just said for her listeners. And she is going to release a report at some point. But again, like, we don't know how much information or new information will even be in her report, right? Yeah. And that's one of the craziest things about covering this. You're in a room with people who

know a lot of stuff they're not allowed to tell you. And boy, wouldn't you like to know the things that they know. It would make it so much easier, Janice, to talk about this. And the lawyers don't ask the questions the journalists at the back of the room want. They ask their questions for their own sort of reasons. And we're just there to take notes. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization their own household income. That's not a typo. 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Cops. Janice, look, you know, I can't help but think, listening to you,

the next federal election is coming up, right? You know, we're in a minority parliament situation, so it could really happen theoretically anytime. And, you know, I wonder what you think has been learned from this inquiry and what they say about the degree to which our political apparatus is going to be capable of dealing with foreign attempts to interfere in the next federal election and in any election, really? I have found it kind of extraordinary the extent to which

first senior staffers in the prime minister's office and then the prime minister himself spoke openly about things that Canada's spy service was getting wrong, the extent to which perhaps people's trust in CSIS might be rattled a little bit. Now, other people would say discussing this openly is actually a very healthy thing. And Trudeau actually today, I'm speaking on Thursday, was asked if he still has confidence in Canada's spy agency. And he said he important, pushing back against the sources and part of the work everyone needs to do in this process in order for it to all be verified and confirmed and the system to work. this idea that it's open for interpretation, that it's not always kind of obvious how to take a certain report,

and that two people might look at the same thing and draw a different conclusion. I think we may have a false sense that when we see an intelligence briefing that that is a fact. And if there's anything I've learned covering this inquiry is that intelligence assessments, intelligence reports are not the same as proof and facts. They kind of feed into something for your awareness, but they're not necessarily the truth with a capital T. Another issue raised is the fact that a lot of this interference isn't happening in Canada's official languages. The interveners at this inquiry that represent vulnerable communities have made this point again and again and again. This idea that sort of the things that might be most harmful

might be said in languages we don't understand. And I guess the other thing, as we think to the next election, Russia wasn't really playing out in any of the specific incidents we heard about for 2019 or 2021. But all that was happening prior to what happened in Ukraine two years ago, and everything that's happened in the Russian-Canadian relationship over the last two years in particular. Next time out, will Russia, who I think everyone would recognize is a major, major player, particularly in disinformation, will Russia be involved? And how unsettling is that for the next vote? And all the lessons they've learned

about Chinese foreign interference, Indian foreign interference, will that prepare them for the next battle if Russia steps onto this stage and wants to sow some chaos here? I don't know the answer to the are we prepared question, but that will be the task of the next stage of this inquiry. In the fall, we're going to have more hearings, hear from more witnesses about what needs to be done to help Commissioner Ugg make some recommendations to that end. And I'm going to state the obvious, Jamie. The stakes for this couldn't be higher. I'm a parliamentary reporter. I don't ever want to cover an election where when all is said and done and the results come in, I'm wondering if some other hostile country had its finger on the scale. We have had very prominent examples of that happening in other places. I don't think anyone

wants it to happen here. I cannot think of something with higher stakes for our democracy than getting a handle on this and keeping it under control. And if you care about a fair vote, you care about mobilizing people, and you care about an inclusive democracy where different groups all feel like it's safe for them to participate and speak out and be counted, this inquiry arguably is everything. If other people have their fingers on the scale, if we don't have a fair vote, then we don't have a strong democracy anymore. And as a parliamentary reporter, I can't think of anything I care more about. All right. Janice, thank you so much for this.

You're welcome. All right. That is all for today. Front Burner was produced this week by Sarah Jackson, Ali Janes, Matt Mews, and Derek Vanderwyk. Sound design was by Mackenzie Cameron and Sam McNulty. Music is by Joseph Shabison. Our senior producer is Elaine Chao. Our executive producer is Nick McKay-Blocos. I'm Jamie Poisson.

Thanks so much for listening and we'll talk to you next week. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.