The Current - Poilievre says Trudeau was lying, after explosive testimony

Episode Date: October 17, 2024

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says he has the names of Conservative parliamentarians involved in foreign interference, but Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has refused the security screening that would give him access to those names. In response, Poilievre said the prime minister is lying and should name names. National security expert Wesley Wark unpacks Trudeau’s explosive testimony to the foreign interference inquiry Wednesday.

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news, so I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with Season 3 of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy.

On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current Podcast. The attacks on the cores of our democracy and our institutions that the authoritarian narratives and attempts at disinformation and propaganda and sowing chaos in our democracies are much more serious and severe over these past years than they have been. We need only to look at the headlines this week to see the extent of interference activities and the impact they have

on Canadians. That is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on the witness stand yesterday for the final day of testimony at the public inquiry into foreign interference. Justice Marie-José Hogue is set to deliver her report in December. Now for a look at what the inquiry heard, I'm joined by Wesley Wark. He is a national security and intelligent expert, a senior fellow with the Centre for International Governance Innovation, and a fellow with the Balsillie School of International Affairs, and he's with me in our Ottawa studio. Good morning. Good morning, Rebecca. The Prime Minister's testimony, of course, yesterday was pretty dramatic. The whole week was dramatic dramatic with those allegations from the RCMP that senior Indian diplomats

were involved in serious criminal activities. So what more did we learn yesterday about all of that in Trudeau's testimony? Well this was the final day of course of the public hearings, the second round of them that Commissioner Hogan's run and the crescendo moment of course was the appearance of Prime Minister Trudeau on the stand. He was there for a long time, I think for about seven hours. There was definitely a kind of crescendo to the testimony, which culminated, of course, in really what was an attack on Pierre Polyev and the Conservatives for not being serious about

national security issues. And what he talked about and what he said was bewildering to him was the fact that Pierre Polyev has not gotten the proper clearance to access that information. What is your reaction to some of that? Well, that in itself was not news. And this has been something that the Liberal Party and Justin Trudeau and others have been criticizing Polyev about for some time. So I think what the Prime Minister did and Justin Trudeau and others have been criticizing Poliev about for some time.

So I think what the prime minister did was bring a little bit more ammunition to that fire at the public inquiry by saying, you know, not only is this a problem, but this is why the problem exists, because I know the names of conservatives, parliamentarians, he didn't say MPs or senators, conservatives who are implicated in foreign interference. And this is something that for, as Prime Minister Trudeau said, for reasons that are bewildering, the conservative leader himself doesn't want to know and isn't curious about. And in particular, the Prime minister said that he just couldn't understand why Pierre Pauliev didn't want to have a clearer picture of foreign interference in his own leadership races. We'll get to a little bit more of that.

But just I want to be clear that when pressed, Trudeau did also say that there are liberal parliamentarians involved as well, right? Yes, he did. He said parliamentarians from all parties. involved as well, right? Yes, he did. He said parliamentarians from all parties. And at an earlier point in his testimony, he also confessed that he was surprised to learn through Cease's testimony last week that one of the six cases that Cease had unearthed of serious incidents over the past six years of foreign interference involved a liberal MP. And the Prime Minister said he was astonished to learn this. It was news to him that he should have been told at the time about this intelligence dossier. But he also tried to reassure Canadians that if this had happened now, there's a new system for

disseminating intelligence, making sure that reports get to him. And he would have found out about this much sooner today as opposed to not finding out about it in the past. Back to Pierre Pauliev for a moment and these sort of conflicting accounts of what's going on. He released a statement accusing the prime minister of quote, lying to distract from a liberal caucus revolt, repeated his call for the prime minister

to release the names of all MPs who have collaborated with foreign interference. He also talked about how he has some access through his Chief of Staff to read some of these documents, and he's been briefed in various ways. These are conflicting accounts. So what is going on? Well, we do know that Pierre Poiliev's Chief of Staff has been given a security clearance, presumably requested it, has been given it. That doesn't mean, of course, that whatever CSIS or other security agencies may decide that his chief of staff needs to know in terms of intelligence, and some of it might be

very highly classified. You know, the restriction with having a security clearance and being briefed is the condition of that clearance is you cannot talk about that information to others. So his chief of staff couldn't share the classified intelligence that he might have received from CISIS or others with the leader of the opposition. So there is a bit of a gap there in terms of what Mr. Poilievre, I think, frankly, is saying. And, you know, he hasn't provided any explanation, I think, that most Canadians could understand as to why he himself doesn't want to get a security clearance. Jagmeet Singh has. Elizabeth May has. The leader of the Bloc Québécois said he was going to. There doesn't seem to have been any progress on that, but all the other opposition leaders were prepared to, opposition party

presences in the House were prepared to get that security clearance. Pierre Pauliev is outside that. Okay, let's take a step back on who and who does not have security clearance and talk more about what we're actually learning at this inquiry. What do we know now that we didn't know before about foreign interference? What have you learned that you're interested in? Well, that's a great question. I think it's an important one for Canadians to think about. question. I think it's an important one for kind of Canadians to think about. And I would start,

Rebecca, by reflecting on David Johnson's report and approach as independent special rapporteur. We'll remember that process didn't go well. But David Johnson made the case that in declining to recommend a public inquiry, he said, look, a public inquiry just wouldn't work. to recommend a public inquiry. He said, look, a public inquiry just wouldn't work. There wouldn't be any way in which enough information and intelligence could be shared with the Canadian public to make such an inquiry worthwhile. I think while there's some reason, there's some rationale for that approach,

I think what Justice Hogue's inquiry and its conduct and her insistence on kind of maximum transparency has demonstrated is that you can learn a lot through a public inquiry. So that's the starting point. We've seen a lot of documents that we never otherwise would have seen, highly classified documents that have been declassified. We've heard a lot of witness testimony from officials, from ministers, ultimately from the prime minister. What does it all add up to? Well, you know, we've learned more about who the most dangerous threat actors are. No surprise in terms of the top of the list, in terms of the

conduct of foreign interference, that's China. I think the big surprise that has come forward in the public inquiry is the extent of Indian government activity in the foreign interference space. India was, of course, listed as the second most dangerous threat in a report that was published by the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians back in June. But all the testimony that we've heard through the process at Justice Hogue's public hearings and document releases also really underscores that. So India has come into the picture as a major problem for Canada. Of course, that was underscored recently by the RCMP press conference

and by the tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats by Ottawa and New Delhi. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is.

I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. It's a big file, foreign interference, you would think, and yet this inquiry is relatively narrow in its focus. It's talking about the integrity of the 2019 and 2021 elections. Are you concerned that it's too narrow, that we don't get a full grasp of what's going on if we don't look at a bigger picture? Yeah, Rebecca, that's a great question. It's something I've been concerned about from the beginning and a reason why I was skeptical about what we might ultimately learn from the inquiry.

for political reasons, to be honest, and in terms of media focus on Chinese foreign interference in Canada's elections or, you know, alleged interference in 2019 and 2021, we've kind of dived down a rabbit hole, to be honest, and looked very narrowly at and have come up with a, you know, a pretty blinkered picture of what foreign interference as a threat to Canada might be. So the focus is on election integrity and related interference with democratic processes. One of the things that I found really interesting that came forward during the public inquiry is that we learned of the development of a foreign interference strategy that was meant to be made public to kind of inform Canadians about the breadth and scale of foreign interference threat. That foreign interference strategy, for reasons that

remain bewildering, at least to me, was never released in public, although it was worked on for six years. And successive ministers talked about it and reasons why it wasn't released, overtaken by events, not a top priority, and so on and so forth. But it would have been a key instrument of public education. And the reason I referenced that strategy is not only that clearly a lot of thought went into it, but I think it was a good strategy. It listed six different, if you like, vectors or vulnerable sectors in Canadian society that were subject to foreign interference. Of those six, one was elections and democratic processes. There was a much wider... What else is on the list?

Well, I can just list them for you. I actually have the strategy declassified from its former secret level. So it lists six. Electoral security is the first. And then it goes on to economic prosperity. It talks about foreign interference impacts on international affairs and defense, on social cohesion.

There's been some talk about transnational repression, of course, at the inquiry, and critical infrastructure. So that's the big picture, but we've narrowed down to one element. And certainly the Indian example, it doesn't fit into the electoral process in the same way that we are looking into with this inquiry. It's outside of that scope. Well, it's outside of it in part. I mean, what we've learned through the independent review processes, through the National Security Intelligence Committee

of Parliamentarians report, through the public inquiry, is that India has attempted to interfere in elections, leadership campaigns, and so on. We don't know the degree to which that was successful, probably not very successful, but it certainly made an effort there. But a lot of its focus has been really on transnational repression and, in fact, on espionage operations. And this is one of the reasons why those six diplomats were thrown out of Canada. Why haven't we heard from any of the victims,

the people who are affected because they're being targeted by foreign interference? Why have those people not been on the stand? We've heard from representatives of diaspora groups about their concerns. And, you know, one of the reasons why I think their voices haven't been as prominent as perhaps they need to be is just there's a concern about their own safety and security. If they come forward in public, are identified, they fear there could be repercussions in their own community or in terms of an increased and accelerated targeting against them.

It's really been left to political actors to make that case. People who've been on the political stage like Jenny Kwan, the NDP MP from the Vancouver area, who has talked about the impacts of foreign interference on herself and, you know, what she describes as the ultimate discomfort of being accused of being a traitor in public. You talked about earlier how when and how people, parliamentarians, Justin Trudeau in particular, are learning about the things we're talking about today. And that, you know, he said sort of that he learned about it in the newspapers, for instance, what Chinese foreign officials were getting involved in two-hour elections and that kind of thing. He only learned about it as we all did. So what are the changes in place now to ensure that he knows what's going on? I mean, it's shocking to hear that. It is, and I think it'd be a surprise to everyone, although I think, again, a couple of things that Canadians might be learning is that there is an

awful lot of intelligence that flows across the transom in the Canadian government, and that the intelligence community is a bureaucracy and mistakes happen. You know, that's not an excuse for problems that were actually first revealed by David Johnson as the independent special rapporteur. He called attention to the real problems with, you know, what has been called intelligence dissemination, making sure that intelligence reports get to the right people who need to have them in a kind of timely way and that the significance of them are really signaled. So that was something he really wanted to pursue if he'd had more

opportunity as independent special rapporteur. It's certainly been taken up in testimony before Justice Hogue, the extent to which she'll focus on it in her final report, you know, remains to be seen. What we're told is, first of all, yes yes there were real problems with intelligence dissemination material that should have been getting to ministers for example or senior officials either wasn't getting there or wasn't being paid attention to we're also told that there been a lot of machinery of government changes to try and ensure that intelligence reports can be tracked and that their significance can be signaled when they're sent to decision makers. The Prime Minister spent quite a bit of time on the stand talking about how he receives

intelligence now and his confidence that he's getting the right kind of intelligence. And a lot of this depends on the ability of the National Security Intelligence Advisor, which has become another issue in the inquiry. So the answer to everybody's concern is, well, there were problems in the past, they've been fixed. Let's hope so. We don't have a lot of time left, but I just want to ask, south of the border, they're in the middle of the campaign and disinformation is a big thing over there. Disinformation campaigns from foreign entities is also a concern. I'm wondering here in Canada, are we tackling that? And is that a grave concern to you? It is a grave concern. I think it is, to be honest, just in terms of

information operations as a component of foreign interference, it's the most serious threat. And we know that foreign state actors like Russia, like China, perhaps like India, we know less about India, have some really sophisticated capabilities to kind of mess with our digital information environment. The problem we have in Canada twofold is, I think, twofold, Rebecca. One is that while we recognize this problem, we haven't really thrown the resources at it that we need to do. We have a very small unit at Global Affairs Canada called the RRM, Rapid Response Mechanism, which probably no one had heard of before the inquiry got underway. It's charged, the small unit, eight people or so is charged with kind of tracking foreign state disinformation efforts targeting Canada. It's overwhelmed by that task. And when I gave testimony recently to the Public Safety Committee, I said,

look, there's some interesting international examples that we could, you know, perhaps model a Canadian response on. The one that I'm most fascinated by, just very briefly, is something called the Psychological Defense Agency. It sounds very Orwellian, but it's something that the Swedish government has created or recreated from a Cold War past. The idea there is you need to have a robust governmental capacity to identify foreign disinformation efforts and do internal government coordination to figure out how to respond to them. But you also have to have a robust capacity to talk to Canadians about the nature of these disinformation efforts and really engage in public education. We don't have those two things. Lots to talk about. Wesley Wark, thank you for talking with us. My pleasure. Thanks so much, Rebecca.

Wesley Wark is a senior fellow at the Center for International Governance Innovation and a fellow at the Balsillie School of International Affairs. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.