The Decibel - The ‘stain’ of foreign interference on Canadian elections

Episode Date: May 6, 2024

The public inquiry into foreign interference aimed to provide answers critical to Canada’s democracy: who are the main perpetrators of the threats against the country’s electoral system? What, if any, role did they play in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections? The first report from the inquiry has now been released – detailing the “pervasive, insidious and harmful” problems of foreign interference on Canada’s democratic institutions.Robert Fife, The Globe’s Ottawa bureau chief, breaks down the report and explains what comes next, as pressure mounts on the Trudeau government.Questions? Comments? Ideas? E-mail us at [e-mail]

The acts of interference that occurred, some of these acts have been established while others remain only suspected, are a stain on our electoral process and impacted the process leading up to the actual vote. A stain on our electoral process. That's Justice Marie-Josée Hogue, the Commissioner of the Public Inquiry, looking into foreign interference in Canadian elections. The issue of interference has been top of mind for over a year now, and this is the third report to examine it. The first one came out last February. It said that efforts to meddle in the 2021 election did not affect the outcome. Then, three months later, Special Rapporteur and former Governor General David Johnston released a report.

Foreign governments are undoubtedly attempting to influence candidates and voters in Canada. Foreign interference is a real and growing threat. Despite Johnston saying a public inquiry was not needed, eventually, that's what happened. And on Friday, we got the first report from that inquiry. This is an interim report. A final one will be released later this year. It's the result of closed-door and public hearings. In her report, Justice Hogue talked about the importance of safeguarding Canadian democracy.

Far-right interference is a real occurrence and a serious threat, and one that is probably impossible to completely eradicate. But we must do all that we can to detect, prevent, and counter it. So today, we're talking to Bob Fyfe. He's the Globe's Ottawa Bureau Chief, and one of the journalists who initially broke the story about concerns around foreign interference. He'll walk us through what you need to know about this report. I'm Mena Karaman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Bob, thank you so much for being here again.

Always a pleasure. So we've had two other reports on foreign interference in the last year and a bit. How is this one different? Well, I think this one is different than the report by former Governor General David Johnston, in a sense that we, the public, have seen hearings. There have been public hearings on this. So we've heard testimony from the prime minister, senior aides, senior ministers, the CSIS director, the senior officials who have been in charge of election monitoring,

the SPORA groups, conservative, liberal, and the PMPs who have been targeted by China. We have been able to watch in real time what this public inquiry was doing, the contradictions between the various people's testimony. And also, we benefited from the fact that very classified intelligence was provided to the public through summaries, much more different than David Johnson's report, which is basically we had to rely on whatever he had to say. He, in large part, was discredited because he said there was no need for a public inquiry. He didn't think that the prime minister or anybody else did anything wrong. And his focus seemed to be on discrediting media reports, which were based largely on selected CSIS documents that had

been leaked to the media. And Justice Hogue did not in any way try to discredit media reporting. Okay. I guess the big question really that's also coming out of this is whether foreign interference affected the overall results of the 2021 and the 2019 election. What did the report say on that, Bob? Well, this whole thing is a bit of a bogus argument because nobody, nobody has ever said that the overall results of the 2019 and 21 election campaigns were affected by foreign interference. And she agreed with all of those conclusions.

And it's something that the prime minister and the liberals have been trying to use ever since this whole foreign interference reporting came out by saying, look, we won this election fair and square. And the Conservatives, the NDP, everybody has agreed that liberals won the election campaign. And so did David Johnson said the overall results of the election were not impacted by foreign interference. And she agreed with that. But the big difference is that she said she believed that there's enough evidence to believe that in some writings, presumably in writings where there were heavily Chinese Canadian voting, that foreign interference and disinformation campaigns did probably affect these election campaigns.

I mean, that's a really important point, right? It's a hugely important point. And the conservatives had claimed that between five and nine writings, they believed they lost because of Chinese state and proxy disinformation campaigns, largely. She didn't venture an opinion on that. What it's done is it's undermined confidence in our electoral system. And that her argument is that it is a very serious issue and that whoever is in charge of the government must deal with this really quickly. That's the big takeaway from this report, which is this is a problem, folks. Wake up. Do something about it.

So, Bob, let's actually look at some of the specifics now of the report. A big focus here seems to be on the who question, meaning basically which countries were potentially interfering in our elections. What did the report find on that front? Well, she said that China is the principal aggressor. It's very sophisticated. And the way they do it in a whole range of areas, which is illegal camping, contributions, bribery, blackmail, cultivating long-term relationships, and particularly on disinformation, which is a very effective way of trying to defeat people that they think are not going to be favorable to China. What about other countries, too, Bob? Because I know so China sounds like it was the main country here,

but this inquiry was also looking at Russia, India. What did we find there? Well, on India, it was particularly strong in saying that India and its intelligent network has had a very significant role to play in trying to influence elections and nomination meetings, that they have provided legal funding, and that they have proxies in the Indo-Canadian community that are working with Indian intelligence to try to influence election campaigns or other matters amongst elected officials to try to get them to be supportive of the views of the Indian government. But in terms of Russia, they feel that Russia had no significant involvement at all in either the 2019 or 2021 election campaigns. Another big issue has been whether conservatives were targeted.

You mentioned this a little bit here, Bob, including a candidate named Kenny Chu, who lost in a Vancouver area riding in 2021. Let's talk about this, because the two previous reports did not definitively say Mr. Chu lost because of disinformation. But, Bob, what did Justice Oak find here? She think there was a lot of credible evidence that Kenny Chu was targeted, not only targeted, that it probably had an impact on his writing in the Vancouver area. And this is significant because this is one of the writings where she says they've had an impact in some ways. And Kenny Chu was a prime target of the Chinese consulate in Vancouver. We had, I mean, that's a glow, myself and Stephen Chase, who wrote about these stories, had seen CISA's reports where the consul general at the time was bragging about the fact that

they had defeated, or she believed that they had defeated Kenny Chu by using proxies within the Chinese Canadian community and using disinformation campaigns against them. He himself testified that he believed he was a victim of this disinformation campaigns. And he felt that even though these two election monitoring bodies were informed of this, nobody ever told him about it. He said, like, I felt like I was drowning and everybody was on the bank watching me drown. And I think this is a pretty significant moment for Kenny Chu that she herself is saying, yeah, this probably had an impact on why you lost the election campaign. I'm curious, did Justice Oaks say, I guess, what evidence brought her to that

conclusion? I'm wondering if it was different evidence than, you know, previous reports had seen. Was this new evidence? What do we know? She certainly had access to all the classified information that David Johnson had. But I think she would have benefited from the fact that she's a judge. And she had the powers of a commission of inquiry, which means that she had subpoena powers if she needed to be. She had more commission counsels with her to work with her. So in some ways, it's not fair to Mr. Johnson, in the sense he didn't have the same kind of staffing that she did. They also had in-camera hearings, and a lot of that stuff was released in summaries,

and then the public were able to see them also be in question in the open as well. So much, much different and much better for the public. And I think one of the things you've learned from all of this is that there's too much secrecy in this country. A lot of this stuff should have been available to the Canadians. You know, we might not have had the same, the problems we had in 2021, less so in 2019. A lot of this information was more available to Canadians. We'll be back after this message. I want to ask you about another specific writing, Bob, that these reports looked at.

This is the writing of Don Valley North, which is a Toronto area constituency. It's currently represented by MP Han Dong. He's been under a lot of scrutiny around the involvement of international students in his nomination race. So does this report finally explain really what happened there? So let's go back to the Johnson report. The Johnson report said that in 2019, there was a nomination race just before the election where Han Dong won the nomination. He said there were suspicions. When we say won the nomination, that's won the liberal nomination to be a liberal candidate in that for that riding.

Yes. It's really important for Canadians to understand that in a lot of parts of the country, if you win a nomination race, you're guaranteed to win the riding. And that was a very safe riding, Don Valley North, as you know, if you go to Calgary Center, for example, well, that's a pretty safe conservative riding. And if you win the nomination, you're almost guaranteed to win. So Don Valley North is a very liberal riding. So if you win the liberal nomination, you're probably going to win.

You're going to win. And I think what we've learned from these hearings is that foreign actors will target the nomination races because they know that whoever gets that nomination is going to get into Parliament. And if they can get someone that they believe will be sympathetic to their views, then they've got somebody in parliament that will not criticize them, that may speak up sympathetically for them. And so what we learned from the nomination race that this was a very hotly contested race. Mr. Dong only won it by a very, very close margin. In testimony, we heard that international students from China, high school students were bussed in to help them win that nomination. CSIS had believed that this was paid for, the buses were paid for by

the Chinese consulate indirectly, and that students in some cases were intimidated to vote for Mr. Dong, and in other cases, some of them had false documentation. And she was very clear that she has serious concerns about how this race was handled. Although she says, look, she can't prove that China was involved in this. But her argument was that this is kind of a classic example of how foreign interference can play a role in influencing nomination campaigns. And she was also critical of the prime minister who was warned about this. Cicero told his top aides that they believed that China was trying to influence the nomination so that Han Dong could win. Mr. Trudeau discounted it. He discounted the intelligence, but he testified at the inquiry that he promised to revisit the matter after the nomination.

And she said, well, there was no evidence whatsoever that he even bothered to do that. So let me ask you kind of another question related to this. I want to ask you about the handling of intelligence information by the prime minister, by Justin Trudeau, as well as his aides and his ministers, because this was a point that was discussed previously during the summit of the testimony. Did Justice Oge say anything about how the prime minister and people around him handled the CSIS warnings they were getting? You know, she never passed judgment on how the prime minister's top aides or senior ministers handled intelligence. But she also said that you can expect more forthright comments on a whole range of issues in her final report.

Which will be out later this year, basically. This is an interim report. Yeah, in December, late December. But she did say the evidence I've heard to date does not demonstrate bad faith on anyone's part or that information was deliberately and properly withheld but she also said it does suggest that on some occasions information related to foreign interference did not reach its intended recipient when others the information was not properly understood by those who received it. She hasn't absolved the Prime Minister and we have to wait for the final report but you know you know, she didn't pass judgment, and she seems to be giving people a bit of leeway on this. What she did not give anybody leeway on is she was much more critical of these two panels from bureaucrats, the site panel.

And the site panel, that's the Security and Intelligence Threat to Elections Task Force. That's one panel. The other one is a five-person panel that basically responds to the threats that cite flags. Right. And she was just very critical of them that they didn't share information that they could potentially could have shared information with people. And I must say that Jenny Kwan, who is a new Democratic MP and had been targeted by, and is a target of china uh has has said

what we really need out of this when the final uh recommendations come what we need is an independent agency that overlooks foreign interference in our election campaigns one that you know we and you and i can feel like okay these are really trustworthy people. If they see foreign interference, they can either alert the public to it or to perhaps have to tell the parties, look, we're seeing something here. You might want to take some action here to protect yourself because of disinformation or cyber activities or whatnot. And I think that is probably going to be a recommendation that she will make at the end of the day, because it seems to make a lot of sense. Bob, in our last few minutes here, let's, I guess, talk about some of the bigger picture

questions here again. In the past, when we've had you on the show, you've used the phrase sunshine and transparency, and how, you know, how it's really the best to get issues of foreign interference out into the light to see them for what they are. Has this process helped Canadians understand what happened in our last two elections, do you think? Yeah, I think it has. I think it has been a really enormously beneficial for the country, because we're now talking openly about what China principally, but also India and other countries are up to. And I think you're going to see some action taken probably as early as this week, because Dominic LeBlanc, the public safety minister, said we are readying legislative packages coming very, very soon that is going to try to answer some of the concerns that were

raised in the public inquiry. So watch for, finally, legislation that set up a foreign influence registry so that if you work for China or Russia or whatever, and you're a former senior civil servant or former politician or whatever, you have to register just like you would have to register if you were a lobbyist. So it's a foreign agent registry, I think, right? Yes, a foreign agent influence registry. So I think that's going to happen. I think we will see changes to the CSIS Act of 1984 and the Security and Information Act, which will make it much easier for CSIS to tell you and me and every Canadian when there are instances of foreign interference. So coming back to what you'd asked me about, they'll at least have more transparency and light about this sort of stuff. And I'm hopeful that we will see changes

to the criminal code to make foreign interference an offense. Now we're going to wait to see what Justice Oaks says, which I mean, she's going to provide, I think, some more safeguards. And I also think in the fall, when she begins hearings on what kind of recommendations we need to deal with foreign interference, I think she's going to have some pretty good recommendations to deal with nominations. And I think she'll also make recommendations in terms of how do we make sure that the body that oversees our elections are independent and can be much more willing to be able to come out and tell Canadians when they have a serious concerns. What I'm looking for at the end of this process in the late December is that we're going to have a series of measures that are going to safeguard

our democracy and more significantly, Manika, is to provide protections to dysphoric communities who are the real victims in most cases of this kind of foreign interference. Bob, always so good to have you here. Thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you very much. That's it for today. I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms. Our intern is Raisa Alibi. Zura Jabril joins us as a fellow of Carleton University's Brooke Forbes Award. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer and Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening and I'll talk to you tomorrow.