The Munk Debates Podcast - Friday Focus: No Public Inquiry

Episode Date: May 26, 2023

Friday Focus provides listeners with a focused, half-hour masterclass on the big issues, events and trends driving the news and current events. The show features Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and bestselling author, in conversation with Rudyard Griffiths, Chair and moderator of the Munk Debates.   This week’s edition of Friday Focus is dedicated to analyzing the fallout from former Governor General David Johnston’s report on Chinese interference into Canadian democracy and his recommendation not to call for an independent public inquiry. Janice and Rudyard assess the decision, it’s reasoning and debate what is ultimately in the public’s interest when it comes to restoring public confidence.   This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue.   More information at www.munkdebates.com.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The following is a complimentary excerpt of this week's edition of the Friday Focus podcast by The Monk Debates. To access full-length editions of each and every episode, along with all kinds of great additional benefits and perks, become a donor to the Monk debates. You can do that for as little as $25 a year, and you'll receive each and every year 50 Friday Focus episodes at full length. It's all available. right now on our website in just a few simple clicks. Triple W. The Monk Debates.com. Look for the Friday Focus option in our navigation bar, the top right of the website. Make your donation, and we will send you each and every Friday a link to listen to the full-length edition of this program.

Thanks in advance for your generous contribution. Hello, Monk listeners. Roger Griffiths here, the executive director of the Monk Debates. Welcome to this, our regular Friday Focus roundtable. We're joined by my friend and mentor, each and every one of these programs, Janice Gross Stein. She's the founding director of the Monk School of Global Affairs, an internationally renowned scholar.

Author Janice, great to be in conversation with you just days away from June. I know. Spring, the summer thing is happening too fast. I know, and it's still cold. It is still cold. The sun is it, but it's cold. I am waiting for tomorrow when it is supposed to be.

to warm up. Yeah, we're going to get a blast of heat. Good. Talking about blasts of heat, Janice, we had another, I don't know what you call it, stone thrown, shoe dropped, window broken in the ongoing saga of Chinese election interference in Canada, the release of a much anticipated report by former Governor General David Johnson on election interference. I think surprising many people in not calling for a public inquiry.

Instead, kind of recommending a listening to her that he is suggesting that he should lead with diaspora groups across the country. Top-level, Janice, what's your takeaway here? Have we missed an opportunity possibly to clear the air in a more substantive and serious way around this? issue of foreign interference in our democratic processes and institutions. Let me give you a short, crisp answer to your question, Redyard. Yes, we missed an opportunity and an important one. There are two big issues here, Reddard. Was there something else that could have been done? Were there actionable items on Chinese interference? I'll let Chinese interference in our domestic politics, particularly our elections.

We can debate that one, and let's do that in a minute or two. But there's a second one which David Johnson clearly identified our system misfunctioned, our national security institutions, frankly, simple English, messed up. It is not clear to me why there is not an official inquiry into the failure of our national security institutions. A listening tour, which he proposes to do, as you said, Rudyard, is not the same as having a power of subpoena to get official testimony from people under oath about why the system failed the country. And I think that is an enormous missed opportunity. I know people disagree with me on that one, but I think the time has come.

This is a long-standing problem in Canada. The intelligence information, for whatever reason, did not reach ministers and the prime minister in a timely way they found out from reading the Globe and Mail. This is not the way a serious country operates. Yeah, I'd agree with you, Janice. This has been a failure, a failure of government. And I guess what concerns me, Janice, with this whole process around David Johnston, is that I think a failure was compounded by another failure.

that instead of, or whatever set of circumstances, instead of taking this, maybe it was a necessary process, some kind of independent review was an inquiry required or necessary, is a valid and live debate. Instead of giving that to someone who could have provided an answer to that without the, to put it politely, the coloring around David Johnson, I think, was a huge missed opportunity. And it's, for me, it's, look, I want to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. I think he's a sophisticated enough individual that his longstanding friendship with the prime minister's father, his bent to which the current prime minister knew him as a child, a student, they had an acquaintance while he was Governor General, all of that.

Let's put that aside. For me, it's that Johnston himself represents a kind of coloring, a shape of the Canadian establishment that has had a long and close relationship with China. And again, there's nothing wrong with this, but it's just the selection process. that was undertaken here. A person was chosen who, in David Johnson, who was instrumental in introducing the Confucius Institutes of the Chinese government into Canada.

This is an individual who pioneered the system now where most universities in Canada receive large subsidies from the Chinese government to host Chinese students in Canada paying foreign tuition. This is someone who had three of his children educated in China at institutions of higher learning. It just to me is indicative of how much of the elite and the establishment in this country has been captured by what I would call the China consensus. This view that was held for a long time and could have been a valid assessment that China was going to liberalize, that was going to join the Western. world, democratically, geopolitically, and elsewhere in the liberal international project.

And we know that that didn't happen. It's a big tragedy that it didn't. But we kind of now need to move on and we need to have people in charge who accept that the China consensus is a failed and was a failed strategy. I think that's what annoys me here, Janice, is that In all of these people, we couldn't find someone who was truly independent in their views about China and their relationship to China because that's the heart, the essence of this very quandary that we now face ourselves. It's not Russian interference. It's not American interference.

It's Chinese interference. And we needed somebody who was truly intellectually, mentally independent. And I don't think we had that in David Johnson. And that's why I'm not surprised, ultimately, in the final outcome of his report, the decision not to hold a public inquiry. So, you know, I think two threads join here, Rudyard, and they're both important. One, a large part of Canada's policy establishment, private sector, we're very optimistic about what would happen in China beginning, you know, over the last 10, 12 years. And it's been a rude awakening. But many have awakened. There are many in the private sector in this country

who have closed down their factories, who have reduced their investment exposure in China. So there certainly are those who've looked at the last five or six years. and put up a big white flag and said at the very least we're slowing down. I think my concern is just a little different from yours here. And I think, you know, Pierre Lagasse wrote a very good article this week, in which he said, former governor generals should treat their governor generals at the end of their career.

That is a really important point to make. Look, this is the vice. And why? I mean, I think you should explain that, Jess. It's because they have to be above politics in that role. So once you've done that, if you go back and you cross that red line again, you kind of undo, don't you, Janice, the objectivity of the very role that is so essential to our constitutional democracy.

as it's configured on the Westminster model. Exactly. Whatever we think of the crown in our system, the Canadian embodiment of the crown is the vice regal role, the governor general. And the governor general, the definition of that role is you are above politics. There is no way that this inquiry could not and would not become political.

There are deeply contested political positions on all sides of this. And so I think the fundamental error was to ask a former governor general and for the former governor general to accept. You know, in Lagasse's article, which is really on point, he said, we pay governor generals $150,000 a year for the rest of their life when they retire. And why do we do that? And I think we should do that. We do that so that they do not need to engage in activities, which, you know, in which there is even a whiff of political activities after they give up their governor generalship. And they're giving money to set up a charitable foundation, which, again, is above the political freight. So there was right at the outset here, a category. mistake. And I hope we learned from this that never again do we seek to involve a former governor general in anything like a commission of inquiry, whether there should be one, whether it should not be one, nor should they. And even now, I think David Johnston should not lead a listening tour, frankly. He's not the right person to do this. In his listening

tour, and to make this point you, Richard, in his listening to her, he has talked, and there is an agenda coming, but he's talked about going to meet with the diaspora communities, particularly the Chinese and Hong Kong diaspora here, that are most badly affected by this, and of course are very disappointed. But he's also going to have a, he's also going to talk and listen to former officials about how the national security system should be reconfigured. But without a power of subpoena, without the capacity to summon witnesses,

and again, if he makes any recommendations about reconfiguring our national security infrastructure when this is all over, that cannot but be seen in the end as recommendations about our political institutions. It is just not a good idea. And it's not too late for him to pull back, frankly, given the egg cries. And it's, yeah, and as they say, the blame shouldn't all rest with him having accepted this request.

In a sense, our institutions, and I would say maybe our prime minister should have known better than to have asked and to have put him in this position. And I just wonder, Janice, if this goes to a bigger problem, I call it the problem of the former. It seems that in Canada recently, whether it's the S&C, Lavalind scandal, you name it, when there's a hot potato in Ottawa, we go to the formers. These are former clerks of the Privy Council, former Chief Justices, former Governor Generals,

and they aren't part of the official system. David Johnston was appointed a special advisor to the prime minister. You can call them a rapporteur, but that's what the order and counsel was. That's what's written. In other words, all of these people, and we know who they are, they tend to stick around some cases for decades. And they pop up very conveniently to bring their stature and standing to these controversial kind of moments, but they have no standing with Parliament. They have no official standing with any of the

institutions of government because they're actually all formers. And to that extent, they're trading on the reputations, just as you, I think, beautifully pointed out, this connection back to the office of the Governor General and what probably has happened here, which is a bit now of a clouding of that institution around Johnson's acceptance of this ultimately political task. I think it's time just to draw a line here. Let's thank the formers for their service. Let's stop using them as these convenient tools to kind of insert into the media and into institutional processes to frankly represent the interests of the executive, because that's

what they always seem to do. That is always what their function is, is to stand up and speak for the executive in the executives' interests, furthering the executive's objectives. The United States doesn't do this. And this will be the final point of, but the one rant I will have in this show, we just had the Durham report in the United States. And people, you know, could say, well, that was commissioned by Trump and it was a political exercise. But it was carried out by a special prosecutor who is an employee of the U.S. Department of Justice, empowered with those those, those, uh, those, uh, authorities as a Justice Department employee under the supervision now of Barack Garland,

the Biden appointed Attorney General. They had an inquiry and it revealed some important findings about the FBI and corrections that need to be made in their domestic spy service. But it was done within the institution. There was no former Supreme Court Justice of the United States involved. former vice president, you know, former chief of staff of the White House. I just don't think other serious countries like the UK and the United States do what we do in Canada time and time again, which is go to these former's and have them kind of do the dirty work, the spade work for the executive.

Time to stop this. Thanks for listening to this excerpt of the Friday Focus podcast to get full-length editions of each and every episode of this program. Simply go to our website, www.com. Click on the Friday Focus tab in our navigation on the top right of the site. Make a donation as little as $25 a year of 50 cents an episode. And we'll send you not only the full-length editions of each and every Friday Focus podcast, but all kinds of special offers, perks, access to events, and additional content.

Again, you can do that right now, by becoming a donor to the Monk Debates at Triple W. Monk Debates, MUNK, Debates with an S.com.