Report: China and India Coopted Lawmakers for Their Benefit — and Trudeau Let It Happen

Canada’s National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP), an inter-party group of lawmakers tasked with investigating foreign influence over Canadian elections, issued a bombshell report on Monday that accused some members of Parliament of “wittingly assisting foreign state actors.”

The report said some MPs sought to influence their colleagues for the political benefit of India and China in particular. NSICOP said Chinese election interference was especially blatant, as the Chinese Communist Party bluntly believes Canadian politicians who accept its assistance during their election campaigns owe China a few favors once they get into office.

In the case of India, the NSICOP report found India-friendly MPs forwarded confidential information to Indian officials and sought to influence other parliamentarians on issues that were important to the Indian government.

NSICOP reviewed intelligence that suggested Canadian politicians have communicated with foreign missions during their election campaigns, accepted campaign funds from foreign powers “knowingly, or through willful blindness,” and taken direction from foreign governments over the conduct of parliamentary business.

Much of this foreign interference was allegedly conducted through proxies, who facilitated “person-to-person interaction” between foreign governments and Canadian politicians while providing a layer of deniability. However, foreign diplomats and intelligence officers also participated directly in efforts to influence Canadian politics.

One noteworthy example of such direct participation involved a former member of Parliament who maintained a personal “relationship” with a foreign intelligence officer. The report was heavily redacted to remove “injurious or privileged information,” including almost all details about this relationship and whether it included a romantic element or not.

“Foreign states also used mainstream and social media, and other digital means, to conduct interference activities,” the report noted.

Not all of these election interference campaigns targeted Canadian politicians. NSICOP found foreign powers also used agents in Canada and transnational tools of repression such as threatening family members back home to “monitor and repress respective ethnocultural communities in Canada.” 

Russia, Iran, and Pakistan were also identified as “key threat actors” in the report, but the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was flagged as “the largest foreign interference threat to Canada, including to its democratic institutions and processes.”

“The PRC’s foreign interference efforts continue to be sophisticated, persistent, and multi-dimensional, targeting all orders of Canadian government and various facets of society, and relying upon a number of methods,” the report said.

While previous analyses suggested Russia was the “second most significant foreign interference threat,” NSICOP found that the silver medal had been passed to India, which has been especially eager to counter Sikh separatists living in Canada.

Iran and China were singled out as being especially vigorous, and vicious, at using the tools of transnational repression against their respective ethnic and cultural communities in Canada. China’s now-infamous secret police stations in Canada (and the United States, and other Western countries) were highlighted in the report.

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The NSICOP report sternly criticized the administration of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for ignoring and downplaying foreign threats to Canadian politics over the past six years. The parliamentary committee complained about Trudeau ignoring both its own recommendations and loud warnings from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).

“Given the risks posed by foreign interference to Canada’s national security, the Committee expected the government to act. It was slow to do so,” the report said.

“The slow response to a known threat was a serious failure, and one from which Canada may feel the consequences for years to come,” the report warned.

“The implications of this inaction include the undermining of the democratic rights and fundamental freedoms of Canadians, the integrity and credibility of Canada’s parliamentary process, and public trust in the policy decisions made by the government,” the authors added.

Trudeau’s failures created an outright “crisis” in Canadian national security and political integrity, which NSICOP said must now be urgently addressed with new procedures and legislation, including faster distribution of intelligence from CSIS to lawmakers. The committee also thought the public should be brought into the loop about foreign interference threats, a somewhat ironic recommendation given how much of NSICOP’s own report was redacted.

“We’re calling on parties to start looking at this much more seriously,” NSICOP chair David McGuinty told CBC News on Monday.

“We’re also calling on the government to now really start a serious dialogue with all parties to say how can we up our game at our own parties, and is it time for Elections Canada to run these nomination processes? To tighten this up? Because a lot is at stake here, it’s the confidence Canadians have in their democratic processes,” he said.

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The Trudeau administration disputed some of the report’s conclusions, especially its criticism of the slow and inadequate response to foreign interference threats.

“The government’s concerns center around the interpretation of intelligence reports, which lacked the necessary caveats inherent to intelligence, as well as the lack of acknowledgement of the full breadth of outreach that has been done with respect to informing parliamentarians about the threat posed by foreign interference,” insisted Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc.

LeBlanc suggested some of the redacted material in the NSICOP report might undermine the impression of negligence left by the document, if that information were revealed. He said some of the redacted material could be intelligence that has not been fully verified.

“That’s one of the concerns we have in terms of leaving the impression that an individual piece of intelligence might constitute evidence or might be a fact,” he said.

LeBlanc said some of the report’s policy suggestions have already been incorporated into a foreign interference bill currently under consideration by parliament. McGuinty countered that the legislation in question is a “step in the right direction,” but it does not go far enough. 

McGuinty emphasized the importance of turning intelligence about foreign interference into legally actionable material, so that behavior currently dismissed as “deeply unethical” could be prosecuted as criminal misconduct.