Three days after the release of a bombshell report that accused some lawmakers of “wittingly assisting foreign state actors” in their efforts to control domestic politics, the Canadian government has offered no firm answer on whether politicians who acted as agents of foreign powers would be permitted to run for office again or not.
Pierre Poilievre, leader of the opposition Conservative Party, said on Wednesday that the public deserves to know the names of the MPs described in the heavily redacted report.
“The national security committee indicates there are members of this House who have knowingly worked for foreign hostile governments. Canadians have a right to know who and what is the information. Who are they?” Poilievre said.
“I can’t believe the following needs to be said. Parliamentarians’ duty is not to a foreign state but to the people of Canada. Will the prime minister release the names of these parliamentarians?” said Conservative MP Michael Chong, who is one of Canada’s highest-profile examples of foreign election interference, as he was vigorously targeted by the Chinese Communist Party for calling attention to the Uyghur genocide.
Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc responded that it would be “inappropriate” to release information that is classified or not fully vetted.
“The leader of the opposition knows very well no government, including the government [of] which he was a member, is going to discuss particularities of intelligence information publicly. So he knows better than that,” LeBlanc said.
The public safety minister suggested Poilievre obtain a security clearance so he can see the redacted material, completely – and probably willfully – missing Poilievre’s point that the public needs to know if their lawmakers have colluded with foreign powers, some of them extremely hostile to Canada.
“He would be much more informed than he is now and we would invite him to do so, so he wouldn’t stand up and cast aspersions on the floor of the House of Commons without any information whatsoever,” LeBlanc said contemptuously of Poilievre.
“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,” he said.
The head of the intra-party National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP), David McGuinty, fended off a horde of reporters on Wednesday by insisting his committee members have taken oaths of secrecy and cannot divulge the redacted details from their stunning report on foreign interference.
“Look, the committee’s hands are tied. We can only release what we release,” McGuinty said, noting that if the members say more, they could be “prosecuted” under Canadian laws protecting official secrets.
“The members have always wanted to be more transparent, rather than less. We have gone as far as we can in this review to reveal information without being in breach of the Security of Information Act,” he insisted.
McGuinty said he was unable to give a clear answer on if the colluding politicians described in his report would be allowed to run for office again. The next election will be held no later than October 2025.
“It’s unclear if the identities of the alleged colluders will be revealed by then – if they will be permitted to stand for re-election, or if they are sitting MPs now,” Canada’s Global News observed on Wednesday.
Other opposition parties joined the Conservatives in demanding more disclosures and possible prosecutions, especially for the most serious examples of foreign collusion outlined by the NSICOP report.
“There should be an investigation,” said Jagmeet Singh, leader of the NDP party. “If it is true, they’re held accountable. It can’t be ignored, can’t be we’ve got these serious allegations and nothing happens.”
“It does bother me very much in the same Parliament where I work some people might voluntarily be under the influence of foreign powers,” said Bloc Quebecois leader Yves-Francois Blanchet.
Some members of the governing Liberal party also demanded investigations or immediate disclosure of the names redacted by the NSICOP report.
Toronto Liberal MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith wanted both, insisting that if a lawmaker “had a relationship with a foreign agent,” then “that person should be named in the shorter term, and fuller allegations should be laid out, and we should have due process.”
LeBlanc has been left to handle damage control for the Trudeau administration, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is in Normandy for the D-Day commemoration. Much of LeBlanc’s spin doctoring has consisted of vaguely claiming he disagrees with some of the report’s conclusions, but refusing to specify exactly what his disagreements are, because doing so would reveal classified information.
Global News described Trudeau officials as increasingly nervous and evasive about the report, which was reportedly highly critical of Trudeau for refusing to take action against foreign interference in Canadian politics.
Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland tried dodging questions about the report on Tuesday, stammering that her administration takes foreign interference “really, really seriously,” but the matter needs to be handled by “law enforcement.”
On Wednesday, Freeland shifted her position and promised a “review” of the foreign collusion accusations, although she still would not commit to revealing the names of the accused or barring them from running for office again.
National Post columnist Terry Glavin was incredulous that the Trudeau administration is trying to soft-pedal a sustained assault on Canadian democracy that goes “beyond scandalous.”
Glavin acidly noted that Canada’s systems for dealing with foreign interference only work if the advances are “unwelcome,” but the NSICOP report revealed that a shocking number of Canadian MPs are quite happy to work in secret with foreign powers.
Glavin castigated Trudeau for ignoring the growing crisis, which kicked into a higher gear after Canada detained Chinese Communist Party princess Meng Wanzhou in late 2018. The heavy redactions in reports on foreign interference are a major reason Trudeau can get away with ignoring them:
The problem is, going back five years, the awkwardly-constituted NSICOP, with a secretariat of only 11 people, has produced absurdly redacted yet otherwise consistently rock-solid research and findings about threats to Canada’s national security. Each report has presented sensible conclusions and recommendations that Justin Trudeau’s government has variously ignored, overlooked, put off or bungled. In its annual report released last year, NSICOP noted that the Trudeau government had failed to even respond to a succession of seven of its reports on “critical issues in the security and intelligence community.”
As Glavin pointed out, the public only knows about the foreign interference crisis because intel from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) has been leaked to certain media outlets. If Trudeau had his way, no one without a security clearance would know anything was amiss.
“This is scandalous. And it helps explain why the NSICOP report is written in a tone of unmistakable exasperation, and perhaps even despair,” he concluded.
