No traitors in the House, but foreign interference, and the Liberals’ non-response to it, is still a serious concern

Open this photo in gallery:

There is a technique of political argumentation that might be called opportunistic benchmarking. Broadly speaking it involves measuring yourself against standards or expectations that cannot fail to be to your advantage – setting the bar so low you can’t help stepping over it – or conversely, setting impossibly high standards or expectations for your opponent.

Sometimes the benchmark is an obviously false or exaggerated argument, or better yet two. “Some people say we should do x,” a politician will intone, invoking some lunatic extreme that no one has actually proposed. “On the other hand, some people say we should do y,” meaning some other pole of insanity. And then, as if it were some daring bit of contrarianism: “I prefer a middle path.”

At other times it involves excusing the inexcusable, by reference to a standard of conduct that is plainly inadequate but conveniently self-exculpating. Jean Chrétien was a master at this. No matter what the scandal was, no matter what appalling behaviour was unearthed, on the part of himself or one of his intimates, the former prime minister’s response was the same: “The RCMP have not laid any charges.”

The implication being that unless actual criminality were involved, there was no misconduct. A frequent variant is the “no harm, no foul,” rule: if some sordid scheme, of a kind that crops up often in politics, does not succeed, no wrongdoing occurred. Watergate? “A third-rate burglary attempt.”

But the most common example is the expectations game. Ahead of some event, attempt to set expectations at the most subterranean level for yourself, stratospheric for your opponents. When the result comes in somewhere in between, declare victory/defeat as desired. Recall Bill Clinton’s christening of himself as the “Comeback Kid” after the 1992 New Hampshire primary, on the basis of having finished … second. Because he was expected to do worse.

Which brings us to the final report of the public inquiry into foreign interference in Canada’s democracy, led by commissioner Marie-Josée Hogue. The report is already being portrayed in some quarters as having suggested the whole issue was overblown, wildly exaggerated, misreported – as if to suggest that, if it were, foreign interference is not an issue, or not a serious enough one that it should have troubled the Liberal government unduly.

Thus, because the judge did not find that MPs were selling top secret defence plans to the Russians, there is no need to be concerned that some of our elected representatives have been playing footsie with agents of foreign governments. Because the Prime Minister was not found to be an actual Chinese asset, his government’s remarkable and sustained inactivity in the face of repeated warnings of the efforts of hostile foreign powers to interfere in our elections can be ignored. And because these powers did not succeed in determining the outcome of an election, it doesn’t matter that they tried.

Particular attention has focused on the first, relatively narrow addition to the foreign interference file: the explosive claim, in last June’s report of the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP), that several “parliamentarians” (MPs or senators) had “semi-wittingly” or “wittingly” aided foreign powers in various ways. The judge’s finding that “I did not see evidence of ‘traitors’ in Parliament” has been widely reported.

Certainly the NSICOP report comes in for some sustained criticism, for having either mistakenly reported the intelligence, or reported mistaken intelligence. And everyone seems to have jumped to the wrong conclusion, that because the public version of the committee’s report talked about the alleged activities of individual parliamentarians, the classified version must have contained a list of names of those involved. In fact, Justice Hogue reports, there was no such list.

That does not mean, however, there were no such individuals. With the help of the intelligence agencies, the judge was able to reverse-engineer the names, working backward from the allegations in the report to the intelligence on file. And far from exonerating them, she finds evidence of conduct that is “troubling” and “questionable.”

“Some elected officials,” the judge writes, “have maintained relationships, or had interactions, with foreign officials that may have crossed the line beyond normal diplomacy. The intelligence also indicates that some elected officials may have knowingly received support from foreign officials or proxies.”

For the most part she puts this down to naiveté or poor judgment, a matter of not knowing where the line was rather than deliberately crossing it. Still, she says, “some information in the intelligence may be cause for concern or may justify further investigation. I heard evidence from CSIS witnesses that they believe there are and have been some relationships of concern between elected officials and foreign states.” That would be worth knowing more about, wouldn’t it – before the election?

Even the reassuring reappraisals of NSICOP’s work are not all that reassuring. “CSIS assessed that the politician was aware of and had accepted the assistance of a foreign state,” but “CSIS did not assess that the politician was wittingly engaging in foreign interference.” So he or she took the “assistance,” but didn’t think of it as interference? That’s great … I guess. Another MP was reported by NSICOP to have “proactively provided confidential information to Indian officials” but at the time the information was no longer confidential. Uh huh. Did the MP know that? Did his Indian interlocutors?

Anyway, as I say, the “traitor” MPs story is a small corner of the foreign interference story. And the rest of Justice Hogue’s report confirms, in most essential respects, the extraordinary litany of reports on the efforts by foreign powers, particularly China, to interfere with Canada’s electoral process and harass and intimidate its citizens.

It’s all there:

• the smear campaigns against Conservative MPs Erin O’Toole and Kenny Chiu, for daring to criticize China and/or suggesting the need for a register of foreign agents;
• a similar campaign against NDP MP Jenny Kwan;
• the attempt to intimidate Conservative MP Michael Chong, via his family in Hong Kong, for having sponsored a motion in the House denouncing China for its treatment of its Muslim Uyghur minority;
• the support campaign on behalf of 11 candidates (seven Liberal and four Conservative) and 13 staffers whom China judged more friendly to its interests;
• the warrant requesting permission to surveil Liberal power broker Michael Chan, which sat on the desk of then-public safety minister Bill Blair for 54 days;
• the strenuous exertions by the Chinese consulate, in 2019, to secure the Liberal nomination in the Toronto riding of Don Valley North for Han Dong, going so far as to bring in busloads of visiting Chinese foreign students to the nomination meeting, complete with fake proof of residency in the riding, under threat that their visas would be revoked if they did not participate.

There’s no evidence Mr. Dong knew about or participated in the scheme. And certainly Justice Hogue appears to have cleared him of the most serious charge against him: that he suggested to a consular official that China hold onto the Two Michaels – the two Canadian businessmen held hostage nearly three years on trumped-up charges – rather than release them, supposedly for fear of validating the hardline approach favoured by the Conservatives.

But that hardly extinguishes all concerns. Maybe Mr. Dong said nothing improper in the conversation, which was recorded by Canadian intelligence. But why was he talking to officials of the People’s Republic at all, at such a sensitive time, and without the government’s knowledge? Why was China so eager that he win the nomination in Don Valley North? And why was the Prime Minister, apprised mid-campaign of intelligence concerns about the nomination, so lackadaisical in response?

Well, we know one reason: as he told the inquiry himself, nomination meetings are stacked in this way all the time. But that only points to the broader seriousness of the issue. If a foreign power could tilt the nomination in Don Valley North, a safe Liberal riding, it could do so in others. The process by which we nominate candidates, always an ethical disgrace, has become a serious security risk.

And the Prime Minister’s lack of curiosity in the Dong affair is only one example, among many in the report, of intelligence warnings that either went missing, or were not passed on, or were passed on but weren’t read, or were read but simply unheeded. This, remember, was after the 2016 U.S. election had alerted everyone to the risk, or rather the reality, of foreign interference.

To be sure, the Liberals had taken some important steps in response, as the judge notes: the Rapid Response Mechanism, first in the G7, which “aims to prevent, thwart and respond to malign and evolving threats to G7 democracies”; amendments to the Canada Elections Act in 2018 that created new offences related to foreign interference and modified existing ones; the Plan to Protect Canada’s Democracy, in the following year, which established the Critical Election Incident Public Protocol, designed to assess which sorts of foreign interference required the public to be alerted, and the Panel of Five deputy ministers to administer it; and beyond.

But somewhere amid all the plans and protocols and panels the government seemed to lose sight of the objective: protecting Canada, and Canadians. It seems, with the benefit of Justice Hogue’s report and others, that this was more the result of complacency and incompetence than deliberate intent. This is not greatly comforting.

The only reason anyone knows about any of this, let’s recall, is because the information was leaked to the press, presumably by intelligence officials distressed at the government’s inactivity on the file. Had it not been, presumably the government itself, in its invincible blindness, would have remained as unaware as everyone else. But still – not treasonous!