Foreign interference findings are not as simple as outing traitors in the House

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There are no traitors in Parliament, Commissioner Marie-Josée Hogue has told us. Now there will have to be another solution for foreign interference other than naming names.

The loud, persistent calls last summer to release the names of suspected collaborators – from Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, followed by many pundits – were all futile.

The final report of the Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference told us there is no list of names. And the whole issue just isn’t that simple.

Instead, Justice Hogue’s report forces us to face a harder-to-counter, more grown-up version of foreign interference in Canadian politics than simply exposing suspected fifth columnists in the House of Commons.

Admittedly, we were told there were reasons to fear. The MPs on the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians issued an unclassified version of a report last June that stated current and former parliamentarians had been “witting” and “semi-witting” participants in interference.

It turns out that was wrong.

It was exaggerated, more definitive than the intelligence warranted, Justice Hogue found. It contained “inaccuracies.” The notion that it contained a list of alleged collaborators, which grew in the days after the report was released, was not true.

“I did not see evidence of parliamentarians conspiring with foreign states against Canada. While some conduct may be concerning, I did not see evidence of ‘traitors’ in Parliament,” she wrote.

So much for settling interference issues by naming names. The problem is harder to solve.

It requires moving past what Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet termed the “imprudent nonchalance of the Liberal Party,” which was echoed in the report’s outlines of the comedy of errors in intelligence co-ordination. Mr. Blanchet argued that there might not be traitors in the Commons, but there are “useful idiots” under foreign influence. Both he and NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh renewed calls for Mr. Poilievre to seek a security clearance to deal with cases in his own party.

Some of the cases involving parliamentarians that Justice Hogue confirmed still sound unsettling, although they are typically described in vague terms.

One former opposition politician was suspected of “working to influence parliamentary business” for a foreign government. Chinese diplomats sought to exclude candidates who criticized Beijing from community events. A proxy agent of India is suspected of providing financial support to candidates from three different parties – who might not have known where the money came from.

The picture of interference efforts that emerges through Justice Hogue’s report isn’t of China or India trying to elect their favoured party, but rather foreign governments seeking to aid and cultivate Canadian politicians for the long term.

For all the focus on traitors, Justice Hogue insisted that misinformation and disinformation are the far bigger threats to Canadian democracy. Her report makes that seem like the most intractable part of the problem, too.

She highlighted two separate episodes in the 2021 election campaign, one aimed at then-Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole and another at Conservative candidate Kenny Chiu, but don’t expect to find easy solutions for such dangers. One unwieldy recommendation is creating a government entity to monitor the online universe.

Still, one take-away from Justice Hogue’s report is that a lot can be done with more zeal and some obvious tools: better intelligence co-ordination, tightened election rules and political parties and leaders that make combatting election interference a priority.

The best-known allegation of foreign interference is perhaps the case of independent MP Han Dong. He won the 2019 Liberal nomination in Don Valley North, but intelligence agencies suspected he was helped by a busload of foreign students sent in by the Chinese consulate to support him.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was told, but there wasn’t enough evidence to block Mr. Dong’s candidacy – and he denied involvement with the busload of students.

Even now, though we know Mr. Dong’s name, we don’t know much about what Mr. Trudeau learned about the MP after the 2019 election, when he sat as Liberal backbencher – although Justice Hogue concluded that reports he urged a Chinese diplomat that Beijing keep imprisoned Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor in jail were false.

But we also know the Liberals could have restricted voting in nomination races to citizens and permanent residents, yet they resisted until this year. Political parties still oppose tougher election rules and stronger investigation powers. Those things, and a lot of others, remain to be done.