A few days before the end of parliamentary proceedings in Ottawa, Justin Trudeau’s Liberals were clearly banking on the summer break to put an end to the torture of the gout that has become the revelations surrounding foreign interference in the federal election. The resignation on Friday of special rapporteur David Johnston, whose impartiality had been strongly contested by all opposition parties in Ottawa, shakes up this strategy and proves Johnston’s criticisms right. Above all, it demonstrates once again the need to hold a public inquiry to get to the bottom of the allegations of Chinese interference in the 2019 and 2021 elections. Rather than silence his critics, Mr. Johnston’s testimony in parliamentary committee this week will have given them new weapons in their efforts to discredit his work. His resignation had become inevitable.
Tabled last month, his report concluding that a public inquiry would not be necessary to get to the bottom of the allegations illustrated flaws that have become increasingly apparent as testimony continues before the Standing Committee. of Procedure and House Affairs in Ottawa. Even setting aside Mr. Johnston’s obvious conflict of interest, as a longtime friend of the Trudeau family, but also as a member of the Pierre-Elliott-Trudeau Foundation, the omissions and errors from him were starting to pile up.
First, there was this contradiction between his conclusion that the disinformation campaign waged against certain conservative candidates in 2021 “could not be traced to a state-backed source,” and comments made in the House of Commons. Commons by former leader of the Conservative Party of Canada Erin O’Toole. The latter said he was informed in May by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) that “my party, several members of my caucus and myself had been the targets of disinformation and [des efforts] of vote suppression orchestrated by China before and during the 2021 election campaign.
Questioned on this subject by the New Democrat leader Jagmeet Singh, Tuesday, in parliamentary committee, Mr. Johnston admitted that the conclusions of his report published on May 23 were based on the evidence “which had been given to us [rendues] available at that time”, while adding: “Since that time, [et depuis] the conversations that Mr. O’Toole had with the director of CSIS, I think a bigger step has been taken in terms of what should have been done then and what needs to be done in the future . However, this answer does not exempt Mr. Johnston from having made a mistake in arriving at a conclusion which has since proved to be unfounded.
“The amount of information available was [aussi vaste qu’]an ocean and we saw a very large lake,” Johnston told the show Power&Politics, of the CBC News network, shortly after his testimony in parliamentary committee. However, he said he was hopeful that he had “reached [à des] conclusions based on facts”.
However, Canadians were entitled to question whether Mr. Johnston exercised the rigor necessary to carry out as thorough and complete an investigation as possible. He seemed to have relied rather on the information that members of the Trudeau government gave him without asking them many questions. Regarding the notorious CSIS memo regarding China’s efforts to target Conservative MP Michael Chong and his family — a memo that was sent to the Prime Minister’s National Security Advisor in July 2021, but had not been read by the latter at the time – Mr. Johnston’s report had noted “serious deficiencies in the way intelligence was relayed and processed between the security agencies and the government”.
However, he said he had “not identified any instance where a minister, the prime minister or their respective offices failed, knowingly or negligently, to act on the information, advice or recommendations provided”. However, his testimony will have demonstrated the hasty nature of such a conclusion. Only a public inquiry, conducted by a judge and in which witnesses could be questioned under oath, would determine whether this was indeed the case.
In committee, Johnston said Trudeau had been made aware of “irregularities” surrounding Han Dong’s nomination as the Liberal candidate in 2019 — but that CSIS had made no recommendations to the prime minister regarding actions to take in stride. The admission startled NDP MP Jenny Kwan, who lamented that Mr. Johnston relied on the lack of a recommendation from CSIS to absolve Mr. Trudeau of all responsibility.
Indeed, the report by Mr Johnston, who admitted never even meeting Mr Dong during his work, only touched on the subject of Chinese interference in the 2019 and 2021 elections. resignation should force Mr. Trudeau to face the facts. Canadians want and deserve a public inquiry. Nothing less would suffice.
Based in Montreal, Konrad Yakabuski is a columnist at Globe and Mail.