The Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, participated this week in the commemorations of the 80e anniversary of D-Day in France. At Juno Beach, the beach in Normandy where 14,000 Canadian soldiers landed in 1944 during the offensive to liberate France, he highlighted the extent to which the rights for which these soldiers fought are in danger like never before since the end of the Second World War.
“Democracy is still under threat today. It is threatened by aggressors who want to redraw the borders. It is threatened by demagoguery, misinformation, disinformation and foreign interference,” he declared alongside the French Prime Minister, Gabriel Attal, and Prince William of England, and surrounded by a few hundred-year-old Canadian veterans. of war and descendants of dead soldiers.
If he is absolutely right about the facts, Mr. Trudeau should have been a little shy about stating them loud and clear.
While most of our allies are massively increasing their military efforts since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the government headed by Mr. Trudeau is still avoiding delivering on Canada’s commitment to dedicate at least 2% of its gross domestic product to defense. The Canadian Armed Forces are in a pitiful state, short of personnel and modern equipment. The legacy of the Canadian soldiers who landed in 1944 reminds us that this was not always the case.
Mr. Trudeau should have shown more modesty. His government’s defense and national security policies fall short of the threats he outlined in his Juno Beach speech.
The lack of seriousness with which Mr. Trudeau had received the allegations of foreign interference in the 2019 and 2021 elections, when they made headlines in Canadian newspapers in early 2023, already testified to a blatant laxity of His part. He had hoped to put an end to this controversy by appointing former Governor General David Johnston, a long-time friend of the Trudeau family, to investigate the subject. His report, very summary, satisfied no one, except the liberal monks.
Mr. Trudeau was then forced to set up a formal commission of inquiry, chaired by Judge Marie-Josée Hogue, who delivered an interim report. No, she concluded, foreign interference had no impact on the identity of the party that formed the government in the last two elections, before adding this: “Let the electoral results be affected or not, the fact remains that foreign interference is widespread, insidious and harmful to Canada’s democratic institutions. »
Three days later, the Minister of Public Safety, Dominic LeBlanc, finally tabled Bill C-70 on foreign interference, awaited for more than a year. This provides, among other things, for the creation of a register of foreign agents. The bill provides that “persons or entities that enter into an agreement with a foreign principal and undertake activities aimed at influencing a government or political process in Canada would be required to publicly register those activities” under penalty of a fine or of imprisonment. However, everything will depend on how rigorously the new law is applied.
“Our government has been clear,” underlined Mr. LeBlanc when tabling C-70. “We will not tolerate any form of malicious foreign interference on Canadian soil. »
However, he seemed much less categorical after the tabling of a report from the Committee of Parliamentarians on National Security and Intelligence which reported the participation of certain parliamentarians in the efforts of foreign states to interfere in Canadian politics .
This report, a redacted version of which was made public, fell like a bomb in Ottawa. Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre called on the government to reveal the names of the MPs and senators concerned, a request that Mr. LeBlanc rejected on the pretext of a possible unreliability of information from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) regarding foreign interference.
Revealing their identities would harm the people named in the confidential version of the committee’s report. As the unredacted report points out, the actions of these parliamentarians “are unlikely to result in criminal charges, since Canada has still not resolved the long-standing problem regarding the protection of classified information and methods in proceedings judicial”. Indeed, revealing the evidence necessary to obtain a conviction could compromise Canada’s national security.
“Nonetheless, this type of conduct is profoundly dishonest, and even contrary to the oaths and solemn affirmations of parliamentarians to serve the best interests of Canada,” reads the public report of the committee chaired by Liberal MP David McGuinty.
At most, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland promised that the Liberals would carry out “an internal follow-up” following the report. Like her colleague at Public Safety, she did not seem eager to get to the bottom of things. Is it because the Liberal caucus has many MPs from cultural communities who maintain close relationships with the representatives in Canada of the governments of their countries of origin? Some of these MPs fear, with or without reason, a witch hunt in the wake of the McGuinty report.
“The assurance I can give Canadians is that our government takes foreign interference very, very seriously,” Ms.me Freeland. However, the government’s reaction to the latest report leaves, once again, the opposite impression.
Based in Montreal, Konrad Yakabuski is a columnist at the Globe and Mail.