To listen to the leaders of the federal political parties, one would say that foreign interference is someone else’s business. Their own party is prodigiously not threatened. Their leadership and nomination races are providentially spared. And there is no tightening to be made. A naivety — or negligence — which, in any case, does not bode well, a few months before the next elections.
Seeing them parade impassively before her commission of inquiry into foreign interference, Justice Marie-Josée Hogue had to wonder whether the national directors of the major parties had even bothered to read her interim report. Among the troubling findings she made: the vulnerability of political party nomination races, particularly that of the Liberal candidate for Don Valley North, to rules so flexible that they represent real “gateways for foreign states.”
Nevertheless, the national director of the Liberal Party, Azam Ishmael, refuses to see a gaping hole in the face of interference maneuvers. Worse, he rejects outright the proposed corrections, in the name of the free participation of all in the democratic process. There is therefore no question of the Liberal Party returning to a paid membership in order to validate the identity of each person and restrict the possibility of voting at nomination assemblies, or restricting suffrage to Canadian citizens only, less vulnerable to the intimidation tactics of their country of origin. Inexplicably credulous, Mr. Ishmael persists in believing (or pretending to believe) that the mobilization of dozens of people to torpedo a candidacy is too complex an operation for authoritarian regimes that have repeatedly demonstrated the sophistication of their influence efforts.
The Conservative Party is not doing any better. While Justice Hogue has reported foreign interference campaigns targeting two of the party’s recent leadership races, its carefree national director, Michael Crase, has also been at pains to say he is “very confident in the systems that are in place” for both nomination and leadership races.
Even the Bloc Québécois, which has shown itself to be more open than the other two and the New Democratic Party to making certain changes, has, however, been just as jealous of “party autonomy” in managing its own affairs.
The authorities of the political parties are not wrong. It cannot be up to a government in place to impose on its adversaries the guidelines governing its internal choices. However, political parties cannot abdicate by simply having no intention of correcting the breaches of their own protocols.
The status quo is untenable. Not only have candidacies been targeted by foreign agents, but sitting parliamentarians have also been targeted, some of whom have also participated in these interference efforts as “half-consenting or willing” collaborators. Doubt, already sown by months of revelations, has been consolidated among the population. The few demonstrators who welcomed elected officials in front of parliament for the start of the school year by demanding to know the names of the suspected parliamentarians, despite their conspiracy-influenced spiels, express a distrust that is otherwise real and shared.
Justice Hogue will not name them, citing everyone’s right to a fair and equitable defence. Disclosing their identities would also violate the Security of Information Act, which protects operational and secret information, and would jeopardize ongoing investigations, their methods and their sources.
However, political parties have a responsibility to protect the integrity of their nominations and restore public confidence. And this must begin now. It is not enough to wait for Commissioner Hogue’s final recommendations, expected in December, to feign a willingness to act. Federal elections could be held as early as the spring.
However, many of the nomination processes are already over. The Conservative Party has 160 confirmed candidates, out of the 343 ridings that will be contested following the electoral redistribution, while the Liberal Party has 103, the New Democratic Party, 59, and the Bloc Québécois, 2.
Justin Trudeau’s government is certainly not exempt from showing seriousness in this matter by submitting, during its own days of appearances next month, tangible proposals that will urgently improve its capacity to detect and counter foreign interference. Its own indolence has gone on too long.
This democratic responsibility, however, falls equally to all parties, whose response to this clandestine influence cannot be limited to political recovery. Otherwise, it will be necessary to conclude that they are making fun of their own voters.