Investigation into foreign interference | Ministerial secrecy is invoked to not hand over documents

(Ottawa) The cajoling, strong reactions or hostility of opposition MPs on Thursday will not make the Minister of Democratic Institutions, Dominic LeBlanc, back down from the fact that the government is not hiding any relevant information or documents from investigation into foreign interference.

National security adviser Nathalie Drouin said breaking the long-standing convention on protecting Cabinet confidences would mean playing into the hands of foreign entities trying to disrupt Canadian democracy.

Mr. LeBlanc and Mr.^me Drouin both appeared before the Procedure and House Affairs Committee on Thursday morning against a backdrop of insistence from the opposition parties, who want to know why the government is in possession of documents that the inquiry commissioner Marie- Josée Hogue has not seen it.

“Why is your government so opaque? » asked conservative MP Luc Berthold.

Mr. LeBlanc rejected the allegations.

“The Prime Minister and the government are not hiding anything from the commissioner,” he insisted several times during an hour of testimony before the committee.

Dominic LeBlanc said the commission received four substantial Cabinet memos that are most relevant to Cabinet discussions on evidence that foreign states – including China, India, Russia and Iran – were attempting to interfere in Canada’s electoral process. These documents are those that all parties agreed to publish during negotiations on the commission’s mandate last summer, he said.

Additionally, he said 46,000 documents, “some of the most sensitive and secret documents in the possession of the Government of Canada,” had been handed over.

In her periodic report released in early May, Commissioner Hogue said that some of the documents provided by the government contained “redactions for reasons of Cabinet confidentiality, solicitor-client privilege or protection of personal information.”

The commission and the government are still negotiating “the application of these privileges,” the report said.

The opposition behind the commissioner

The opposition has requested this meeting to ask questions about the redactions and what the government has not yet handed over.

“The commission is now requesting the unredacted documents from Cabinet in order to assist it in its work,” said NDP MP Jenny Kwan.

” If [la commissaire] didn’t think it was important to fulfilling her mandate, she wouldn’t ask for it. »

M^me Kwan said much of M’s mission^me Hogue involves determining what the government knew about foreign interference, when it learned about it, and what it did to respond. She wondered why it wasn’t up to the commissioner to decide what was relevant.

Dominic LeBlanc maintained that the commission had access to all relevant Cabinet documents, but acknowledged that a conversation was underway about requesting additional documents.

He clarified that the request not only concerns Cabinet documents, but also those possessed by other agencies such as the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.

He added that no government would “remove” ministerial secrecy provisions entirely and that documents had only been provided to commissions of inquiry five times in 44 different public inquiries, four of which were approved by governments liberals.

M^me Drouin said the tradition of ministerial secrecy is at the heart of the Canadian parliamentary system, allowing ministers to provide opinions and advice behind closed doors and then emerge united behind the decisions they made.

“The first objective of foreign actors is to attack our democracy. This is really the first objective,” she said. We must therefore protect our tools which are there to protect our democracy. This is why I think that ministerial secrecy is not a partisan conversation. This is something we should be proud of, and is absolutely essential in any government to govern. »

As for the public disclosure of secret information collected by Canada or its allies, the situation is also fragile.

“When we collect intelligence and do espionage, we do it in secret,” she said. We do not give targets the opportunity to be heard, so releasing information into the public domain would not be responsible. Additionally, it can destroy the essential sources we have. This is why we really have to be very careful. »

Commissioner Hogue’s periodic report concluded that foreign interference did take place during the 2019 and 2021 elections, including during the nomination processes preceding the vote. M^me Hogue said that while the interference ultimately did not affect the overall results, it may have impacted the results of the nomination race or who won in a “handful” of constituencies.

Since then, the Parliamentarians’ Committee on National Security and Intelligence has released an explosive report that found some lawmakers “knowingly” cooperated with foreign actors after being elected. The names of these individuals have not been made public, although Green Party Leader Elizabeth May and New Democratic Party Leader Jagmeet Singh, who have seen the unredacted version of this report, have not expressed no concerns about current MPs.

M^me Hogue also examines these allegations.

Its final report is expected at the end of December.