A federal official said a group of senior officials considered warning the public about possible foreign interference in the last general election, but after analysis decided against it.
The decision was made, in part, because a possible disinformation campaign was likely to reach only the Chinese diaspora, said Allen Sutherland, who works in the Privy Council Office as an assistant cabinet secretary.
Mr. Sutherland prepared the agenda and attended meetings of this so-called “Group of Five,” whose members were responsible for issuing a public warning if they believed an incident — or accumulation of incidents — compromised Canada’s ability to hold free and fair elections. There have been no such announcements in 2021 or regarding the 2019 elections.
The senior officials committee heard concerns about information circulating on the Mandarin-language social media app WeChat during the 2021 campaign. The Conservative Party has flagged a possible disinformation campaign regarding its platform and attitude towards from China. Former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole told the inquiry earlier this week that he estimated the campaign may have cost his party as many as nine seats.
Officials discussed the appropriateness of a public warning, Sutherland said, and he compared the campaign to an earlier situation that involved a fake article containing inflammatory information about Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2019.
Last resort
The fact that the WeChat messages were in Mandarin meant that the information would likely only reach the Chinese diaspora, unlike the fake articles which were in English and had the potential to “go viral” nationally. “I don’t want to leave you with the impression that this was treated with any less seriousness,” however, Mr. Sutherland told the commission.
That was just one factor that led the committee to choose not to issue a public warning in what was ultimately a nuanced judgment, he argued.
The lack of evidence to definitively link the campaign to China and the fact that the messages referred to “substantial policy matters” — as opposed to clearly false allegations — also weighed in the balance, Sutherland said in a summary of an interview he gave to the commission before his testimony.
He told the inquiry on Friday that discussions were taking place about the threshold for making a public announcement, and he indicated that this would happen, for example, if the spread of false information was persistent and could affect decisions citizens’ voting. “It was understood that this would only be done as a last resort — when the democratic ecosystem was not cleaning itself up and no one was debunking the information,” he said.
The committee was concerned that too frequent public interventions would unnecessarily create the impression that Canada’s democratic institutions lacked integrity, Mr. Sutherland said.
The “group of five”
The committee received information from the Election Security and Intelligence Threats Working Group, comprised of representatives from major national security agencies, as well as other sources. The group was made up of the Clerk of the Privy Council, the National Security Advisor, the Deputy Attorney General and the deputy ministers of Public Safety and Foreign Affairs.
In the 2019 and 2021 general elections, the Liberals were re-elected to government with minority mandates, while the Conservatives formed the official opposition. Still, allegations of foreign interference in these elections — suggestions fueled by anonymous leaks to the media — have given rise to a chorus of calls for the ongoing public inquiry.
The commission is expected to release its interim findings by May 3 and a full report by the end of the year.
The federal investigation, chaired by Judge Marie-Josée Hogue of the Quebec Court of Appeal, aims in particular to identify possible foreign interference from China, India, Russia or other countries during the last two federal general elections.