Prime Minister Justin Trudeau finally had to be reassuring, demonstrate that he was keeping an eye on foreign interference schemes during the last two elections and that he took care to protect the Canadian democratic system from them. His long-awaited explanations before the Hogue commission, however, did not dispel the suspicions of indolence which weigh on his government. Because throughout his testimony, Mr. Trudeau quietly absolved himself of responsibility, placing the blame on the intelligence services, on whom he said in the same breath that he trusted entirely.
At the end of two weeks of public hearings, the exercise of Judge Marie-Josée Hogue will have lied to the defeatist special rapporteur David Johnston, who had claimed that a public inquiry would be useless. Either way, several questions remained without answers in the public sphere, remained classified. But the testimonies, the interviews conducted behind closed doors, the dozens of documents filed have exposed the flaws in the transmission of secret information regarding foreign interference. As well as the limits of the existing handles to replicate there. And Judge Hogue, for her part, seems much less willing than her predecessor to accept them.
Justin Trudeau thus argued on Wednesday that he preferred verbal briefing sessions to reading bundles of documents that he does not have time to go through. His chief of staff, Katie Telford, claimed on the contrary that he read everything last year. The Prime Minister relies on intelligence agencies to report the most pressing information to him and alert his national security and intelligence advisor. If certain elements are missing, the responsibility therefore falls to the secret services.
The numerous memos, sent to the commission after being leaked to the media, do not reflect the content of these oral conversations. An explanation which allows the Prime Minister to disavow them and to exonerate himself from his non-action by claiming not to have been aware of them. Mr. Trudeau therefore knew nothing of a conversation that his former MP Han Dong (now independent) had with the Chinese consul general in Toronto regarding the imprisonment of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor. Nor would he have been warned of two possible transfers of $250,000 paid by Beijing in order to promote the election of 11 candidates deemed sympathetic to China.
As for the information that is indeed communicated to him, the Prime Minister explained that he received it with a bit of “critical thinking”, because this information collected in the greatest secrecy is not always put into context or corroborated, which means that their nature often evolves. And their sponsorship by a foreign state cannot always be demonstrated. This is how Mr. Dong remained a Liberal candidate despite suspicions, in the middle of the electoral campaign, of Chinese interference having helped his inauguration.
Justin Trudeau is right: there are no guarantees that suspicions are true. However, this is the crux of foreign interference, to which his government must find a better response.
The hearings and his appearance will also have revealed a circulation of information that is patchy to say the least. Mr. Trudeau half-heartedly acknowledged that there were “always improvements to be made,” without, however, appearing in a great hurry to proceed.
Ditto with regard to the communication of suspicions of interference, whether to the population, political parties or targeted candidates, which was not considered appropriate either in 2019 or in 2021. The Prime Minister insists on say that the threshold for revealing such attempts must remain very high, because their simple disclosure would influence the electoral process and therefore undermine the confidence of the population. This confidence, however, was precisely shaken due to a lack of greater transparency, with the electorate feeling cheated as the revelations unfolded.
The bouquet of corrections to be made has been detailed many times, in our pages, by experts; it is now done by a parliamentary committee, whose new report formulates 29 recommendations, most of which have been on the agenda of the Liberal government for more than a year: the implementation of legislative reforms allowing a better exchange of intelligence with political authorities , electoral and police as well as the creation of a register of foreign agents.
Commissioner Hogue will likely draw the same conclusions in her final report, expected in December. However, nothing would justify the government delaying action for such a long time – having still not implemented, 12 months later, the recommendations of the Rouleau commission linked to the invocation of the Emergency Measures Act . The interference perpetrated by China, Russia, India, Pakistan and Iran is nothing as rare as the use of this exceptional law. The inertia of the replica cannot be identical.