Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has ordered Canada’s national security agencies to notify any elected officials who face threats after it emerged that the family of Conservative MP Michael Chong has been targeted by China.
“For the rest, we made it clear to CSIS [Service canadien du renseignement de sécurité] that when there are issues concerning a member, his family, it needs to be communicated, ”announced Mr. Trudeau to parliamentary journalists on Wednesday morning.
On Monday, the prime minister said during question period that it was “unacceptable” that a member of the House of Commons had been intimidated by “a foreign power”. He said he was asking security agencies for details about a report whose Globe and Mail got a copy.
The daily reported on Monday that a Chinese diplomat in the country reportedly raised sanctions against members of the family of MK Michael Chong living in Hong Kong. This MP presented a motion to recognize as genocide the treatment of Uyghurs and other Turkic-speaking Muslims in China two years ago.
What did the Prime Minister know?
Since the start of the week, the Conservatives have been hounding the Trudeau government in the House. Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre accused the Prime Minister of knowing about the threats to his MP and doing nothing.
” For two years […] Justin Trudeau did nothing to expel the agent from Beijing who was behind these threats,” Mr. Poilievre dropped on Wednesday morning. He calls for the ousting of the Chinese diplomat. “Not only is this guy not in jail, but he is in Canada with diplomatic immunity from Justin Trudeau. »
Prime Minister Trudeau repeated on Wednesday that he had been informed of the affair by the newspapers. He explained that CSIS officials told him that the threat had not been deemed of sufficient concern to pass the information on to higher levels.
“It is known that CSIS knew certain things and that they did not feel that it met the threshold required to communicate them higher, or to give more than a simple account to Mr. Chong,” he said. .
Michael Chong tabled a question of privilege in the Commons on Tuesday to denounce the alleged bullying of his family, and won sympathy from elected officials from all parties. Prime Minister Trudeau said he arranged a meeting between Mr. Chong and senior national security officials.
Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino on Tuesday defended the process in which “it is the professional, nonpartisan officials of the federal public service who decide, independently, what classified information can be made public.”
A lower threshold
The “threshold” below which a threat of foreign interference is not serious enough to be communicated to the public has been the subject of intense debate in Ottawa since the publication of a report by former senior civil servant Morris Rosenberg in FEBRUARY.
This report highlights that attempts at foreign interference occurred in the 2021 federal election, “but not enough to reach the threshold of impact on election integrity.” The public was therefore never informed.
The independence of its author, Morris Rosenberg, has been criticized by the opposition since the latter has already directed the Pierre-Elliott-Trudeau Foundation, itself targeted by suspicions of Chinese interference. He defended himself this week during a testimony before a parliamentary committee.
“The Prime Minister could not ignore it,” reacted the leader of the Bloc Québécois, Yves-François Blanchet, about the latest revelations concerning MP Chong. Mr. Blanchet bases himself on the testimony of Mr. Trudeau’s chief of staff, Katie Telford, who said that she was hiding nothing from her boss.
In a letter to the prime minister, New Democratic Party leader Jagmeet Singh on Wednesday criticized the government’s “total lack of urgency” to act on the matter. “I am simply asking you to clearly define how your cabinet deals with evidence of foreign interference targeting MPs and their families,” Mr. Singh wrote to his political partner, whom he has pledged to keep in power until ‘in 2025.