Published Jun 19, 2024 \u2022 Last updated 5 days ago \u2022 5 minute read<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n 231 Comments<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the ordinary course of heated political controversies, Canadians can sort out the issue that\u2019s launching their politicians at one another\u2019s throats. In the \u201cforeign interference\u201d upheaval that has in turns paralyzed, confounded and outraged Canada\u2019s political class in recent days, we\u2019re not even allowed to know what the federal party leaders are arguing about, exactly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n This doesn\u2019t make the story easy to tell. It was already hard enough to determine when the story really begins, let alone figure how it will all end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If we wanted to, we could push the beginning of the story back to 2003, when Beijing\u2019s United Front Work Department boasted about electing six of its preferred candidates in Toronto. Three years later, the UFWD \u2014 China\u2019s overseas strong-arming, \u201celite capture\u201d and election-interference infrastructure \u2014 claimed electoral success for 10 of its 44 preferred Toronto-area candidates, according to an internal training manual uncovered by the Financial Times.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n We could also begin the story with the way then Canadian Security Intelligence Service director Richard Fadden was thrown under the bus by Liberal and New Democratic Party MPs back in 2010,<\/a> when he said several provincial and municipal politicians in Canada had come under Beijing\u2019s influence, to a worrying degree. The charge against Fadden back then was led by the Liberals\u2019 current health minister, Mark Holland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But for the opening of this latest chapter, foreshadowed by a series of leaks from intelligence-agency whistleblowers going back to November 2022,<\/a> we need only go back as far as June 3.<\/a> That\u2019s when an extraparliamentary oversight committee released a heavily-redacted, 84-page report that seemed to suggest that some MPs have been dallying in conduct bordering on treason.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n In this way, the \u201cforeign interference\u201d story has revealed itself to be about something worse. Despite the huge blanked-out spaces the Prime Minister\u2019s Office has insisted on imposing on the public record, all along this has really been a story about collusion, about certain of our politicians collaborating with hostile foreign powers to their own advantage and to further their own parties\u2019 electoral prospects. Some MPs have been \u201csemi-witting or witting\u201d participants in the efforts of foreign states to interfere in Canada\u2019s political life, the report found, particularly during the federal elections of 2019 and 2021.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is hardly news to anyone who has been paying close attention, but the story has changed in the way its emphasis has shifted. It can no longer be told as a simple story about Canadian politicians as victims. In the story told by the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians, Canadian politicians are the culprits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In one key respect, however, it\u2019s been the same story, for more than 20 years. While the NSICOP report alludes to bad behaviour on the part of India\u2019s friends in Canada, and Pakistan, and Iran and Russia are mentioned almost in passing, it\u2019s China\u2019s deep involvement in Canada\u2019s democratic processes and institutions that the NSICOP report emphasizes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n By the time of the 2019 federal election, the UFWD\u2019s budget for overseas operations was $600 million, and CSIS assessed that year that Canada had become an \u201cattractive and permissive target\u201d for foreign meddling. Even so, NSICOP reported that same year, public engagement was \u201calmost non-existent.\u201d That, too, has changed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The public is most definitely engaged now, despite the Trudeau government\u2019s efforts over the past year and a half to shut everything down. By filibuster, by blocking evidence demanded by House of Commons committees, and by enlisting the China-friendly, Trudeau-friendly \u201cspecial rapporteur\u201d David Johnston in a failed whitewash, the Trudeau government expended every effort to make it all go away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Liberals evaded the demands for a public inquiry until their minority position in the House made it impossible to stop. Trudeau and his ministers insinuated that it was all just a big fuss manufactured by anti-Chinese racists, by incompetent CSIS officials, by sour-grapes losers among failed Conservative candidates, and by dubiously-motivated CSIS whistleblowers who deserved to be hunted down and prosecuted. None of it worked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n The release of the NSICOP report followed on the equally astonishing proceedings of the Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference in April. In hearings before Commissioner Justice Marie-Jos\u00e9e Hogue, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his officials gave every appearance of committing something close to perjury in their efforts to dispute, dismiss and deny the veracity of incriminating evidence presented by CSIS director David Vigneault. But it was the NSICOP report that left everyone with the worst kind of unanswered questions: Who are these \u201ctraitors\u201d on Parliament Hill?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Officially, it\u2019s necessarily a mystery. That\u2019s because huge swaths of the NSICOP report were redacted and expunged by the Prime Minister\u2019s Office on the grounds that the content would be \u201cinjurious to national security, national defence or international relations,\u201d or would violate \u201csolicitor-client privilege.\u201d Making things even foggier, NSICOP has been engaged in a running battle with senior officials in the PMO and several federal agencies over their habit of relying on \u201ccabinet confidences\u201d to withhold information. Last year, this rationale was used to blot out, in whole or in part, more than 1,000 documents NSICOP asked the government to disclose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Even worse, Prime Minister Trudeau, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh and the Greens\u2019 Elizabeth May, each having seen the unredacted version of the report, disagree quite dramatically about what it contains. Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre says he doesn\u2019t want to be drawn into the cone of silence the NSICOP statute would require of him, so he doesn\u2019t know which MPs are named in it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Despite the furious arguments separating them on all that, there\u2019s a weird circling of wagons going on. Everyone agrees that NSICOP has cast a \u201cdark cloud\u201d of suspicion over the House of Commons. All the party leaders broadly agreed last week that the unredacted version of the NSICOP report should be booted over to Justice Hogue to sort it all out. And separately, a series of national-security measures NSICOP had urged in vain on the Trudeau government for seven years is suddenly roaring through Parliament with all-party support.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bill C-70 is already at the third-reading stage in the Senate after being introduced in the House of Commons only on May 6. Among other things, the bill contains a version of the foreign influence registry that the Liberals dragged their feet on for three years. First introduced in an April 13, 2021 private members bill tabled by Steveston \u2014 Richmond East Conservative MP Kenny Chiu, the registry was ferociously opposed by Beijing\u2019s UFWD proxies in Canada. Chiu was defeated following a well-documented UFWD campaign to punish him at the polls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"Trudeau\"\/](\"https:\/\/smartcdn.gprod.postmedia.digital\/nationalpost\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/2157085795.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=288&h=216&sig=L0crp113GY1FEPWAYSu9ng\")
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