Canada has left itself vulnerable to election interference at the provincial and city level

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Kennedy Stewart served as mayor of Vancouver from 2018 to 2022, and was previously an NDP member of Parliament.

There can no longer be any doubt that Beijing is meddling in elections at all levels of government. Canadians deserve to know the full extent to which foreign agents interfere with our domestic politics and how it will be stopped. David Johnston’s departure from his position as special rapporteur demands a full reset by the Trudeau government, and any new inquiry must include investigating how we will eliminate future tampering in federal, provincial and municipal elections.

Where governments can recover from blunders, it is rare to rebound from making the same mistake twice. Dominic LeBlanc, the Minister for Intergovernmental Affairs, has now been tasked with getting things back on track, and he needs to get it right this time to restore public confidence in Canadian democracy. His suggestion that all federal parties lay down their polarizing and partisan weapons is a good start, but he needs to go much further.

Mr. Johnston’s first report alarmingly confirms that “foreign governments are undoubtedly attempting to influence candidates and voters in Canada.” It also highlights a major structural vulnerability in the process by which we gather and use intelligence: “intelligence about foreign interference is gathered at the federal level and disseminated at the federal level, but is not disseminated to provincial or lower levels of government (such as municipalities, school boards, etc.). There can be and often are high-level discussions with those officials, but they are not cleared to receive classified intelligence. This is something that needs to be robustly addressed, as foreign adversaries recognize both that non-federal officials have a lot of power and that there is considerable movement between political levels, with some starting as municipal or provincial officials and then moving to the federal sphere.”

He underscored a critical flaw in Canada’s approach to security. Like the Maginot Line, the long row of French fortifications that failed because of a gap left in the Ardennes Forest, we have focused all our intelligence resources on federal politics, leaving the backdoor open for foreign interference to occur at the provincial and municipal levels. CSIS is only empowered to offer vague warnings about threats to provincial and municipal officials about which they have no ability to act. For example, when asked about a CSIS briefing to his office about Chinese interference in Ontario provincial politics, Premier Doug Ford said, “With CSIS, everything’s a big secret. They don’t give you a proper briefing in my opinion. They will say a few comments and ‘We can’t tell you, we can’t tell you, we can’t tell you.’ ”

My own experience also confirms Mr. Johnston’s findings. In May, 2022, five months before Vancouver’s municipal elections, two CSIS officers pro-actively briefed me on foreign interference at the civic level. The agents, one of whom identified himself as a Chinese government specialist, used recent examples from federal elections to suggest what I should watch out for, but they were not authorized to share details as to why they were warning me or what precautions I should take.

Almost a year later, leaked CSIS documents revealed what the agents likely wanted to tell me in that meeting. The agency had become aware that, as was first reported by The Globe and Mail, China’s then-consul-general Tong Xiaoling was preparing to interfere in the 2022 municipal election with the goal of defeating me as mayor. The Chinese government had previously criticized me for my pro-Taiwan stand and my support for federal Beijing critics such as Michael Chong and Jenny Kwan.

Like other reported CSIS leaks regarding interference at the federal level, the government and many media outlets played down this information – with some saying it was racist to even raise concerns. However, more recent briefings from CSIS have proven the merits of these early media stories. For example, Mr. Chong has been subsequently informed of threats to his family because of his criticism of the Chinese government’s oppression of Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities. Ms. Kwan and former Conservative Party leader Erin O’Toole have also since been informed that they had been targeted by Beijing for their legitimate political statements and activities.

The same type of disclosure now needs to happen for Vancouver, and perhaps in other jurisdictions. At the very least, any future investigation into foreign interference must clarify the extent to which China meddled in the city’s local elections, what techniques and tactics were used, and what can be done to ensure it does not happen again. To fail to do so would open Canada’s backdoor even wider to foreign interference and undermine our country’s future security.