Commissioner Justice Marie-Josee Hogue listens during the Foreign Interference Commission in Ottawa, on Sept. 18.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
It has been an eye-opening couple of weeks of testimony before Justice Marie-Josée Hogue’s commission of inquiry on foreign interference.
The most extraordinary revelations have had less to do with foreign interference – though the scale and intensity of the campaigns by foreign powers, notably China and India, to interfere in our elections, influence parliamentarians and intimidate diaspora communities continues to amaze – than with the endemic weakness of our defences against them, and the complacency of those in charge. Indeed, we might almost as well speak of domestic interference as foreign.
The commissioner herself began the second and final phase of the inquiry’s hearings by announcing that, although she would look into the findings of the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP), in a report released earlier this year, that several members of Parliament had actively colluded with foreign governments against the national interest, she would not name them.
The NSICOP report had already noted the difficulties of prosecuting those involved, given the sensitivities surrounding the intelligence on which the allegations are based. And since none of the parties seem terribly keen to deal with the alleged traitors in their midst, perhaps in fear of what else this might bring to light, the greater likelihood remains that none of them will face any consequences whatever – not even the loss of their nominations in the coming election.
But that was not the only example to emerge of fecklessness and disorganization on the part of those responsible for protecting our democracy. Since the commission resumed hearings earlier this month, it has heard:
- that Conservative MP Michael Chong learned of attempts by Chinese intelligence to intimidate members of his family via the “front page of The Globe and Mail” rather than from the government;
- that, after he was approached by a woman offering to do some work for him, and having learned that she had been fired from her job at the Privy Council Office years earlier on suspicion of being an agent of the Chinese government, Mr. Chong was told by the Prime Minister’s national-security adviser that all records dealing with her case had been destroyed;
- that the national director of the Liberal Party of Canada, Azam Ishmael, had only just learned (in the course of his appearance before the inquiry) of one of the central allegations in the NSICOP report, as well as Justice Hogue’s own interim report: that busloads of visiting students from China had been recruited by the Chinese consulate to vote for Han Dong in the 2019 nomination race in Don Valley North. Mr. Ishmael had until that point been attempting to maintain that no Liberal nomination race had been successfully compromised by foreign-interference efforts;
- and that the executive director of the Conservative Party, Mike Crase, was unaware of intelligence documenting three separate attempts by foreign powers – two by China, one by India – to interfere in Conservative leadership races, including by means of mass purchases of party memberships.
As the examples above suggest, Canada would appear to suffer from two particular points of vulnerability to foreign interference. One, already much discussed in these pages, has been the strange reluctance of the Liberal government to act on the intelligence agencies’ repeated warnings, particularly with regard to China. For example, the inquiry has been told that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was informed of the allegations regarding the Dong nomination at the time, but allowed the nomination to stand, not only in that election but in the following one as well.
The other is the internal election processes of the parties: the “gateway,” as Justice Hogue has called it, for foreign-interference efforts. The rules governing who may vote in nomination and leadership races, as the inquiry has heard, are so lax, and so laxly enforced, that the parties might as well have taken out an ad: “Interference Wanted. Apply Within.”
To vote in an ordinary election campaign, you have to be at least 18 years of age, a Canadian citizen, and a resident of the riding in which you vote. To vote in party nomination or leadership races, you can be as young as 14. You do not have to be a citizen – or even a permanent resident, in the Liberals’ case. You’re supposed to be a resident of the riding, but as the Dong case suggests this is neither closely enforced nor even well defined: The Liberal national director seemed unclear what “ordinarily resident” means.
Even if the parties were of a mind to enforce these comically slipshod rules, they would find it difficult, given the practice of electing candidates via packed, chaotic nomination meetings, in which the sudden arrival of busloads of new members, hastily recruited by whatever means, is among the least unsavoury tactics.
Leadership races are no better: the parties’ determination to use these, not as opportunities to consult their members, the people who dutifully lick the envelopes and knock on the doors and sit through interminable party policy workshops, about who they prefer should lead them, but as frantic membership sales drives, with all the potential for manipulation – including by foreign powers – that implies.
Indeed, in the last Liberal leadership race, potential voters were not even required to purchase a membership, but only to declare themselves “supporters,” severing the last remaining link in the evidentiary chain, the credit-card receipt.
Historically, party nomination and leadership races, and the shenanigans attending thereto, have mostly been a source of entertainment for the rest of us: If they tended to be crooked, that was a matter for the crooks to settle amongst themselves. But when these races are being gamed, not by colourful local fixers, but by sinister foreign dictatorships, the whole business loses its Runyonesque charm.
Given the many “safe” ridings in a country divided into regional blocs, in which one party or another dominates for decades, nomination races are often the real election. If these have been compromised, it means some of the people sitting in Parliament may have effectively been placed there by China, or India, or some other power. The possibility that they might have had a hand in choosing a party leader or two is even more dismaying.
Yet despite the risk, and despite the abundant evidence that the parties have failed utterly at self-regulation, the likelihood of any of this changing seems remote. None of the parties has shown any readiness to clean up its act. All have rejected outright the most obvious solution, the one Justice Hogue has hinted at: external regulation, ideally by Elections Canada.
The agency, for its part, has gone no further than to propose party elections be subject to a few very basic rules (like no non-citizens voting), while disavowing any role in directly administering them. But even that proposal is unlikely to go further. Because the parties, as possible subjects of regulation, are also the ones, through their control of the legislatures, to decide whether it should be imposed. Like any other proposed reform of Canada’s increasingly decrepit democracy, it is caught in an exquisite Catch-22: The people whose powers and privileges are most in need of reform are the ones who would have to agree to it.
Why should the parties enjoy, after all that we have heard, any benefit of the doubt? The same thin pretext is always offered: Parties are private organizations. Regulation of their internal affairs would be an offence against liberty. The state has no place in the backrooms of the nation.
But this is absurd. Parties are not private organizations, wholly concerned with their own internal affairs and desiring nothing of the state but to be left alone. They seek to control the state. They are machines for winning and wielding power, the instrument for hoisting a small group of people into position to boss the rest of us about, much as they do their own MPs.
The notion that political parties should be immune from the sort of regulation with which countless other private organizations – corporations, charities, even sports leagues – are required to comply is entirely of a piece with the parties’ broader habit of exempting themselves from the laws they apply to others.
For example, federal privacy laws, such as the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), do not apply, for the most part, to the parties: They can collect and use personal information in ways that other private organizations may not.
A similar exemption was thoughtfully carved out of federal anti-spam legislation, “do-not-call” lists, and other curbs on intrusive marketing practices. Ditto for truth-in-advertising laws. To say nothing of the extraordinarily generous tax credits the parties have contrived to apply to political donations – of a kind unavailable for donations to, say, cancer research – and the equally generous system of reimbursements for campaign expenses.
Is there a way to crack this iron circle? Not until one of the parties breaks ranks. But as we are seeing, that is vanishingly unlikely. The parties like to portray themselves as robust rivals. But when it comes to their own interests, they are all on the same side. Competition in the marketplace of ideas has been replaced by an all-party cartel, a conspiracy in restraint of accountability – even on a matter as urgent, and as critical, as safeguarding our electoral process from foreign interference.
First the parties seized control of our democracy. Then they set themselves above it. Now they are emerging as the biggest threat to it.