Prime Minister Justin Trudeau responds to a question during Question Period in House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on June 18.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
Two weeks in, we must conclude that Operation Save Our Reputations has been a resounding success.
No sooner had the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP) issued its June 3 report, asserting that a number of unnamed MPs and senators had been acting, in effect, as agents of foreign powers, than the nation’s political leadership swung into action. Their mission: to prevent anything from being done about any of it – or as it was more usually put, to “prevent innocent people from having their reputations unfairly smeared.”
Because if there is one thing politicians care deeply about, it is avoiding unfair attacks on people’s reputations.
Accordingly, we have yet to hear the names of any of the parliamentarians alleged, in the unredacted version of the report, to have sold their offices to China, India and other countries. We have heard, however, every other accusation under the sun.
For example the NDP Leader, Jagmeet Singh, after reading the full report, was “more convinced than ever” that some parliamentarians had not only committed crimes but were “traitors to the country.” Moreover, he accused the Prime Minister of having effectively condoned their behaviour, having known about it for months but taken no action in response. Mr. Singh insisted that no member of his caucus was involved, but heavily implied that some members of the Liberal caucus were.
So: some Liberal MPs are acting for a foreign power, with the implicit blessing of the Prime Minister. The sort of thing governments fall over, no? No, actually: Mr. Singh said his party would continue to support it in Parliament.
Justin Trudeau, for his part, has lately seemed to imply that some NDP members were involved – told of Mr. Singh’s disavowal, he replied, pointedly: “I would be wary of any party leader drawing any sort of conclusion like that” – after repeatedly sidestepping questions about his own caucus.
He has been more forthcoming, however, on the failings of another group: the members of NSICOP, whose scathing criticism of his government’s inaction on the foreign interference file he suggests was based on a faulty understanding of the intelligence.
This has been a recurring theme of government talking points throughout this affair. Did the Canadian Security Intelligence Service warn the government, repeatedly, of foreign interference activities, notably with regard to the nomination of Han Dong in Don Valley North, only to have its reports ignored?
Well, you know, these intelligence propellerheads don’t understand how politics works in the real world. And besides, intelligence is not evidence. You can’t just take a single, uncorroborated report – hearsay, basically – and run with it. Or even dozens of them.
Fair enough. That, surely, was the point of having the intelligence vetted by NSICOP, a multiparty committee – Trudeau appointees, all of them – with deep experience in legal and national security matters.
So the committee, after sifting through thousands of classified documents and interviewing dozens of top government and intelligence officials, issues a report endorsing the intelligence agencies’ findings and damning the government for ignoring them, and what is the Prime Minister’s response? The committee must also have it wrong.
Because after all, who better to pass judgment on the quality of an investigation than the subject of the investigation?
Then there’s the Conservative Leader, Pierre Poilievre, who has been vocal in his demands for the names of the parliamentary quislings to be released – and equally vocal that no Tories were among them – but unable to bring himself to read the report in which they are named. You’d think he’d be more curious, especially about the part of the report discussing allegations that China and India interfered in the last two Conservative leadership races.
And, of course, there’s Elizabeth May, the leader of the Green Party. Ms. May had earlier raised eyebrows by insisting that a report whose redacted version explicitly accused some parliamentarians of being “witting” participants in foreign interference efforts – of having “knowingly” taken money from foreign powers and “improperly” provided them with secrets and influence in return – had actually exonerated them, in its unredacted version, as unwitting dupes.
But she took her eye-stretching prowess to the next level with her declaration that there was no contradiction between her reading of the report and Mr. Singh’s – that, when Mr. Singh said he was “more alarmed” after reading it than before, when he said “there are a number of MPs who have knowingly provided help to foreign governments” in a way that “absolutely appears to be criminal and should be prosecuted,” he was simply echoing her interpretation: that no one knowingly did anything wrong – certainly no current Member of Parliament.
Because what do words mean, anyway?