We need to know the names of the traitor MPs, but don’t count on any of the parties to give them up

Open this photo in gallery:

At some point in the next few weeks, some member of Parliament is going to have to rise in the House and, under cover of parliamentary privilege, read out the names of the MPs suspected of betraying their country.

Someone, with access to the same intelligence on which the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP) based the allegations in its recent report, will have to leak it to him or her, risking imprisonment.

Liberals will not release names of parliamentarians accused of collaborating with hostile foreign states

Otherwise, I fear, that is the last we are going to hear of it. The impugned MPs, whoever they are, will continue to sit in the Commons, in caucus, and quite possibly in cabinet.

Their names, though no doubt known to some – the Prime Minister, certainly – will be rumoured by others, guessed at by still others. But no one, outside of senior government circles, will know for sure, and no one within that precinct will want any of the names to come out. So they won’t.

You may ask, how can this be? The allegations in the NSICOP report are too shocking, surely, to be kept under wraps. The evidence, from the more than 4,000 documents reviewed by NSICOP and dozens of interviews with senior government and intelligence officials, shows that “foreign actors” – the People’s Republic of China and India are both named – have not just “intimidated or pressured parliamentarians” but in some cases have enjoyed their willing collaboration.

The committee said it had seen “troubling intelligence that some Parliamentarians are, in the words of the intelligence services, ‘semi-witting or witting’ participants in the efforts of foreign states to interfere in our politics.”

They are accused of:

• “provid[ing] information learned in confidence from the government to a known intelligence officer of a foreign state,”
• at “the requests or direction of foreign officials … improperly influenc[ing] Parliamentary colleagues or Parliamentary business to the advantage of a foreign state,”
• providing “foreign diplomatic officials with privileged information on the work or opinions of fellow Parliamentarians, knowing that such information will be used by those officials to inappropriately pressure Parliamentarians to change their positions.”

In return for which they receive:

• “support from community groups or businesses” during election campaigns “which the diplomatic missions promise to quietly mobilize in a candidate’s favour”;
• “funds or benefits from foreign missions or their proxies which have been layered or otherwise disguised to conceal their source,” which they accept “knowingly or through willful blindness.”

In sum, they sold – and for all we know are still selling – secrets, influence and even their colleagues to China and India in return for money and political muscle.

This puts rather a different face on things. Until now, the scandal had seemed to be largely about foreign interference – online disinformation campaigns, intimidation of diaspora communities, and so on – even if the issue was why the government has been so slow to act on it.

But it now appears that at least as much of it involves domestic collaborators: not just unwitting accomplices or unwilling targets, but active, even enthusiastic participants. But then, should we be surprised? Have we not read all those reports from other countries, about not just politicians, but academics, journalists and others being in the pay of a foreign power? Did we think this could not happen in Canada?

Is it because we are more virtuous that there have not been similar stories here until now? Or is it that we have less stringent regulations and laxer oversight?

Indeed, much of the NSICOP report simply confirms what had previously been reported by The Globe and Mail and other media, based on leaked intelligence, but which the government and its supporters had done their best to deny or play down for years.

There is the famous “network,” under the direction of Chinese consular officials, used “to covertly support or oppose candidates in the 2019 federal election,” including “at least 11 candidates and 13 campaign staffers, some of whom appeared to be wittingly working for the PRC.”

There is the plan to clandestinely provide funds, through intermediaries, to their campaigns, “including two transfers of funds approximating $250,000.” There is the reimbursement scheme, whereby China “covertly encouraged individuals to donate money to the campaigns of candidates that the PRC favoured and promised to pay them back.”

And there is the story of MP Han Dong’s nomination as the Liberal candidate in Don Valley North in 2019: how China had arranged for “between 175 and 200 international Chinese students” to arrive at the nomination meeting “in several buses”; how they had been told by consular officials that “they must vote for Mr. Dong if they want to maintain their student visas”; how the students “were provided with fraudulent residency paper work” and “sought to physically intimidate voters”; how they probably delivered the nomination to Mr. Dong, and therefore (Don Valley North being solidly Liberal) the riding; and how the Prime Minister, told all this and more, retained Mr. Dong as a candidate, not only in 2019 but in the 2021 campaign.

This is the third report in several weeks to broadly confirm both the leaks and the media’s reporting of them, after the report by the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency and the initial report of Justice Marie-Josée Hogue’s public inquiry. They add up to a stunning repudiation of the government’s handling of the matter – at best complacent and at worst complicit – and of the earlier report by the Prime Minister’s “special rapporteur,” former governor-general David Johnston, who seemed far more exercised by the leaks than what they contained.

(Though the committee pronounces itself “deeply troubled” by the leaks, it also acknowledges “an uncomfortable truth”: that nobody would be talking about any of this without them. Prior to the leaks, it writes, “there was little sense of urgency” among senior decision-makers to address “this important and well-documented threat to national security. Regrettably, the leaks were the principal catalyst for the government to start considering key legislative reforms and to take meaningful actions against particular states.”)

And yet, the Prime Minister is still largely in control of events. The parliamentary committees that have attempted to look into the scandal have gone nowhere, for lack of access to classified documents. Justice Hogue’s inquiry was given restrictive terms of reference – all the business about who knew what when was supposed to be stuffed into her initial report, two weeks after the close of hearings, though the judge found a way around that – and has been denied important documents on cabinet confidentiality grounds. The NSIRA was similarly limited to reviewing the “flow of information” regarding foreign interference within government.

NSICOP itself is not, despite its name, a committee of Parliament, but one appointed by and reporting to the Prime Minister, who can order redactions to its reports before they are released – and has. Many of the most alarming passages in the current report are vague paraphrases, the original text having been redacted “to remove information the disclosure of which the Prime Minister believed would be injurious to national security, national defence or international relations or which constitutes solicitor-client privilege.” That includes the names of the MPs.

What will happen next? By all indications, not much. Though the report frankly condemns the actions of the MPs as “illegal,” it is even franker in conceding that none are likely to face charges, “owing to Canada’s failure to address the long-standing issue of protecting classified information and methods in judicial processes.” In the U.S. and Britain, legislators have gone to jail for accepting money and favours from foreigners. Not here. The last Canadian MP convicted of passing secrets to a foreign power was Fred Rose, in 1946.

Will they at least be named? Not by the committee: they’re sworn to secrecy. Not by the intelligence agencies: that sort of autonomy is not granted to them. When the then-head of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, Richard Fadden, referred obliquely, in 2010, to certain unnamed Canadian politicians being under the sway of foreign powers, he was very nearly hounded out of office.

And not by the government. The most the Deputy Prime Minister, Chrystia Freeland, would commit to was an ”internal followup” by the Liberal Party – the same process that let Han Dong take his seat as an MP – while the Public Safety Minister, Dominic LeBlanc, pleaded with Canadians to trust “the professionals in our security and intelligence agencies” – the same agencies the government has repeatedly ignored – “and at the RCMP,” whom the committee says are unlikely to investigate anyone.

But surely the Opposition will raise hell? Don’t count on it. On the day after the committee’s report was released, the Conservatives asked 24 questions in Question Period. Not one was about the report, or its allegations. (On Wednesday, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre called on the government to release the names – after it had become clear it wouldn’t.) Possibly this might reflect a suspicion that some of its own partisans might be involved. Didn’t the committee say it had seen “considerable evidence that Parliamentarians across all parties and groups are potential targets for interference activities”?

Doesn’t its report also note – again confirming previous media reports – that two recent Conservative leadership races have been subject to interference by China, and one by India? Between these and the Dong business, the committee rightly recommends that party nomination and leadership races should be subject to the supervision of the election regulators. Political parties are not, as they pretend, private clubs, and however much their internal elections, and associated shenanigans, have delighted us in the past, it is intolerable that they should serve as a portal for foreign powers to infiltrate our politics.

Here again, however, we are likely to face an all-party conspiracy of silence. None of the parties has shown the slightest willingness to have its internal elections vetted by independent regulators – just as none is likely to be too keen to look into what some of its MPs might have been up to. In time, they may hope, the public will get bored, and the media will move on. And in this regard they are probably right.

The Liberals’ tactic of deny, delay and deflect – first denying the allegations, then, when they can no longer be denied, denying they matter – has proved largely successful. Polls show that foreign interference ranks low on the public’s list of important issues. The Opposition is likely to take the hint. It was to their advantage to demand a public inquiry, so long as the government refused – and so long as they could be assured its findings would only stick to the government. But now? What’s in it for them?

For that matter, the same might apply to certain sections of the media: The report refers to Chinese officials “interfering with Canadian media content via direct engagement with Canadian media executives and journalists,” while a redacted passage cites “examples of the PRC paying to publish media articles without attribution.”

So if none of the parties is keen on turning over this rock, if law enforcement are unwilling and the media nervous – Mr. Dong’s lawsuit against Global News will have had a useful chilling effect – then the betting proposition has to be that nothing will happen. None of the MPs involved will be prosecuted, or named, or face consequences of any kind. And the public will shrug. Experience has taught them that, in this country, nobody ever faces consequences for this kind of thing.

Unless … unless a lone MP stands up in the House and names the names.