There is no need, it seems, for the fuss and bother of the public inquiry into foreign interference in the 2019 and 2021 elections. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has already come to his own determination: Nothing much happened, and any intimation otherwise is just sour grapes from the losing Conservatives.
“I can understand where someone who lost an election is trying to look for reasons other than themselves why they might have lost an election,” Mr. Trudeau said Wednesday.
He then said that the election-monitoring task force concluded “unequivocally that the election’s integrity held, that not a single riding or the result of the overall election was impacted or changed because of foreign interference.”
There is a lot to unpack, starting with Mr. Trudeau’s statement that the Conservatives are pinning the blame for their loss on foreign interference. The problem is not Mr. Trudeau’s ungracious tone, but that what he is saying is untrue.
Former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole has consistently said that foreign interference might have – note the conditional – cost his party up to nine seats in the 2021 election, but that the Liberals still would have formed government.
Here are Mr. O’Toole’s words from his Wednesday testimony before the public inquiry about the effect of foreign interference on nine ridings that the Tories lost. “Certainly nowhere near enough to change the results of the election, but for people in those seats, if they were undergoing intimidation or suppression measures, their democratic rights were being trampled on by foreign actors.”
Earlier in his testimony, Mr. O’Toole chalked up his loss to the “vaccine and vaccine mandate issue,” with suburban voters coalescing around the Liberals in the final weekend of the campaign. That is not Donald Trump-style election denialism, but a level-headed assessment.
The Prime Minister also sought to brush away concerns over foreign interference by stating that the integrity of the 2021 election was not impaired and that “not a single riding” was changed. The first part of his assertion is beside the point, and the second is unsubstantiated.
No serious person contends that the Liberals formed government because of foreign interference. The Conservatives have not made such a claim. But Mr. Trudeau and others have wrongly brandished the conclusion that the overall outcome of the election was not swayed as a way of trying to refute the possibility that some ridings were affected.
But Mr. Trudeau went further than that on Wednesday, asserting that no outcome in any individual race was changed, without providing any factual basis for that assertion. When asked on Friday, the Prime Minister’s Office declined to elaborate, ahead of Mr. Trudeau’s testimony before the commission sometime this week. Mr. Trudeau may wish to reacquaint himself with the terms of reference that his government drafted for the inquiry, namely that it examine “any potential impacts [of foreign interference] in order to confirm the integrity of, and any impacts on, the 43rd and 44th general elections at the national and electoral district levels.”
A key part of the inquiry’s mission is to determine whether any riding results were affected. Mr. Trudeau should not pre-emptively pronounce a verdict. If the Prime Minister has evidence that no ridings were swayed, he should share that with Canadians. If he misspoke, he should say so.
Beyond Mr. Trudeau’s attempts at deflection, there is a more fundamental issue: What level of foreign interference is acceptable? The Liberals seem to imply that anything short of outright election-rigging doesn’t much matter.
Clearly, that is not the case. As Mr. O’Toole noted in his testimony, the political landscape would have been different had the Conservatives won those nine seats. He would have increased the Conservative seat count, and perhaps remained as leader. Mr. Trudeau may have faced questions if the Liberal seat count had declined.
If the results in just one riding were impacted by foreign interference, that is one riding too many. Mr. O’Toole articulated an even better standard in his Wednesday testimony: “If one person is intimidated in this country with respect to exercising their democratic rights, that is concerning.”
That is exactly right: No degree of corruption of Canada’s democracy is acceptable. Those are words befitting a prime minister; perhaps Mr. Trudeau can second the sentiment in his upcoming testimony.