Prime Minister Justin Trudeau listens to a question as he appears as a witness at the Foreign Interference Commission in Ottawa, on Oct. 16.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
The scandal that began in June with the release of a classified report warning that some names-redacted parliamentarians had collaborated with foreign governments has now fallen to the level of absolute farce.
The person who has pushed it over the brink is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. On Wednesday, he told the public inquiry into foreign interference that he has “the names of a number of parliamentarians, former parliamentarians and or candidates in the Conservative Party of Canada, who are engaged, or at high risk” of, foreign interference.
This calculated partisan act has now taken us beyond the point where releasing the names of the alleged colluders in Parliament would merely be the right thing to do, as we have argued repeatedly. Now, doing so is the only way out of a deepening crisis whose repercussions will be felt in the next federal election and beyond if nothing is done.
Which is to say, once more, release the names.
The allegations that MPs and former MPs wittingly worked to influence their colleagues on India or China’s behalf, or provided confidential information to the Indian state, or accepted support from a foreign state during nomination and election campaigns, were made by the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians.
NSICOP has access to highly classified intelligence, which it used to inform its report. The committee answers to the Prime Minister, whose office received the report in March and released a heavily redacted version of it in June.
The idea that there are MPs violating their pledge to “be faithful and bear true allegiance” to the sovereign was a bombshell that landed while the country was already wrestling with the fact that foreign actors had tried to influence the outcomes in certain ridings in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections.
The right thing to do would have been to confront the domestic collaborators with the intelligence behind the allegations, and to publicize their names.
Instead, Mr. Trudeau and others in his government have insisted this is not possible, because the allegations are based on sensitive intelligence, and releasing the names might compromise the source of the information. It’s not even possible to confront the named individuals with the allegations, the government argued.
It’s a preposterous Catch-22 that would raise the question of whether Canada should bother gathering unusable intelligence – if that quandary were real.
But it’s not, as Mr. Trudeau demonstrated on Wednesday when he implicated the Conservative Party directly in the allegations. The redacted NSICOP had studiously avoided naming the political parties involved; Mr. Trudeau took it upon himself to put that information out in the public without concern for the complications he raised in the past.
As we keep saying, Mr. Trudeau has the authority to release the names of the implicated MPs in Parliament and let those facing allegations defend themselves there.
Instead, this week he exploited the intelligence to raise doubts about the Conservatives – but only as a concerned Prime Minister, of course, and not as a Liberal leader fighting for his political life.
We’re not buying it. No one should. The problem, though, is that the allegations are serious and can’t be ignored. The Conservatives need to address the matter.
Mr. Trudeau says Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre should get the required security clearance and read the NSICOP report, then deal with the issue internally. But that would be done out of sight of the public, which gets us nowhere.
Mr. Trudeau has boxed himself, and the country, into a corner. If the names remain hidden, Canadians can have no faith that the next election will be untainted by foreign interference, or that none of the winning candidates will collude with other states.
It will also show the malign forces trying to undermine Canada’s democracy that, when faced with allegations that MPs are working against their own country, our politicians take no action and instead descend into partisan bluffing games. A defenceless, vulnerable country, in other words.
Parliament, and through it all Canadians, must learn the truth. Those involved must be held accountable. Thanks to Mr. Trudeau’s actions this week, naming names is the only way out of this mess.