It has been heartening this week to see MPs work together to pass foreign-interference legislation before Parliament rises for the summer.
Among other things, the rapid enactment of Bill C-70 will provide the time required to set up the foreign agents registry created by the bill before the next federal election, scheduled for 16 months from now.
All the parties say they are on board: the Liberals, the Conservatives, the NDP and the Bloc Québécois.
That’s great. But there is a sharp clang of dissonance between the parties’ enthusiasm for countering foreign interference and the way they nominate candidates in each riding – a process that two recent reports say is ripe for meddling.
While MPs are making a show of better armouring elections against illegal foreign influence, they and their party brass are wittingly leaving open a vulnerable flank.
The report released this month by the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP) was blunt in its assessment of nomination rules, its members saying they were “disturbed to learn how easily foreign actors take advantage of loopholes and vulnerabilities in political party governance and administration to support preferred candidates.”
Before that, the initial report from the inquiry into foreign interference led by Justice Marie-Josée Hogue, released in May, said one incident in particular “makes clear the extent to which nomination contests can be gateways for foreign states who wish to interfere in our democratic processes.”
That incident took place in a Toronto riding in the 2019 election. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service says it has credible evidence that Chinese foreign students organized by actors with links to the People’s Republic of China were bussed, potentially from other ridings, into a Liberal nomination meeting and told to vote for one candidate.
Justice Hogue found that “the eligibility criteria for voting in nomination contests do not seem very stringent, and the control measures in place do not seem very robust.”
That’s not exactly breaking news. It’s a Canadian cliché to refer to party nominations as the “wild west.” They are unregulated affairs, with each party, and sometimes individual riding associations themselves, setting their own rules.
Selling new memberships and delivering those freshly cultivated voters to nomination meetings, whether by bus, van or car pool, is old hat for organizers who hope their grateful candidate, if elected to Parliament, will open doors for them in the halls of power.
There is no independent verification of party membership lists, or of the residency status and age of electors. The parties insist that this is their sole jurisdiction on the grounds that they are private associations – a status they jealously protect.
They have done everything legally possible, for instance, to exempt their prized membership lists from federal and provincial privacy laws. They like their private-club privileges, and they don’t want to give them up.
But while that might have been grudgingly acceptable before, it no longer is today. As the Hogue and NSICOP reports make clear, nomination meetings are too tempting a target for meddling.
This vulnerability is made even more alluring by the fact that there are dozens of so-called “safe seats” in Parliament, where winning the nomination for the right party in the right riding is a virtual guarantee of winning a seat in the House of Commons. There is no need to meddle in the actual election if your preferred candidate is already a lock.
The new foreign interference laws, if enacted in time, will go a long way toward discouraging meddling in the next election. But even the threat of a criminal sentence, as the law proposes, won’t stop the most determined bad actors.
The NSICOP report recommends that the government work with the parties to see whether nominations can be brought under the umbrella of the Canada Elections Act, thereby standardizing procedures and providing independent oversight.
That seems like a no-brainer at this point. At the very least, the parties need to tighten their rules and reassure Canadians that their wild west nomination rodeos aren’t a threat to the integrity of the next election.
It’s time for the parties to join the rest of the country in the fight against foreign interference.