Justice Marie-Josée Hogue is the commissioner of a public inquiry examining whether China, Russia or other countries interfered in Canada's elections. Her first report comes out May 3.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
The Foreign Interference Commission, which is investigating meddling by other countries in Canadian democracy, tables its first of two reports on Friday.
Quebec Court of Appeal Justice Marie-Josée Hogue, who heads the commission, is assessing interference by China, Russia and other foreign states and non-state actors, including any potential effects on the 2019 and 2021 general elections.
This first report will also look at the flow of foreign-interference assessments to senior government decision-makers, including elected officials, during the two election periods.
The public inquiry was established after months of reporting by The Globe and Mail and other media on Chinese foreign interference and disinformation campaigns, drawing on confidential national-security sources and leaked secret documents.
The governing Liberals initially resisted launching a public inquiry despite three votes in the House of Commons calling for one by opposition parties.
Instead, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau first tapped former governor-general David Johnston to investigate Chinese government election interference. Mr. Johnston’s report, which concluded that there was no need for a public inquiry, was widely criticized by the three main opposition parties.
The government then agreed to an independent inquiry that over a span of 10 days of public hearings in April heard from diaspora groups, senior civil servants, politicians targeted by China, the head of Canada’s spy agency, the Prime Minister, his top aide and senior ministers. Before the public hearings began, the inquiry heard in camera testimony from the participants and had access to classified intelligence documents that could not be shared with Canadians.
What happened in the 2019 and 2021 elections?
Mr. Johnston concluded that the 2019 and 2021 elections were “well protected by sophisticated mechanisms” and there is no “basis to lack confidence in their results.” (It’s worth noting that no mainstream politician or pundit has ever suggested that the overall outcome of those ballots was affected by foreign interference.) Mr. Johnston said as well that it’s “hard to accept” the assertion from former Conservative Party leader Erin O’Toole that his party lost up to nine seats because of Chinese foreign interference.
The Hogue inquiry heard testimony from officials in charge of election monitoring as well as campaign managers and leaders of major parties. They did not dispute Mr. Johnston’s conclusions that overall 2019 and 2021 results were not altered by foreign interference. What remains unclear is whether interference and disinformation efforts by China and its proxies suppressed the Conservative vote in individual ridings with large Chinese-Canadian voting populations.
During Hogue Commission hearings this spring, testimony revealed that the Trudeau government discounted or ignored intelligence reports on PRC interference into Canada’s democracy. Mr. Trudeau played down reports of foreign interference, particularly in the 2021 election. In the past, he has accused the Conservatives of being sore losers and insisted the overall results of that election, in which the Liberals were returned with a minority, are not in doubt.
Top Trudeau adviser Jeremy Broadhurst told commission counsel in a prehearing interview that he believed the rhetoric of the Conservative Party “with respect to China under Erin O’Toole had shifted and included not just an anti-Beijing government tone, but also an anti-China tone.”
Mr. Broadhurst also cast doubt on Mr. O’Toole’s assertion that foreign interference had cost the Conservatives between five and nine seats. Those ridings were “close fights,” and the Liberals invested resources to win them, “and we won them.”
Katie Telford, Mr. Trudeau’s chief of staff, testified that the Prime Minister’s Office does not take Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) intelligence at face value.
Mr. O’Toole told the inquiry that his party was targeted by a deluge of disinformation orchestrated by China and its proxies. While he does not believe this interference changed the overall outcome of the election, Mr. O’Toole said voters in certain ridings were affected by this meddling and that government officials in charge of election integrity knew about it but never issued a warning to the public or the political parties.
Representatives from the Liberal, Conservative and New Democratic parties, who received national-security clearances to be briefed on foreign interference, said the briefings from the Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections Task Force (SITE) were very general in nature and not particularly useful.
Commission counsel showed Mr. O’Toole documents from the task force, which is comprised of senior civil servants, that outlined Beijing-directed efforts to spread disinformation against the Conservatives over the party’s hawkish campaign platform against China. That policy echoed the views of allies such as the United States and Australia.
“We were not informed of that,” he testified.
Even when his campaign raised the disinformation campaign with SITE, it was played down, he said.
The inquiry heard that the powerful Privy Council Office (PCO) asked Facebook to remove a “false and inflammatory” story about Mr. Trudeau during the 2019 election campaign, but did not make a similar request of WeChat, which was used to spread false information about Mr. O’Toole and Conservative candidate Kenny Chiu during the 2021 election race.
A written summary of the interview tabled at the commission showed officials overseeing election integrity were alarmed about an article in the Buffalo Chronicle, a U.S. website that runs fake stories. It made false allegations in the 2019 election about an affair Mr. Trudeau supposedly had at a private high school where he was teaching in 2000.
The tabled summary dealt with questions put to a PCO official about allegations circulating on WeChat about Mr. O’Toole and Mr. Chiu during the 2021 election, who was defeated in that campaign. WeChat was not asked to remove the inflammatory allegations against the two Conservatives, which were deemed different than the Buffalo Chronicle article in part because “it was written in Mandarin [which] meant that the content would only reach the Chinese diaspora,” the PCO official testified.
In his testimony, Mr. O’Toole noted that WeChat had more than one million users in Canada. That’s far greater than the number of people who would have engaged with the Buffalo Chronicle, he suggested.
In the aftermath of the election, SITE produced a document in December, 2021, that said the “People’s Republic of China sought to clandestinely and deceptively influence Canada’s 2021 election.” The same document talked about social-media attacks on Mr. O’Toole and Vancouver-area MP Mr. Chiu.
Mr. O’Toole said none of the information was shared with him even after the party provided SITE with detailed accounts of what it alleged were foreign-influence operations in 13 ridings.
Did China prefer a Liberal government over the Conservatives in the 2021 election?
The Globe and Mail reported last year, based on classified CSIS documents, that there was an orchestrated campaign by China to ensure another Liberal minority government in the 2021 election and that certain Conservative candidates identified by China were defeated.
The Johnston report said there was an “unconfirmed indication” that a very small number of Chinese diplomats expressed a preference for the Liberals but concluded “that is not foreign interference.” And he said there was no indication that China had a plan to orchestrate a Liberal minority. While there was disinformation about the Conservatives on the Chinese social-media app WeChat and China’s propaganda outlet The Global Times, Mr. Johnson stated this could not be “attributed to any state actor.”
Mr. Johnston concluded that there were serious shortcomings in the way intelligence is communicated. He said he could not find examples of the Prime Minister, ministers or their offices knowingly or negligently failing to act on intelligence advice or recommendations.
In testimony before Justice Hogue, the Prime Minister discounted the effectiveness of Chinese election interference and questioned the reliability of CSIS intelligence about Beijing-directed influence operations.
He largely minimized the spy agency’s information, including notes that were tabled that stated Beijing had “clandestinely and deceptively interfered” in both the 2019 and 2021 elections.
“You have to take this information, with a certain awareness that it still needs to be confirmed or it might not be 100-per-cent accurate,” Mr. Trudeau testified.
He also disputed CSIS intelligence that a Chinese diplomat in Vancouver was recorded stating that Beijing preferred the election of a Liberal minority government rather than the Conservative Party.
Then-Vancouver consul-general Tong Xiaoling was quoted in a classified CSIS document, seen by The Globe, discussing the recent defeat of a Conservative MP in the 2021 federal election whom she called a “vocal detractor of the Chinese government.”
She said this loss “proved their strategy and tactics were good and contributed to achieving their goals while still adhering to the local political customs.” Last year, The Globe reported, citing a national-security source, that the MP was Mr. Chiu.
While Mr. Trudeau did not discount that “individual officials may well have expressed a preference,” for the Liberal Party, the Prime Minister said it would “seem very improbable that the Chinese government itself would have a preference in the election.”
He noted at the time that the governing Liberals were at odds with Beijing over its arbitrary imprisonment of Canadians Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig.
When it comes to foreign interference, Mr. Trudeau said diplomats might boast to their superiors about something that occurred in Canada but that doesn’t mean they were responsible for what transpired. “Bragging is not doing,” he said.
Mr. Trudeau’s chief of staff, Ms. Telford, told the inquiry that she never saw CSIS intelligence that suggested Beijing had favoured the Liberal Party over the Conservatives in the 2021 election. She added that she was never told “either publicly or privately by any government official” that foreign interference had an impact on the past two elections.
Ms. Telford said she was surprised by a report in The Globe early last year, based on classified CSIS reporting, that China wanted a return of a Liberal minority government and sought to defeat certain Conservative candidates in 2021. In one example reported by The Globe, while a Chinese diplomat expressed unhappiness in July, 2021, that the Liberals had recently become critical of China, the official added that the party was better than the alternatives.
Ms. Telford said she would have expected China to be more supportive of the Conservatives than the governing Liberals, considering the tense relations between Ottawa and Beijing over the imprisonment of Mr. Spavor and Mr. Kovrig, who were finally released from Chinese detention in September, 2021.
The commission has been presented with a series of documents outlining warnings from CSIS about allegations that China and its proxies mounted disinformation campaigns against the Conservative Party in the 2021 election. However, Mr. Trudeau testified that he rarely reads intelligence documents and mostly relies on oral briefings either from his national-security and intelligence adviser or from CSIS director David Vigneault.
The dire concerns raised by Mr. Vigneault in briefing documents were not relayed to him, Mr. Trudeau said.
The Prime Minister’s testimony conflicted with what Ms. Telford told MPs nearly one year ago, when she testified at a parliamentary committee that Mr. Trudeau reads any documents he receives.
The CSIS director was recalled to respond to Mr. Trudeau’s testimony. He pushed back on the idea that CSIS did not inform the government about the extent of Chinese election interference and his warning that Canada is slower to respond to foreign interference than its allies in the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance: the United States, Britain, Australia and New Zealand.
Mr. Vigneault said he had briefed Mr. Trudeau, top aides and ministers on attempts by China to orchestrate disinformation campaigns against Mr. O’Toole and Mr. Chiu, the Conservative MP who lost his seat in the 2021 election. The CSIS director said he had told the government that Canada’s lack of strong countermeasures to foreign interference makes such meddling a “low risk and high reward” endeavour for hostile actors.
What happened with Han Dong’s 2019 Liberal Party nomination?
Mr. Johnston concluded that there was “well-grounded suspicion” that irregularities in the 2019 Liberal nomination race in Don Valley North, in which Han Dong emerged as victor, were tied to the Chinese consulate in Toronto. He found no evidence that Mr. Dong was aware of the irregularities or the consulate’s potential involvement in the nomination.
The Prime Minister was briefed about these irregularities, Mr. Johnston said, and Mr. Trudeau concluded that there was no basis to displace Mr. Dong as candidate. “This was not an unreasonable conclusion,” Mr. Johnston wrote in his report.
Shortly before Mr. Dong appeared before the Hogue inquiry in April, he offered an update to evidence he had already provided to commission staff, revealing that before his 2019 Liberal nomination race, he had met with international students from China to encourage them to register as Liberals and that some were bused by their school to his party contest in September, 2019.
In a prehearing interview with the commission, Mr. Dong never mentioned meeting international high-school students from China and said his campaign had rented only two buses, to bring seniors to the nomination contest.
Commission counsel asked Mr. Dong why he only informed the inquiry about the students nearly six weeks after the original interview.
“I was having a conversation with my lawyer and it just came to me,” he said. Later, he said his wife had reminded him about bussing the students, which he explained had jogged his memory.
A summary of a CSIS report, tabled at the inquiry, alleged that China had compelled students to vote for Mr. Dong’s nomination under the threat of losing their student visas and possible consequences for their families back home. The summary also alleged that some students carried false documents.
Mr. Trudeau told the inquiry that he first learned of alleged irregularities from Mr. Broadhurst, a then-national campaign manager and now a senior adviser in the PMO.
He testified that Mr. Broadhurst told him that CSIS could only say that Chinese officials were “developing plans to possibly engage in interference in the nomination contest.” He felt there was insufficient evidence to overturn Mr. Dong’s nomination.
A transcript of a previous commission counsel interview with Liberal Party national director Azam Ishmael, tabled during the inquiry, indicate the director said signing up international students with the Liberal Party and bussing them to voting sites for nomination races is “compliant with the Liberal Party’s rules.”
What did Han Dong say in his phone call with the Chinese consul-general about the two Michaels?
Mr. Johnston described as “false” a 2023 Global TV report that Mr. Dong advised the Chinese consul-general in a phone call to extend the detention of Mr. Kovrig and Mr. Spavor.
The Hogue inquiry released a summary of a CSIS document, based on a taped conversation of the call, that shows Mr. Dong advised then-consul-general Han Tao that releasing the two imprisoned Canadians would affirm “the effectiveness of a hard-line Canadian approach” to China.“
Mr. Dong insisted that he had always pressed Chinese diplomats for the early release of the two men. But he never called for the early release of the two men during that conversation.
He also said he doesn’t recall, as the CSIS intelligence summary says, that he told the diplomat that having China set a court hearing for the two Michaels would help “placate Canadian public opinion and provide some valuable talking points to his own political party against the opposition.”
Mr. Trudeau was also asked about Mr. Dong’s 2021 call with the Chinese diplomat.
He voiced doubt about CSIS’s version of this, saying “there is a lot of uncertainty,” even around the spy agency’s account of the intercepted conversation.
What could Friday’s report contain?
The commission could weigh in on whether the Prime Minister and top aides were at fault in how they handled CSIS intelligence and what they did to respond to election interference.
The inquiry might pass judgment on whether the SITE election monitoring task force performed its job effectively. Is the current system to pass on information to candidates or parties adequate or does it need improvements?
The inquiry could critique how the spy agency provided intelligence to the government and political parties.
Also look to see if there were other incidents potentially affecting the election that Canadians did not know about.
The inquiry could also lay out its plans for the rest of its investigation this year.
This report will not contain recommendations. Those will come instead in a final report in late December, 2024.