Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc is sworn in on Feb. 2 at the public inquiry on foreign interference in Ottawa.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
Lawyers representing groups affected by foreign interference are urging Commissioner Marie-Josée Hogue to release as much intelligence as possible so Canadians can be fully informed about how hostile countries are trying to meddle in elections.
The public inquiry into foreign interference wrapped up a week of hearings Friday that mostly dealt with how much classified information could be made available to Canadians and what must be kept secret.
In testimony Friday, Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc assured Justice Hogue that she will have full access to secret documents, even if some of that sensitive information can’t be made public.
“People need to understand the nature of foreign interference, the threat is real,” he said. “We do absolutely accept the need to maximize public understanding of these issues. That is one of the best ways to detect and disrupt attempts to interfere in electoral processes.”
While the commission will be able to read all documents without redaction, Mr. LeBlanc said government officials will keep a tight lid on what can be publicly released. Much of the information about threats from China and others comes from Canada’s allies, who could cut off the flow of intelligence to Ottawa if vital secrets were exposed, he warned.
“If you have people giving us intelligence through the CIA or other agencies and we divulge something that could get them identified to hostile actors … you could imagine the negative consequences,” he said.
But lawyers representing groups granted standing at the inquiry stressed the importance of getting as much out to the public as possible.
“The best defence against foreign interference is an educated and informed public,” said Jon Doody, who represents the Ukrainian Canadian Congress.
Gib van Ert, the lawyer for Conservative foreign affairs critic Michael Chong, said almost everything he knows about what happened to his client came from news reports. Mr. Chong was targeted by China in the 2021 election but the Canadian Security Intelligence Service did not tell him about the threat until The Globe and Mail reported it last May.
“Almost all we know now comes from newspaper reports based on sources in the intelligence community,” Mr. van Ert told the inquiry. “It won’t be enough for you and your counsel to look at what has gone wrong and write it up in some confidential annex that most people will never see, because the public has the ultimate responsibility in our democracy to judge political decisions.”
Mr. van Ert said Justice Hogue needs to see her role as helping the public understand the depth of foreign interference and “not to protect the ministry or elected officials from scrutiny of their handling of the national-security file.”
He warned that the government and its security agencies can be expected to resist disclosure, so she needs to ask, “Is this really needed to protect national security or am I being asked to protect somebody else?”
Sujit Choudhry, who represents NDP MP Jenny Kwan, said his client and former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole were also targeted by China in the 2021 election. He asked Justice Hogue to be “innovative and bold” at getting information out to the public.
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Dan Stanton of the Pillar Society, which represents retired CSIS officers, said the public inquiry can release classified information through summaries that would protect sensitive intelligence.
How much intelligence will be released publicly remains unclear. The commission had asked for more than a dozen classified documents, most from CSIS, to be cleared for public disclosure but when they were released Thursday, nearly all of the information had been removed. It served as a test of what could be released.
“We note that the result of the exercise is that the CSIS documents are redacted almost in their entirety,” said an accompanying letter from Department of Justice lawyers released at the inquiry.
The lawyers said disclosure of CSIS details of foreign interference would cause damage. “It is reasonable to assume that foreign officials are following the Inquiry such that disclosure of sensitive information would become known to them. This will likely lead to an immediate loss of access to the intelligence that Canada has deemed to be of the highest priority.”
They said government personnel devoted more than 200 person hours in reviewing and censoring these documents. They also warned this level of national security confidentiality review “is not sustainable if replicated over a longer term” and said it’s “clear that redactions of documents on a large scale will not be a productive way forward within the time frame allotted.”
This suggests the inquiry will face difficulty in getting the public release of significant amounts of confidential information from CSIS and will have to find other means, such as obtaining security-cleared summaries of information or leaving deliberations to behind-closed-door hearings with summaries produced for the public.
The government set up the inquiry into foreign interference under political pressure from all the opposition parties after The Globe obtained secret and top-secret CSIS documents that outlined a sophisticated campaign by China to influence the 2019 and 2021 elections.