Conservative MP Michael Chong rises during Question Period in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, on May 4.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
The government’s story about who knew that Chinese diplomats were targeting a Canadian MP has gone back and forth. Each time, the upshot is the same: It fell through the cracks.
After The Globe and Mail reported last week that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service had learned in 2021 that a Chinese diplomat was involved in efforts to target Conservative MP Michael Chong’s relatives in China because of his criticism of Beijing, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said CSIS had not reported that information to him, or to higher-ups outside the spy service.
But that wasn’t the end. A day later, the Prime Minister’s national security and intelligence adviser, Jody Thomas, told Mr. Chong that information about a threat to MPs wasn’t sent to the Prime Minister’s Office, but it had been sent to one of her predecessors in the Privy Council Office.
Which predecessor? It was hard to tell, because there were three senior civil servants who held the job as national security and intelligence adviser, known as the NSIA, in the summer of 2021. One official who left the job, one who took it on and one who filled in for a few weeks in between.
But then the three people who served as NSIA in 2021 all said they didn’t recall receiving such a report. On Wednesday, Mr. Trudeau told the House of Commons that none of them received it. The PMO and the PCO didn’t clarify.
More than a week after Mr. Chong learned his relatives were targeted but no one told him, the story is still going round in circles. Maybe it isn’t so hard to imagine important information falling through the cracks when the Prime Minister still doesn’t know what happened.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has questioned whether those stories conveniently protect the Prime Minister. But they don’t protect him.
When information like this falls through the cracks it points to the nub of the whole foreign-interference controversy that his government faces. Warnings fell through the cracks because Mr. Trudeau didn’t set up the system to watch for it.
The Prime Minister is accountable for the Privy Council Office, the central government department where the NSIA works. More broadly he’s responsible for the machinery of government, for CSIS, for how things are reported senior officials and for setting priorities.
And the issue is that Mr. Trudeau didn’t direct the machinery of government to make interference by Beijing a high priority.
Perhaps, in the case about Mr. Chong, an official didn’t read the report, or forgot to pass it along amid the rush of information. Perhaps it wasn’t moved up the government food chain because it didn’t seem important enough. But when bureaucrats see something they know is important to the PM, it tends to jump out at them.
There was a hubbub in December when it was learned that the government didn’t check for security concerns before it issued an RCMP communications equipment contract to a Chinese-owned company. The government later decided there was no danger, but that was something that should have been assessed at the outset.
None of this is a sign that, as some wild-eyed critics allege, Mr. Trudeau and his government are in cahoots with Beijing. A national-security official who provided information to The Globe tried to draw that line clearly in a March article about why they blew the whistle: They didn’t think any elected leader was a traitor; they were frustrated that the government still wasn’t taking serious action to address the threat.
Mr. Trudeau now says he has told CSIS that if there’s any kind of potential threat to an MP, it has to be escalated to the top. His government expelled Chinese diplomat Zhao Wei over his involvement in the affair with Mr. Chong. Presumably, the Liberals are taking the issue a lot more seriously now. A civil servant who gets a memo about it is going to notice. The government has a to-do list about foreign interference.
But there can’t be a lot of confidence that Mr. Trudeau is rewiring the machinery of government – in CSIS, in PCO or across the bureaucracy – to deal seriously with the foreign interference. That’s the action that matters. At the moment, he can’t reliably tell us how a threat against an MP fell through the cracks.