Trudeau now has a yes-or-no question on Chinese election interference inquiry

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There were, before an important vote on a public inquiry, a number of officials who came to the Commons procedure committee with caveats.

There are lots of caveats, they said, about intelligence reports, such as the ones that warned the Chinese government interfered in Canada’s 2019 and 2021 federal elections. They weren’t talking about any specific intelligence, such as what was reported by The Globe and Mail and Global News, which raised questions about whether Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ignored serious warnings. But there are caveats about intelligence.

David Morrison, the deputy minister of foreign affairs who was, for a while in 2021, the acting national security adviser, noted that intelligence reports themselves often include caveats, for example by noting they are based on less-than-certain sources. Sometimes conclusions change or don’t turn out to be right.

“They are not an account of what happened. They are often an account of what somebody said might have happened,” he told the committee.

But there was another caveat that Mr. Morrison and all the other senior officials applied when talking about this: They couldn’t discuss specific cases or specific intelligence. They couldn’t talk about what actually happened.

By this point, things had moved well beyond generalities. The committee was just about to vote on whether there should be an inquiry. And there had already been a lot of vague responses in recent months that hadn’t been enough.

Now there has to be someone who can find the answers to a couple of key questions: What kind of Chinese interference did Canada’s government discover? Did Mr. Trudeau’s government ignore or cover up credible warnings about campaigns or candidates? Was enough done to stop it or punish wrongdoers?

The security agencies will always be worried about secrets, so not everything about that can be aired in public. But a credible, independent figure who can be trusted with secrets must now answer those questions in terms ordinary Canadians can understand.

That option will now be put to Mr. Trudeau directly, after the House of Commons standing committee on procedure and House affairs passed a motion proposed by the NDP – his partners in a parliamentary alliance – calling for a public inquiry.

As New Democrat MP Peter Julian, the motion’s sponsor, put it in a press release: “The ball is in Prime Minister Trudeau’s court.”

At this point, an inquiry has to be Mr. Trudeau’s best way forward. If it is true that the government can’t properly explain itself because it can’t talk about intelligence, then a serious, trusted figure sifting the facts is better. Politically, it is surely better for the Liberal government than letting unanswered questions mount, simmer and boil. So far, its response has been a shemozzle.

The Globe reported on CSIS documents that recounted a series of specifics of Chinese government efforts to interfere in the 2021 election, with the aim of helping Liberals win, but only to the point of another minority government.

Those efforts included not just spreading misinformation but directing illegal donation schemes and arranging for companies to hire international students to volunteer for local candidates.

The government has since released a report by a respected former senior official, Morris Rosenberg, that found the outcome was not affected by foreign interference and the system to flag such interference worked properly.

But Mr. Rosenberg was obviously the wrong choice to author such a report because his previous work as chief executive of the Trudeau Foundation from 2014 to 2018 was always going to raise allegations of bias.

This week, the Trudeau Foundation decided to return a $200,000 donation pledged in 2016 – after The Globe reported that CSIS had captured a conversation that indicated Chinese government officials directed the gift as part of efforts to curry favour with Mr. Trudeau.

All of that is, to put it very very mildly, bad optics. If Mr. Trudeau’s Liberals want to explain it away as a series of unfortunate events, it is going to take more than a few tweets.

There are too many specific questions now to be settled by the generalities of civil servants talking about what might have taken place. Things have moved beyond that now. Now the immediate point is whether Mr. Trudeau will approve an inquiry, and it is a yes-or-no question.