Green Party leader Elizabeth May and MP for Kitchener Centre Mike Morrice arrive for a news conference, in Ottawa, on June 11.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
Two party leaders read the same secret report and gave the country what sounded like vastly different assessments. But Green Party Leader Elizabeth May didn’t see that big a difference.
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh said some parliamentarians are traitors to their country. Ms. May saw no traitors in the House.
“I don’t think we reached different conclusions,” Ms. May said in an interview.
Understanding Ms. May’s explanation of how she bridges her views with those of Mr. Singh requires parsing some words. So let’s parse.
Ms. May was the first party leader to read the full unredacted report on foreign interference by the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians, known in Ottawa as NSICOP, which reported that some parliamentarians had “witting” involvement in foreign interference.
She told reporters that after reading it, she was relieved. When Mr. Singh read it, he said he was alarmed.
“Perhaps I was more worried going into the room,” Ms. May said.
She said that after reading the public, redacted version of the report, she had feared that the secret version would contain the names of sitting MPs who had actively sold out their country.
She means cases like that of an unnamed former MP who maintained a relationship with a foreign intelligence officer and “pro-actively” gave them information provided in confidence, according to the public version of the NSICOP report.
“If that member of Parliament was a named member of Parliament currently serving, I’d bring a motion right now to have them removed,” Ms. May said.
But she insisted that there are no “current examples” that meet that threshold.
Mr. Singh used the word “traitor,” but Ms. May argued that this term can only be applied to someone who actively worked for a foreign country and accepted a quid pro quo in return for favours.
There were certainly MPs who allegedly received benefits from a foreign government – one section of the publicly released report, for example, describes Chinese government proxies arranging for busloads of voters to boost the Liberal nomination of MP Han Dong, who now sits as an Independent. But they did not reach the same level, in Ms. May’s view. And it is not clear precisely how “witting” some were.
“I said there are MPs who are potentially compromised, who have become too cozy with a foreign government. Absolutely. Not many – fewer than a handful who are actually named in the unredacted version,” she said.
“Accepting favours without a quid pro quo can amount to willful blindness, cluelessness, stupidity, conduct unworthy – but treason and traitor, those are specific words with real meaning, and I don’t throw them around lightly.”
Ms. May sees the differences with Mr. Singh’s characterization as mostly a matter of vocabulary and tone. Still, Ms. May initially expressed comfort with the MPs around her, even if she says she has doubts about their ethics and judgment.
Mr. Singh did go a step further: He suggested Prime Minister Justin Trudeau should have punished some Liberal MPs, arguing that by failing to do so, he effectively accepted a certain level of foreign interference.
The Green Party Leader also pointed to sections of the public report that suggest intelligence officials, and NSICOP itself, have been frustrated with the Liberal government’s failure to beef up the response to foreign interference.
And she argues that all party leaders have to act quickly – to obtain security clearances to read the full NSICOP report, and to meet together with intelligence officials to work on issues such as tightening the wide-open rules for nominations and leadership races that are vulnerable to interference.
And she said she thinks that MPs’ duty to act in Canada’s interest, and not against it, should be codified so that it can be enforced. Ms. May said she agrees with NSICOP’s call for the Commons ethics commissioner to be given authority so intelligence services can ask them to be the arbiter of unethical interactions with foreign governments.
“If they were able to go to the commissioner of ethics, and say, ‘We think this person has violated their oath of office’ … I think we’d get farther, faster.”
Campbell Clark