Green Party MP Mike Morrice looks on as leader Elizabeth May speaks while holding up a copy of a public security report during a news conference, in Ottawa, on June 11.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
Elizabeth May is the leader of a tiny two-person faction tucked away in the corner of the House of Commons, and she added something invaluable to the debate about naming MPs who have been witting participants in foreign interference.
She read the secret report. And told people what she thought of it.
In her view, she told reporters, the furor over publicly naming the MPs mentioned in it is “barking up the wrong tree.”
Last week’s release of a redacted version of the report by the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians was a bombshell that indicated some parliamentarians have been witting participants in foreign interference – sparking calls for their names to be released.
On Tuesday, the Green Party Leader said fewer than a handful of current MPs are named in the full, unredacted report.
“And no one in that fewer than a handful could be described as setting out to knowingly betray Canada in favour of a foreign government,” Ms. May said.
That’s the judgment of one person, of course. And it does seem to conflict, at least in tone, with the characterizations that came through the redacted version released last week by the committee, known in Ottawa by its acronym, NSICOP.
A handy timeline on foreign interference
Ms. May is the leader of a small party, and some of her MP colleagues think some of her views are on the fringe, too. But they don’t call her a liar. And she actually read the report.
She did something else: She told the country what she thinks the upshot is.
More of that, please. Any party leader who wants to tell us the importance of the issue, or take issue with Ms. May’s characterization is able to do so. If they have read the full report.
Ms. May was able to read the top-secret version because she obtained a security clearance last year, as did NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh. Mr. Singh hasn’t yet read the report but expects to Wednesday. Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet said he also intends to seek a reading.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre doesn’t intend to, and his party argues that if he did read the report, his hands would be tied and he wouldn’t be able to talk about it.
But apparently a leader can talk about it, with constraints. Ms. May talked about it for an hour and nine minutes at Tuesday’s press conference. She warned that there were many things she couldn’t say, she did provide a few details and her judgment of what it revealed. Other party leaders can, too.
Ms. May said that her view of the involvement of current MPs changed dramatically.
The threat of foreign interference is clearly serious, she said, and one former MP who was not named in the report should be prosecuted for actively passing on information provided in confidence to a foreign intelligence officer.
Some MPs might be “compromised” because foreign states might have helped them, but she argued that they did not intentionally work with foreign states against Canada.
It must be said that the distinction Ms. May drew between complicit and compromised was not crystal clear. The redacted version of the NSICOP report said parliamentarians were “witting” participants in foreign interference efforts but Ms. May suggested that all the current MPs mentioned were in a grey area where it wasn’t clear that they knew about things such as foreign governments paying for busloads of people to pack a nomination meeting.
“I mean we can go from witting to unwitting to willful blindness,” she said.
Still, willful blindness sounds bad, doesn’t it? It would be worth getting a second opinion. Or more.
Ms. May, by the way, said that reading the full report changed her view on referring the issue of MPs’ involvement to the public inquiry headed by Justice Marie-Josée Hogue, and now she feels parliamentarians have to “take responsibility for the hot potato.”
It’s too late for that – MPs voted Tuesday to refer the issue to the inquiry. And the truth is that after all this, a continuing inquiry into foreign interference can’t avoid the question of whether parliamentarians have been complicit. Or willfully blind.
But Ms. May is right that in the end, all this must be the responsibility or Parliament. The first thing we should expect is that all party leaders read the full, secret report – and tell Canadians the upshot.