Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appears as a witness at the Foreign Interference Commission in Ottawa on Oct. 16.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
Justin Trudeau brought a twist to the tale.
The Prime Minister appeared on the very last day of witness testimony at the foreign-interference inquiry to push back against the political damage it has caused. And to hurl a grenade at his opponent.
Mr. Trudeau, as is customary at this inquiry on secretive national-security matters, had already been interviewed behind closed doors. And as a summary of that testimony showed, he said he has seen “explosive” information about foreign interference in a political party that he did not name.
When questioned, Mr. Trudeau launched into a lecture about why it’s awkward for the prime minister to get involved in questions about opposition politicians who might be involved – and the importance of party leaders to get classified briefings so they can deal with it.
Then he dropped the bomb: “Because I am Prime Minister and privy to all these informations, I have the names of a number of parliamentarians, former parliamentarians, and/or candidates in the Conservative Party of Canada who are engaged or at high risk of or for whom there is clear intelligence around foreign interference.”
It was a startling statement, both for its substance and its guile.
The public can’t check if it’s true. Or even know what the allegation is. The information is secret. Mr. Trudeau raised it on what was the last day of witness testimony, so officials with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service won’t be called back to the inquiry to testify on how accurate his statement is.
Even Mr. Poilievre can’t say he personally knows that it’s not true, because he hasn’t received a security clearance to obtain a full intelligence briefing – which was the very point Mr. Trudeau was trying to exploit. And the Prime Minister kept hammering away at the Conservative Leader for failing to take the briefing.
At one point, Mr. Trudeau conceded he was “getting a little more partisan than I tried to in this case” – which can only be true if he had been trying to get really, really partisan. Partisan? (Wink) Who? Me?
It was pretty clear the Prime Minister was trying to drag Mr. Poilievre into the same partisan mess that he himself has been in. Now Mr. Poilievre is facing the allegation that some in his party might be compromised, and that he hasn’t acted.
The Conservatives noted in a statement that Mr. Poilievre’s chief of staff, Ian Todd, had a security clearance and received a briefing and was not given the names of Conservatives. Mr. Trudeau, queried by a lawyer for the Conservative Party, said that might be because Mr. Todd is not the leader.
Mr. Poilievre called on Mr. Trudeau to release the names of any of the Conservative politicians. He flat-out said Mr. Trudeau is lying.
But now both leaders are down in the muck denying he-said-she-said allegations that are mostly obscured by secrecy. And perhaps that’s as close to mission accomplished as Mr. Trudeau could expect to get.
Now it’s presumably up to the inquiry’s chair, Justice Marie-Josée Hogue, to disentangle the allegations for the Canadian public.
The rest of the Prime Minister’s testimony won’t get nearly so much attention – even his strongest moments, when he recounted Canada’s response to Indian interference that allegedly included conspiring with organized crime to commit extortion and murder.
Mostly, it was a redoubled effort to deny assertions that his Liberal government was weak in reacting to foreign interference, notably from China.
On Wednesday, Mr. Trudeau had a new habit of repeatedly referring to the classified information in news stories that made foreign interference a prominent issue as “criminal leaks.”
When the system failed, he didn’t see it as much of a failure. He dismissed the discussions about some of the intelligence briefings that never made it to his eyes by testifying that now that he’s read them, they weren’t that important anyway. He wasn’t too concerned that his office never approved three proposals to provide MPs with CSIS security briefings, arguing that CSIS could have done it without his approval. He insisted, wrongly, that the fact that his government finally passed a new security act this year that instituted a foreign-agent registry doesn’t mean there was a gap before that.
Mr. Trudeau obviously wasn’t planning to spend his day on the stand acknowledging anything should have been done better. He was there to push back.
And, above all, he was there to try to push some of the suspicion and questions firmly into the path of his political opponent, Mr. Poilievre. In true partisan style.