No public inquiry on foreign interference. Why not? What happens now?

CLIP You are listening to a Frequency Podcast, network production in association with City News.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Yesterday after months of controversy and speculation about who knew what and when in relation to allegations of Chinese interference in Canada’s democracy, the country finally got some answers.

CLIP There should not and need not be a separate formal public inquiry. A public inquiry examining the leak materials could not be undertaken in public given the sensitivity of the intelligence.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Wait, sorry. by answers I mean that they were told they would not be getting answers with a public inquiry. Mr. Johnston concluded that an inquiry into the affair, which has been dominating Canadian federal politics since February was unnecessary and said that he found no evidence that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had ignored any reports on Chinese interference. And naturally, Mr. Johnston’s conclusion was good enough for everyone and the matter was calmly put to bed.

CLIP We see today that his ski buddy, cottage neighbor, family friend, and member of the Beijing financed Trudeau Foundation came out and did exactly what I predicted, helped Trudeau cover up the influence by Beijing in our democracy.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Wait, sorry, by put to bed. I mean, the lack of an inquiry will be an incendiary topic from right now until the next election with no end in sight. So what do we know from this report that we didn’t already know? What might we still find out in the coming months? Why isn’t there going to be an inquiry? And if we’re not going to get clear answers from a public inquiry on this, what could we be doing to better protect Canada from the interference that launched this whole affair?

I am Jordan Heath Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Stephen Maher is a writer, a reporter, and a commentator. He’s one of our favourite people to help us break down, hijinks in Ottawa. Is it fair to call them hijink, Steven? This is serious.

Stephen Maher Well, I guess that depends on whether you, support the government or the opposition.

Jordan Heath Rawlings That’s, yeah, that’s gonna be the story of the summer, I think. So, a little while before we spoke, former Governor General, Mr. David Johnson released his report today on Chinese interference in Canadian politics. Just, before we begin, Stephen, maybe just catch us up roughly what did it say? What’s the big takeaway here?

Stephen Maher Well, the, the takeaway is that Justin Trudeau and his government were not negligent in overlooking foreign interference. And there should be no public inquiry to look deeper into the question. However, Mr. Johnson found that there are what he sees as systemic shortcomings in the way that intelligence is moved from the intelligence agencies to the government, and that there were serious shortcomings in, addressing this issue that our systems need to be repaired or reformed so that we have more resilience in dealing with concerted influence operations from China.

Jordan Heath Rawlings And so that’ll all be done, I guess, as part of the public inquiry that Canada’s going to get, so we can see who knew what, when, what needs to be done right out in the open?

Stephen Maher Well, Mr. Johnson seems to have come to the conclusion that we don’t need, in fact, can’t have, mus’nt have a public inquiry, which will have the effect of not allowing Canadians to find out who knew what, when, about any of this.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Why can’t we have one?

Stephen Maher So when he gave his news early, he was asked that repeatedly. And what he said is that the material is just too secret, too sensitive, and it would not be possible to get into it in a public inquiry because the inquiry would have to go in camera so often. And there’s two sort of things I would raise about that. One is that there have been inquiries in the past that did do just that. In, in particular, the O’Connor inquiry into the wrongful rendition of Maher Arar. Which I think must have involved the deepest, darkest secrets in the possession of the Canadian government having to do with what we used to call the War on Terror. And, Justice O’Connor managed to, to do a report on that, that seemed to satisfy people in the end, we were left just basically having to take Justice O’Connor’s word for it because, you know, we, we could not actually see all the intelligence. So that’s one sort of issue with his assertion in my view. The other issue is, Mr. Johnson himself in that the current opposition, leader Pierre Poilievre, has called this a fake job and cast dispersions on Mr. Johnson because of his connections to the Trudeau family and the Trudeau Foundation. Mr. Johnson spoke at length about this. The, the report states that he, he got a conflict of interest check with the former Supreme Court Justice. He hasn’t, spoken to Mr. Trudeau in a friendly way in 40 years or something. Their families knew each other, but nonetheless it appears to me that there is an appearance of conflict of interest. And Mr. Poilievre is not going to have faith in anything involving Mr. Johnson doing this. So, so politically it does not close the gap between what the opposition wants and what the government is willing to, to offer

Jordan Heath Rawlings Even if it doesn’t find out anything. And even if, you know, we can’t, reveal some of the details like in the Maher Arar inquiry. Wouldn’t everybody benefit from a bit of transparency here? And I say this, you know, knowing you covered the inquiry into the shooting out east, we just had an inquiry into the convoy. Isn’t this just gonna be the biggest political story of the entire summer now the fight over why there’s no inquiry. And does David Johnston know Trudeau, as opposed to the actual issue of Chinese interference in Canadian democracy?

Stephen Maher I don’t know. I mean, maybe. There’s no question in my mind that the opposition have raised valid objections to Mr. Johnson in that there is an appearance of a conflict that even if they’re not, besties, Mr. Johnson and Mr. Trudeau come from the same sort of club. They’re both lifelong members of the, what Westerners like to call the, the Lorean elite, right. The kind of people who see each other at Montro bla and the, the Chateau Laurier at events. And, and you have Mr. Johnson here, who I should say he’s held in at least until he said there shouldn’t be a, a public inquiry. He is held in high regard by everyone who’s ever had anything to do with him, right? He, he really has an excellent reputation, which will now be damaged with the Members of the conservative party. So that’s not ideal in a sense. And then you end up with this partisan split around this process. On the other hand, Mr. Trudeau is getting the headlines he wants. The government is not going to go through a torturous process whereby little bits of information are coming out. The government’s constantly forced to respond. Liberals have bitter memories of the Gomery inquiry right into the liberal sponsorship scandal. So it may be that for electoral reasons, the liberals are, feel relieved about this. There are to be hearings conducted by Mr. Johnson over the summer in a final report by the end of October. These hearings are going to be into what the government should do to fix the problems that he identified. It’s hard to tell now whether the news will be dominated by the sort of useful, constructive conversations that will come out of that, or the partisan outrage. At the fact that we’re not having an inquiry that may be difficult to sustain over the long term, if there’s not fresh information.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Do we know exactly what might come outta these hearings? Other than I guess, no classified intelligence since that’s why we’re not having a public inquiry. I think it will be a lot of public servants and representatives of civil society sitting down and saying, well, in order to prevent interference, I think we should bring in a foreign agent’s registry. And I think that we should make the following changes to the Elections Act, and, here’s what we can learn from the experience of Australia and you know, it’ll, it’ll be that kind of, talking about the best way to, to deal with this going forward.

Stephen Maher If this topic is as incendiary as it seems it might be, politically between now and whenever Canada votes next, with accusations of what did the Prime Minister know, or, you know, conflicts of interest between him and Mr. Johnson and that kind of stuff, does that take our eye off the big ball here, which maybe should be protecting ourselves from the kind of interference that started this whole process. I’m not sure. I mean, one of the things that, Mr. Johnson did in his report and his news conference today was talk about the way that the leaks that have led to this scandal are based on partial intelligence. Some of it appears to have been wrong. Some of the headlines that we saw, the allegations about Hen Dong, for instance, liberal mp. That’s what’s been driving. This is leaks from the intelligence services, right? If those now stop, then it will get quieter. Scandals are like fires and in the absence of fuel, they eventually kind of burn themselves out. This has all been driven by fuel from apparently CSIS from our spies, which is in itself extraordinary that they’re leaking so, repeatedly. Beyond anything that happens, anything that the politicians say or do. What will determine whether or not this fire kind of fades to embers or, or flares up again, is whether we get a fresh stream of leaks from, the intelligence agencies.

Jordan Heath Rawlings What could we be doing in the meantime? You mentioned that the report itself says we need to improve information handling at security agencies. What are our other options to, you know, fortify ourself, I guess, for lack of a better term, from this kind of interference?

Stephen Maher Well, I did an, a long article recently for The Walrus. Looking at five things that we can do and talk to a number of, quite a large number of experts and political types who were involved in the elections. The first one and the most important one, I think, is establishing a foreign influence registry. The United States has had one since 1938. Listeners may recall that there has been a story about what are referred to as Chinese police stations operating in both Canada and the United States and in other countries where agents of the communist government in China are able, to use these facilities to surveil and harass and intimidate Canadians in the diaspora. When this story came out in the United States, The Americans quickly charged a number of people for doing the bidding of a foreign government on US soil without having registered. In Canada, no one has been charged, and according to one report, they’re still operating. And that’s because it’s not against the law to act on behalf of a foreign government in Canada without having registered because there is no registry. If you look at the Trudeau Government’s track record on this and compare it with Australia and the United Kingdom, both of which have similar issues, the Australians have been, started to take action on this in 2018. Now they’re much closer to China and it’s a more of an existential issue for them. So it does seem surprising. In a sense that the government has not done anything about that I say has not done anything they have recently promised to study the issue.

Jordan Heath Rawlings That’s very Canadian.

Stephen Maher Yes it is. Yes. And we’ll give it a good study. So it looks like they may go ahead with something, but it seems, relevant to me that I n 2021, a member of parliament from Vancouver named Kenny Chiu, who had brought forward a private members bill, proposing such a registry was defeated in, an election in which he alleges was influenced by Chinese disinformation through social media and the Chinese language press. So I think that that particular incident kind of shows that the government, by dragging its feet, has allowed, the government in Beijing to continue to act with greater impunity here than it does in other places.

Jordan Heath Rawlings In general with the decision today that there won’t be an inquiry. First of all, were you surprised by it? And second of all, is this a win for the conservatives simply because they get the ammunition?

Stephen Maher I was surprised. A lot of the smart people who I’ve listened to about politics were thinking, well, Johnson will look bad if he doesn’t call an inquiry. So he doesn’t wanna look bad, so he’ll likely call an inquiry. The conventional wisdom seems to be that this will be bad for the liberals cuz so many people think there should be an inquiry. On the other hand, I know a number of conservatives, very partisan conservatives who are not in the tent of, Pierre Poilievre right now, but people who have no love for this government and want to see it unseated. But people who are familiar with the machinery of government who do not think that a public inquiry is a good idea, Mr. Johnson’s view is not insane. Right. I don’t think I agree with it because of the precedent of, the Maher Arar case, for example. And the process that he has set out will not provide accountability, based on what the government has done in the past. So that remains entirely a fair field for the conservatives to attack, since the government cannot say, we have established a process to get to the bottom of this. So stop asking questions in the house. They’ve shut down a potential avenue of defense for themselves. And so it remains fair game for the conservatives unless there are fresh leaks. I am not sure whether it can be sustained in as intense a way going forward as in the past. But the leakers want a public inquiry they, that appears to be what they want. They’re not getting one. So I’m gonna be waiting to, to see, what their next move is.

Jordan Heath Rawlings That was gonna be my next question anyway, which is, yeah, won’t the leaks just continue? And what if they do? That’s what I want to know about what happens next. What if there’s two days from now, two weeks from now, another insider CSIS story in The Globe and Mail?

Stephen Maher Yeah. It’s gonna be interesting to watch. One of the mysterious things about all of this to me, and there are many mysterious things in this whole story. Because you’re dealing with secret intelligence. How are the, these leakers and there it’s more than one. Able to continue to do this. I mean, this is not the sort of thing that traditionally happens. These people all take oaths. They are being explicit. One of them, there was, wrote an op-ed in the Globe and Mail in which they said, well, I feel I have to do this because I’m serving a higher purpose, which is, I’m serving my country by acting as a whistleblower. It’s, I would say impossible for us to conclude that that’s the case. Or whether they have a policy disagreement, which is what Mr. Johnson suggested today, that they should not be doing this without the facts at hand. It’s very difficult for you or I to know what is actually motivating these people. And it’s perplexing and raises questions that might be as serious as the, questions about interference, about the competence of this government if they can’t plug the leaks. It’s a very strange thing here, and it’s very difficult to have a proper public conversation about it because I’m in general, in favour of people leaking and particularly to me, sure. But it’s odd that they seem to be able to do so with impunity, and I suspect that the number of people understand the implications of the way that what this might be doing to our intelligence gathering capacity, you know, is quite small, but it could be quite, have serious national security implications if our allies don’t wanna share information with us, because it’ll just leak. If the Chinese come to see exactly how we’re gathering information and they start to be more careful, then we won’t know what they’re doing. So there are serious, questions about how we got to this, to this point and no clear path to getting answers.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Stephen, thanks so much for this. It’ll be fascinating to see what happens next.

Stephen Maher Thank you. Take care.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Stephen Maher reporting on what’s going on in Ottawa and writing about how to prevent election interference in the first place in The Walrus. That was The Big Story. For more, you can add to TheBigStorypodcast.ca. You can search for China and find our previous episodes hopefully providing a comprehensive picture of this topic. If you’d like to comment on this episode or any other, or suggest an episode yourself. You can find us on Twitter at TheBigStoryfpn. You can write to us the email address is hello@TheBigStorypodcast.ca. Or you can call and leave a voicemail. The phone number is (416)-935-5935. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.