Katie Telford testifies

No reveals!

Wellington Street, opposite Parliament Hill, remains deserted, jersey barriers at each end. A cyclist, a lone jogger (maybe the racoons visit at night). The West Block of Parliament now requires sophisticated navigational aids to find the entrance. One helpful commissionaire pointed me to the “bunker.” From there it’s through airport-style security and down long underground passageways. Eventually I stumbled on the meeting room for PROC, the Procedures and Operations Committee of the House of Commons.

The meeting room was buzzing in anticipation of the testimony of Katie Telford, the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff, on matters of election interference. Chiefs of Staff don’t normally appear before Committees, so this had the potential for drama. Ms. Telford was already seated, tapping what I took to be an expensive pair of stiletto heels, completely unlike the killers worn by the KGB villain in Fleming’s From Russia with Love. The buzz died away pretty quickly as the session wound through for 2.5 hours, thirty minutes over the original schedule, replete with some increasingly exasperated interventions from the committee chair, Bardish Chagger.

Ms. Telford kept her cool and batted away questions intent on getting her to reveal her knowledge of intelligence documents and briefings. She was also understated in detailing Liberal government responses to election interference since coming to power in 2015. She mostly left it to committee members to pour fuel on already partisan fires.

Instead, the PMO uber-boss told the committee about her role in the intelligence world. She described herself emphatically as a consumer of intelligence, not a gatekeeper, and not a briefer. She explained that she would usually be at the PM’s side during intelligence briefings, but that those briefings were always delivered by the professional heads of the intelligence community, especially the National Security and Intelligence Adviser. The only glimpse we got behind the closed door was Ms. Telford’s suggestion that robust conversations took place around intelligence presentations, with probing questions asked about the veracity of intelligence and its policy implications. She repeated on several occasions that election interference threats were a serious matter for the government and that action was taken whenever warranted. She even mentioned CSIS threat reduction measures—an area worth further contemplation.

In response to NDP questions suggesting that the government should have announced a public inquiry right away (the underlying assumption being that a public inquiry is a magical formula for restoring trust in government), Ms. Telford’s response was to counsel patience, and wait for David Johnston’s report on recommended next steps, due to be released by May 23. In her defence of the creation of a special rapporteur role, she argued that one thing a special rapporteur can do is decide, independently, on what the core question really is. Good point. Is it really that intelligence warnings were ignored by political leaders (as the leakers would have it), despite the absence of any clear evidence for this, or something else (the possibilities are numerous)?

As the testimony ground on through successive rounds of questions, the Committee ultimately descended into its much-expected toxicity, with Conservative MPs arguing that the Liberal government turned a blind eye to election interference because they benefitted from it; and Liberal opponents decrying Conservative “conspiracy theories.”

My professional journalist colleagues will laugh at this, but I came away thinking, and wishing, that standing committees of Parliament would do their homework. In all of the two and a half hours of testimony not a single question was asked in the room about the Leblanc report, which I discussed in a recent substack.

“One (foreign interference) review down, three to go”

However you read it, and my reading was critical, the Leblanc report provides plenty of ammunition to raise questions about why the government didn't take some steps to improve the nation’s capacity to understand and respond to foreign interference earlier. Why no improvements to public communication and education about foreign interference threats, why no strengthening of national security governance, especially through an interference strategy, why no linkages to share threat reporting with other levels of government, right down to municipalities. Instead we had to wait till a gale force media storm blew in, based on leaked documents, not a single one of which has yet been revealed in public.

Conservative MPs seemed to have difficulty keeping their media stories straight, and distinguishing between what had been reported by Global News and what by the Globe and Mail, the two contenders in the leakers’ orchestrated horse race. Its not easy, I grant you, but they do have staff. The Globe and Mail newsroom must have been watching anxiously as rival Global News stories featured early on in questioning from Conservative MPs, Larry Brock and Michael Cooper.

The session finished with the camera crews rushing in to film Telford sailing away to her next piece of government business. It had a processional feel, a hint of royalty. No media scrum.

That seemed, somehow, a fitting end.