The First Foreign Interference report
Great Expectations, but no Dickens
Justice Hogue issued her much-anticipated first report as head of the Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference (PIFI) at noon today. [1] Some media commentators billed this report in advance as the main event—the ‘who knew what, when’ blockbuster. Anyone who believed this will be deeply disappointed.
In fact, there is much to be disappointed about in the FI Commission’s first report, with all due allowance for its impossible timelines and the huge challenges Commissioner Hogue faced in trying to put a public face on a great deal of classified intelligence.
The Commission’s first report comes across as very interim and tentative in nature. Many issues are left over for study in the next phase, which stretches from May to December 2024, and is meant produce recommendations to improve the federal government’s capacity to respond to foreign interference and democratic processes in future. Public hearings are scheduled for the Fall.
The most immediate takeaway is that Commissioner Hogue’s findings do not depart in any material sense from those reached by the much-maligned David Johnston in his first report as Independent Special Rapporteur. The bottom line remains—that while foreign interference attempts were detected they did not have any measurable impact on the outcome of free and fair elections in either 2019 or 2021. Conservative party claims advanced after the 2021 election that it lost between 6 and 9 ridings because of Chinese state foreign interference are given no credence in the report. Nor are notions around the People’s Republic of China favouring a Liberal party minority government in 2021, or deploying some orchestrated “network” of actors. Commissioner Hogue found nothing to substantiate the (wild) claim that the Liberal government deliberately turned a blind eye to reports on PRC foreign interference because they somehow benefitted from it.
Remember that we are at the one-year anniversary of the first Johnston report. In some important respects the Hogue report is much less hard-hitting than its predecessor.
This is especially true for the very minimal treatment she gives to issues of dysfunction in the intelligence system when it comes to dissemination of reports to senior officials and Ministers. Johnston dealt with this at length and was blunt. Here the Commissioner has, in my view, simply failed to deliver on an important part of her mandate.
There are other noticeable gaps.
In contrast with the Johnston report, Justice Hogue does not breathe a word about how the media (hello Globe and Mail and Global News) framed their reporting on Chinese foreign interference in the 2019 and 2021 elections around selected tidbits of leaked classified information. Johnston found that media reporting had frequently misconstrued the context and broader outlook of intelligence reports and had created a misleading picture. This part of his report won him no friends. Not only did Justice Hogue steer clear of any analysis of media reporting and its impact, she decided to say nothing on the problem of leaks.
I was hoping for some discussion of value of the “pragmatic” approaches the Commission took to dealing with the secrecy problem, notably the innovation of having the intelligence community produce intelligence summaries of their holdings on key issues. These intelligence summaries are useful but opaque, lack sufficient substance, and are unclear on the issue of how they were put together. But maybe better than nothing.
In remarks on the release of the first report, Commissioner Hogue indicated that she intended to focus future attention on illicit financing and of disinformation as key foreign interference tools. But the first FI Commission Report fails to clarify important distinctions between disinformation and misinformation and does not introduce the grey zone concept of malinformation (amplified misinformation). It needs to do more work to understand the foreign interference ecosystem when it comes to the weaponizing of information by foreign state adversaries and be much more precise in its use of terminology.
Has the Commission opened our eyes to anything not previously covered by David Johnston? The answer, to be fair, is yes, in places. We have learned something about efforts by the Indian government to interfere in Canadian democratic processes, and have been presented with surprising findings that the Russian government has been relatively passive, despite fears stemming from its efforts targeting the US presidential election in 2016. We have been treated to more granular detail about the work of the election protection mechanisms, especially the SITE (Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections) task force, responsible for fusing intelligence threat reporting, and the work of GAC’ s Rapid Response Mechanism” to detect foreign disinformation efforts. The Commission clearly plans to lean in on the question of how the SITE TF can better engage with security- cleared political party representatives during future elections. Handling by the SITE TF of the Conservative Party’s complaints about foreign interference in the 2011 are well covered.
In her conclusion, perhaps in an effort to satisfy all parties, Commissioner Hogue reorients concerns about foreign interference around the broader, but vague, concept of an “election ecosystem.” She concludes that foreign interference impacted the overall election ‘ecosystem’ in 2019 and 2021. What does this mean? Hard to say. The Commission finding is qualified by such statements, as “likely impacted some votes.” It goes on to say, “This impact has likely been slight to date, but may become more severe in future.” As they say in Texas, some hat, no cattle.
The real test for Commissioner Hogue’s work as the Commission moves into its next phase concerns the ability to understand on a deep level the workings of the intelligence system. Intelligence is on the front lines of foreign interference defences. Any stiffening of those defences involves improvements to the intelligence system, whether that comes in the shape of better reporting, better dissemination, better attention to intelligence in decision-making, more transparency for a public audience, or greater outreach to targeted, especially diaspora communities, and politicians at all levels of government. For this, we will have to wait for Phase Two.
The most puzzling statement in the entire 193-page report occurs in the opening message at p. 6, where the Commissioner states: “The nature of the information gathered and shared by intelligence agencies seems to raise the suspicions of many, who may prefer to refrain from acting when such information is brought to their attention.”
Say what?
I have no idea what she is talking about here and it is hard to connect it with any testimony we heard or documents released in public. Nor is there any elaboration in the text of the report.
Cryptic statements in judicial inquiries are not really what a public audience needs, if the purpose of this effort is ultimately to improve public understanding of the foreign interference threat. Secrets are bad enough, without more layers of gauze.
[1] Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference, First Report, May 3, 2024, https://foreigninterferencecommission.ca/fileadmin/user_upload/Foreign_Interference_Commission_-_Initial_Report__May_2024__-_Digital.pdf
Sir, as always, good reading.
Now, for something not at all different!
You quote the commission and then say, "“The nature of the information gathered and shared by intelligence agencies seems to raise the suspicions of many, who may prefer to refrain from acting when such information is brought to their attention.”
Say what?"
To me that suggests that "many" recipients of the information suspect THE INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES and do not trust them. In fact, that is - perhaps? - a possibly rational explanation for the apparent incredibly dysfunctional approach to these apparent (that word again!!) warnings from those same intelligence agencies.
Put differently: the pols didn't believe what they were told - continuously - by the "experts."
One thing that I have truly wondered about is that the various reports, from Rosenberg right through the PM and the various "usual suspects" through to Johnston to the current report keep assuring us that the results of the election were not really changed by this interference. My wonderment is why would, say, the Chinese worry about trying to sway the election results when they had already ensured that their own trusted candidates were running for the "right" party (and won! so no need to sway) and so many Canadian elite were already bought and paid for. So, wonderment as to why does anyone worry about "swaying" the election when the individuals have been purchased over many years?
Again, Sir, thank you for your stellar efforts.
Ouch! Thank you for your tough assessment of Justice Hogue's first report. In a way, the Justice's underwhelming first foray almost seems to vindicate David Johnson's efforts. Your assessment also underscores just how partisan Conservative Party claims about the preferences of foreign states for the Liberal Party have been.
Which is not to say that the LPC's activities do not need to be scrutinized more closely. I suspect, though, that the Commission will likely be careful about how much blame is laid on that and the other political parties.
Which is a shame, really.