The Foreign Interference Commission reconvened its public hearings into election interference in the 2019 and 2021 general elections on April 2, following a four-day break for the Easter long weekend.
The morning session, which started late and finished early, was devoted to testimony from a panel of campaign chairs for the parties who were involved in the 2021 election. The panel consisted of Walid Soliman, the Conservative’s campaign co-chair from 2021; Azam Ishmael, the Liberal campaign director for 2021; and Anne McGrath, who served in a similar capacity for the NDP.
The big takeaway was the clear view expressed by all the campaign chairs that the process established prior to the 2019 general election to ensure that political parties were made aware of any election interference threats just didn’t work to anyone’s satisfaction. Designated party officials were meant to be briefed about threats by a collectivity of intelligence officials called SITE (Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections Task Force). SITE membership includes representatives from CSIS, CSE, RCMP and GAC. Party officials are designated as a panel to interact with SITE.
Walid Soliman, the Conservative campaign co-chair, was pretty representative in stating that he learned little from the briefings. He called it a “high potential exercise” and said he supports the idea but believes that the general briefings he received were of little value in terms of being actionable by the party. All the campaign chairs noted that the SITE briefings indicated that there was no intelligence to suggest that the 2019 federal election had been impacted by foreign interference, which they found “comforting.” SITE informed the parties that the election interference threat had evolved for 2021, but the party officials all stated that they didn’t receive the kind of specific SITE intelligence reporting now available to the Commission. They testified that concerns about foreign interference in the 2021 elections were generally “low” on their radar, partly as a result of this stilted flow of information. A greater concern was the challenge of holding an election during a pandemic period.
Things took a different turn immediately after the 2021 election, when the Conservative Party sent to SITE, through PCO, a memo outlining some of what the party heard about concerns about potential foreign interference in 13 ridings. SITE task force members examined the concerns but concluded that they were “unable to conclude that there was a clandestine campaign to influence the outcomes of the 13 ridings identified by the CPC.” Soliman testified that he found this assessment deeply unsatisfactory and frustrating. He stated he didn’t feel there was a sufficiently robust process involved in reaching this conclusion.
He was also intent on saying that at no time did the CPC harbour any “Trumpian” notions that the 2021 election had been stolen. The party just wanted to make sure the government was aware of its concerns and took them seriously.
But Soliman was pressed in cross-examination on some social media posts he had made in the immediate aftermath of media reporting in February 2023, in which he accused a “weak security establishment” for a failure to “protect our democracy.” Whoa there. This was certainly farther than he was prepared to go in sworn testimony before the Commission. The statement even sounds just a little Trumpian, if Donald Trump actually believed that the words “security establishment” stood for anything other than the “deep state.”
I can see a common-sense recommendation taking shape in the Commission’s mind, on the basis of what was heard from the campaign chairs. For future elections, SITE is going to have to get better at conveying what they know in more detail to party officials. Generic briefings are not going to cut it. But real, substantive intelligence briefings at the secret level (no need to go higher—not least because the clearance process would be too onerous)) will have to happen, and the intelligence community will have to get used to treating cleared party officials as a key audience, in addition to the very senior officials who make up the so-called Panel of Five (The Critical Election Incident Public Protocol), who have independent authority to publish information should a serious incident be identified that threatens a free and fair election. [1]
What this could look like would be a three-stage process of substantive pre-election briefings on the general threat environment; dynamic updating on threat trends and indications during the election writ period; and, perhaps most important, a post-mortem shared with the political parties on a classified basis about what was learned about foreign interference attempts. For their part, if senior party campaign officials are going to engage with the intelligence community on a substantive exchange, it is not enough for them to simply protest that they are not security experts. They are going to have to take seriously the need to understand the work of intelligence agencies and the nature of security threats. In particular, they will need to come to understand that not all intelligence is “actionable,” however much they might like it to be.
Long lunch break…
The afternoon started (late again) with the testimony of Han Dong. Dong is the MP who faced allegations made by Global News and its then reporter, Sam Cooper, in February and March 2023. I sat in the meeting room behind Mr. Dong’s wife, who was following the proceedings with more rapt attention than I managed.
To gauge today’s hearings into the Dong affair, we have to replay those media allegations, and their treatment in the report of the-then Independent Special Rapporteur on Foreign Interference, David Johnston.
Cooper reported on three occasions regarding Han Dong and Chinese interference.[1] The first occasion was on February 25, 2023. His first story contained an allegation that Han Dong was a “witting affiliate in China’s election interference networks.” Anonymous sources told Cooper that CSIS had been investigating Han Dong before 2019 and had intervened with the Prime Minister’s Office to urge it to drop Dong’s nomination for the Don Valley North Riding (in Toronto). Cooper also reported alleged irregularities in Dong’s nomination process including reliance on the support of Chinese international students with fake addresses and two “busloads” of Chinese-Canadian seniors. Aspects of this same story were repeated by Cooper on February 27.
Cooper launched an ever more sensational claim on March 22, 2023 in which he reported that Han Dong had advised a Chinese diplomat (the Chinese Consul-General in Toronto) to delay releasing the “two Michaels”—Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor. At the time of the conversation in February 2021, Kovrig and Spavor were being held by the PRC as a clear exercise in hostage diplomacy, in response to the Canadian detention of Meng Wanzhou, the Huawei Chief Financial Officer, pursuant to a US extradition request. In response to this story, Han Dong did not deny the conversation happened, but told Global News that, in fact, he asked for the immediate release of the two Michaels.
The following day, the Globe and Mail released its own story about Han Dong, in which it revealed that its two reporters, Steve Chase and Bob Fife, were aware of the February 2021 phone conversation, and had asked the Prime Minister’s Office about it. They learned that Government officials had reviewed a CSIS transcript of the conversation between Han Dong and the Chinese Consul-General and had determined that it contained no “actionable intelligence” and that “conclusions could not be drawn that Mr. Dong asked Beijing to keep the two Canadians in prison for political reasons.” The Globe story further indicated that the paper had decided not to publish a story about the phone conversation because they couldn’t authenticate its contents.
Subsequent to the Global News stories, Han Dong decided to leave the Liberal caucus to sit as an independent on March 22, while working to clear his name, and initiated a defamation law suit against Global News. Dong remains an independent MP to this day. Sam Cooper, the author of the Global News stories, left Global on June 9, and has subsequently set himself up as the author of a paid subscription newsletter, “The Bureau.” This is not a plug.
The allegations made by Sam Cooper for Global News were subject to scrutiny by David Johnston in his first report as the government’s appointed independent special rapporteur on foreign interference. [2] Johnston addressed both Global stories. With regard to any Chinese foreign interference in 2019, Mr. Johnston stated the following:
“Irregularities were observed with Mr. Dong’s nomination in 2019, and there is well-grounded suspicion that the irregularities were tied to the PRC Consulate in Toronto, with whom Mr. Dong maintains relationships. In reviewing the intelligence I did not find evidence that Mr. Dong was aware of the irregularities or the PRC Consulate’s potential involvement in his nomination.”
Johnston went on to say:
“The Prime Minister was briefed about these irregularities, although no specific recommendation was provided. He concluded there was no basis to displace Mr. Dong as the candidate for Don Valley North.”
The Independent Special Rapporteur ended with a rather curious double-negative. He said, “This was not an unreasonable conclusion based on the intelligence available to the Prime Minister at the time.”
Johnston was much more blunt about the allegation made by Cooper/Global News that Han Dong had suggested the PRC delay the release of the two Michaels for political reasons. No double-negative this time. He called the allegation “false,” based on his review of the relevant intelligence report. The Commission has a copy of a declassified summary of CSIS intelligence reporting on the Han Dong affair, which it will publish on its website in due course.
The afternoon testimony of Mr. Dong spent considerable time on the alleged irregularities in his 2019 nomination race, without advancing the story about any Chinese foreign interference or Mr. Dong’s knowledge of it one iota. The clock ticked slowly as questions arose about the “busloads” that came to his nomination, when Han Dong became aware, what kind of buses they might have been, who ordered them, and who they carried. It turned out that one busload came from a Seneca college residence in his riding, which was occupied in part by Chinese international students, and two brought Chinese-Canadian seniors likely recruited from Mrs. Dong’s Tai Chi network. Were these irregularities? No one said for sure. Was there a Chinese state hidden hand. No one said. Why were we spending some much time on this issue? Who knows? There was nothing to suggest that the Independent Special Rapporteur’s previous conclusions of a year ago were mistaken.
For those who watched, there were stretches when you were watching paint dry. I can only give a shout out to the dedicated media reps who had the fortitude to stay through all of this and report on its totality. I packed it in early.
But there has to be a cautionary note, if you are reading the media headlines. Watch out for leaps from the minutiae to the major conclusion. To use a hockey metaphor (forgive me, but it is nearly playoff season), there is a big difference between trying to score a goal and actually scoring one, a big difference between Chinese consular chatter, (the equivalent of the boastful guff that goes on in the locker room) and the reality of any success.
Watch out for the Trumpian impulse.
It will be up to the Commission in its May 3 report, based on a lot of classified intelligence reporting that the public will never see, to determine if there were not just attempts at foreign election interference, but real impacts. Commissioner Hogue’s report will fall in line with other reports, including independent analysis on the performance of the election monitoring process for 2019 and 2021, and Mr. Johnston’s report. And somewhere in the not-too-distant future, we will see the analysis produced by the two independent review bodies, the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency (NSIRA) and the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP). The NSICOP report is bound to remind the government of the earnest and unheeded findings it made in its 2019 study of foreign interference
Up next, likely a full day of complaints from opposition political figures (Erin O’Toole, Kenny Chiu, Michael Chong for the Conservatives; Jenny Kwan from the NDP), about how their concerns regarding foreign interference in the 2021 election were downplayed. Let the games continue…
[1] I previously examined Cooper’s reporting in detail in a substack column, “Global News Casts Pearls,” April 18, 2023, https://wesleywark.substack.com/p/global-news-casts-pearls
[2] Report of the Independent Special Rapporteur on Foreign Interference, May 23, 2023, https://www.canada.ca/content/dam/di-id/documents/rpt/rapporteur/Independent-Special-Rapporteur%20-Report-eng.pdf
[1] Cabinet Directive on the Critical Incident Public Protocol, https://www.canada.ca/en/democratic-institutions/services/protecting-democracy/critical-election-incident-public-protocol/cabinet.html
Ah yes the column to debunk and criticize those that apparantly have peddled a great conspiracy theories.
There are no “Hidden Hands”
You know the one that countless leading academics, journalists, intelligence agencies and even a brave politician or two have said
The CCP’s at War with Democracy
Now if you subscribe to the axiom “States have interests” then election interference, manipulation and control of messaging within diaspora communities and outright statecraft sits on the probability charts, at 110%.
Anecdotally A Director of a think tank said to me at the MSC when addressing the political leadership's inability to grasp facts that might upset their corporate and diaspora allegiances is this.
“It’s all conspiracy, until it’s True”
But by then, we are at war.
China, Russia and Iran have been using Hybrid Warfare for a century to undermined democracy and the freedoms it affords.
Join me today www.whistleblowingcanada.com for my talk on the subject
There shouldn't be a whitewash of CCP interference in Canada, like the Johnston inquiry.