We Lost the election in 2021, fair and square
But...how much did foreign interference affect votes in 2021?
It will come as no surprise that the former Conservative Party leader, Erin O’Toole, believes that the CPC lost a number of seats (he now puts the figure at 6-9) during the 2021 general election as a result of Chinese election interference. This view is based on CPC modelling of expected riding results against outcomes at the polls that showed a striking difference, and anecdotal information available to the party about the impacts of a misinformation campaign targeting Conservative candidates, especially in B.C. This misinformation campaign was in response, as O’Toole acknowledges, to the Party’s 2021 election campaign platform, which had prominent mention of several confrontational approaches to the Chinese government.
It might be useful to look back on the Conservative party platform for 2021.[1] The platform, issued on August 16, 2021, was a full 160 pages. Statements about the party’s position on China can be found in numerous places and included a pledge to “Stand up to the Communist government of China.” Other China-related election planks included:
creation of a “Foreign Agents Registry Act;”
working with allies to build a “coalition of democracies” and decouple critical parts of our supply chain from China;
support for the people of Hong Kong;
withdrawal from the Asian Infrastructure Bank;
ban Huawei from Canada’s 5G infrastructure;
crack down on China’s foreign influence operations on Canadian soil;
advance greater practical cooperation with Taiwan;
create a “security pillar” for Canada’s engagement in the Indo-Pacific.
The Conservatives’ approach to China featured as the most significant foreign policy issue in its campaign.
Whatever the impact on voters of the various China-related issues in the party platform, Mr. O’Toole admits that the principal issue that affected the party’s fortunes in the 2021 campaign was its policy on vaccine mandates. This leads to a somewhat twisty suggestion that in ridings where there were large numbers of Chinese-Canadian voters and where the CPC suffered what it regarded as surprising losses (the 6-9 ridings), it was somehow the CPC’s China policy that turned people off, not the party’s approach to vaccine mandates or other issues. How could one know and why assume that Chinese-Canadian voters were not attuned to other issues? Mr. O’Toole also notes that the party was not in a position to monitor social media, including the Chinese language WeChat app, to gauge trends, and that the CPC had no systematic program to build an “intelligence “ dossier on information that came to it about foreign interference. You got a sense that that was a mistake the party will not replicate next time around.
The real challenge of course is distinguishing between domestic misinformation and foreign state-sponsored disinformation and being able to determine whether there was any practice of foreign actor “malinformation” (whereby foreign state entities would seek to covertly amplify domestic misinformation to serve its own interests). Was the misinformation a matter of legitimate domestic debate, or were information warfare puppets pulling strings to some effect?
Following the 2021 election, Mr. O’Toole has come to a conclusion that the so-called “Panel of Five,” of senior-most public servants, should have issued a public warning about misinformation campaigns. He even testified that in retrospective he should have demanded the issuance of a warning—but that would be out-of-bounds for a political leader and the very reason why an independent panel of senior civil servants was entrusted with the task.
He also took the Commission through his thought process as he decided himself not to speak up about the issue during the campaign. That calculation apparently included a desire to “stay on message” and a concern that raising the misinformation issue in a politically polarized campaign would backfair on the party. Mr. O’Toole believed that the Trudeau government had cast a deliberate and calculated chill over discussions of China-relevant controversies, such as concerns about the origins of the COVID pandemic and security breaches at the National Microbiology lab in Winnipeg which involved the termination of two Chinese-Canadian scientists, by raising the spectre of racism and xenophobia. He says he did not want to feed into that.
It is clear that Mr. O’Toole regards the apparatus of official election monitoring established before the election in 2019 and maintained in 2021 as a failure—a failure that includes its alleged inability to properly share information with security -cleared officials from the political parties. Here he closely hewed to the testimony of his campaign co-chair, Walid Soliman—offered the day before. There were indications in cross-examination of Mr. O’Toole that a different story might be had from SITE officials—stay tuned for that evidence on Friday.
Kenny Chiu, a Conservative MP who lost his Vancouver area seat in the 2021 election, was even more accusatory in his testimony. He argued that the Government had betrayed him by failing to protect him from misinformation circulating during the election campaign, misinformation that he understood was supported in a variety of ways by official Chinese media entities. He said he found himself “drowning” in misinformation and believed something should have been done to rescue him. The solution he suggested to the Commissioner was that the government should step in and use its “brand” to provide accurate information—in effect a counter-narrative, presumably during the election writ period. On any close examination, such a suggestion has massive problems, including the caretaker convention, which limits actions a government can take during an election period, as well as issues involving perceptions of government information manipulation in domestic political debates. Counter-narratives may be an important tool but their use by government is probably best restricted to the international sphere and selected efforts to counter disinformation strategically, for example in countering Russian disinformation about its war in Ukraine.
A third figure to testify on April 3 was Jenny Kwan, an NDP MP from Vancouver, who was first elected to Parliament in 2015. She indicated she was given a general briefing from CSIS prior to the 2021 election. She maintained contact with a CSIS officer during the election. She believes she earned the ire of the Chinese government because of her human rights activism and a protest she led outside the Chinese consulate in Vancouver. She may have been right.
CSIS briefed her in more detail in 2023, as part of a new initiative, about being a target of Chinese foreign interference.
Following the 2021 election, Jenny Kwan’s office informed CSIS about an election period “free” lunch, with unknown financial backing, supporting a Liberal candidate, which she believed might have involved foreign interference. MP Kwan also raised the issue of the free lunch with the Commissioner for Canadian elections as a potential campaign finance violation. She linked this possibility to news reports about an alleged “slush” fund being operated out of the office of the Chinese consul-general in Toronto—she wondered if such a slush fund was run out of Vancouver as well. The counsel for the Attorney General tried to cast the free lunch as a minor issue, boring in its repetition, but Ms. Kwan got a laugh when she told the Commission that it was “pretty lavish.” Score one for Ms. Kwan. Important also to note that intelligence officials were aware of the “free lunch” issue and had connected it to potential Chinese foreign interference. So Ms. Kwan’s loose inferential chain had some support in terms of intelligence community knowledge.
MP Kwan made the point that, from her perspective, the investigation into the “free lunch” issue by various players, such as CSIS and the Commissioner for Canadian Elections, failed. In her view, no one “followed the money” properly. It may only have been one free lunch, but she suggested the bigger picture was the incentive provided to others to believe they could get away with similar activities. Maybe—but difficult to know how far to stretch this point, not least in light of media reports from classified sources that suggest that Chinese diplomatic officials in Canada were well aware of heightened vigilance on the part of Canadian security agencies regarding foreign interference and were urging their proxies to take precautions. [2]
The final witness of the day was Michael Chong, currently the Conservative Party’s foreign affairs critic.
His story about election interference in 2021 was the least compelling of the day. We learned that MP Chong was contacted by the RCMP for a discussion in 2023, following media reporting, about any possible foreign interference he had experienced during the 2021 campaign. Chong told them about an apparent spoof email warning him not to travel to China and a suspicious set of questions he had fielded at a town hall in the rural community of Puslinch in his riding. The RCMP investigated but could not find any actionable information.
Chong’s sense of concern about foreign interference in the 2021 election was primarily focused not on his own experience but on the case of Kenny Chiu, the defeated Conservative candidate.
In a way, Mr. Chong’s testimony was a fitting end to a long day at the Commission, in which elevated fears of foreign interference were expressed, many referencing and possibly even buoyed by media stories, but where little hard evidence could be adduced.
His concluding remarks were also a good capstone, and I think spot on. What needs to happen in future is the exercise of much greater transparency by the government and its national security and intelligence community about foreign interference threats, in and out of election periods. Education is a key, but education has to find a willing audience, including in the political class, prepared to invest the time to learn about national security issues. That was also on short display in testimony today.
[1] Conservative Party of Canada election platform 2021, “Canada’s Recovery Plan,” https://cpcassets.conservative.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/07090434/5ea53c19b2e3597.pdf
(It featured a cover page shot of Erin O’Toole in a T-shirt)
[2] The Globe and Mail, Robert Fife and Steven Chase, “CSIS Documents show China warned ‘Canadian friends’ of foreign interference investigations,” February 18, 2023, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-chinese-diplomats-warned-canadian-friends-to-scale-back-influence/
There was a fair amount of anti-Chinese messages in their platform. Is it possible they lost because of that?