Top bureaucrats on a panel tasked with reviewing possible threats to the 2019 federal election warned the Liberal Party of concerns about the riding nomination contest in Don Valley North, the Foreign Interference Commission heard Monday.
Nathalie Drouin, who was deputy minister of justice and deputy attorney general during the 2019 federal election, told a commission hearing Monday that those concerns involved international students being bused to the riding to vote in the nomination contest, and financial allegations that were referred to the Commissioner of Canada Elections.
“Being able to brief a party, here it was a Liberal Party, was contributing in terms of reducing the risk and the potential impacts,” Drouin said Monday.
Drouin said that informing the commissioner was a way to mitigate possible threats. She said that the allegations and intelligence the panel received about the nomination contest did not meet the panel’s threshold for issuing a public warning.
The panel is tasked with monitoring threats during elections and issuing public warnings if they feel the electoral process is under threat from foreign interference. The Don Valley North riding race normally would have fallen outside the panel’s remit, but in this case it overlapped with the 2019 federal election.
The five senior bureaucrats on the panel in 2019 were briefed on intelligence suggesting several interference incidents during the campaign, according to testimony and documents presented before the commission Friday.
Panel members during the 2019 and 2021 elections are being questioned in front of Commissioner Marie-Josée Hogue.
Drouin, who is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s current national security and intelligence adviser, testified Monday morning about her role during the 2019 election. She said that aside from informing the Liberal Party and the elections commissioner, the panel also asked the Canadian Security Intelligence Service to continue to feed the panel information about Don Valley North.
“One information that was more corroborated was the existence of buses with students. That was more corroborated. All the other elements were not corroborated,” Drouin said, adding that while she could not explain what those other elements were, they had a financial element.
After reviewing all the intelligence to which they had access, Drouin said, the panel concluded that the allegations in Don Valley North did not meet the threshold required for a public warning because the threat did not compromise Canada’s ability to hold free and fair elections.
Drouin said Monday that during the 2019 federal election, all the intelligence the panel got about possible threats to the electoral process were focused on individual ridings, rather than any overall threat to the federal election.
“We did not observe, in 2019, any incident that we believe even met the threshold at the riding level,” Drouin said, adding that because there was no significant threat at the riding level, they did not have to widen their scope to consider how possible foreign interference affected the election as a whole.
Janice Charette, former clerk of Privy Council, who sat on the 2021 panel of five, later told the commission that the panel did not receive intelligence about incidents during the 44th federal election that reached the threshold required to issue a public warning at the riding level or national level.
WATCH | Public inquiry on foreign election interference shifts its focus to India:
Foreign interference inquiry focuses on India, PakistanThe ongoing public inquiry on foreign election interference has shifted focus to what is considered the second biggest threat: India. Intelligence officials testified that India targets a number of ‘high-priority individual races’ rather than the election as a whole.
An unclassified witness summary disclosed Friday said that on Aug. 17, only days into the 2021 campaign, the task force was made aware that a member of Parliament had reported “cultivation and elicitation attempts by an official of a foreign state.” The country wasn’t specified, but the document said that, in deciding what information to send the panel, the task force “erred on the side of providing more intelligence than less.”
On Aug. 23, a report from the task force discussed how a foreign official was “liasing with a member of a political campaign to discuss potentially sharing confidential information about the campaign and possibly arranging an introduction with the electoral candidate.”
A week later, on Aug. 30, the task force briefed the panel, but the document shows its CSIS representative was not aware of any response by the panel.
Separately, testimony released Friday showed that, during and after the campaign, the task force was briefing the panel of five on what was characterized as “very textbook” foreign interference activity involving the People’s Republic of China supporting a particular candidate. Neither the candidate nor the party was disclosed.
Erin O’Toole appears as a witness at the Public Inquiry Into Foreign Interference in Federal Electoral Processes and Democratic Institutions in Ottawa on Wednesday. (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press)This information was presented separately from numerous references to security officials detecting Chinese-language media and social media critical of the Conservative Party, and in some cases circulating false information. On Aug. 31, for example, officials detected Chinese-language WeChat accounts posting a false story about how then-leader Erin O’Toole would ban WeChat if a Conservative government was elected.
On Sept. 10, officials also noted false narratives circulating about Conservative MP (and 2021 candidate) Kenny Chiu’s private member’s bill to create a foreign agent registry, but the officials noted that the Rapid Response Mechanism team at Global Affairs was not able to assess if this was a PRC-backed campaign or “organic activity.”
On Sept. 12, CSIS debriefed officials from the Liberal Party of Canada on a specific foreign interference issue. While security officials were regularly briefing representatives from all parties throughout the campaign on general interference risks, documents and briefing records released so far suggest no other parties received the briefing the Liberals received on this specific issue.
The briefing said the spy agency officials “regret having to inform” the Liberal Party of this issue and said they understood the “difficulties associated with the limitations of what [they could] do with it.” The briefing was provided for “awareness and action based on [their] judgment,” the note said.
In late August, separate reports refer to the detection of an “individual who was assessed to be a foreign interference proxy.” By mid-September, officials were briefing on a “Government of India proxy agent who may have attempted to interfere in democratic processes.”
“Indian FI maybe have occurred in a covert manner,” the testimony said, and intelligence corroborated that the government of India intended to “influence the outcome of the Canadian elections.”
The testimony summary said the intelligence “appeared to reveal what could be considered a potential Criminal Code offence.” A task force member sought direction on how to proceed with sharing the intelligence with the RCMP, but testified that she was unaware if there was an active investigation based on this intelligence.
Last week, the RCMP disclosed at the inquiry that it is still investigating an undisclosed number of issues related to the 2021 campaign.
CSIS Director David Vigneault appears as a witness at the Public Inquiry Into Foreign Interference on Thursday. (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press)The commission of inquiry has heard that a deliberately high threshold was set by the panel for alerting the public, because not only could such a warning affect voter choices and affect the election results further, it could also severely affect Canada’s relations with a foreign country to condemn it for election meddling in the heat of a campaign.
Last week at the inquiry, CSIS Director David Vigneault said he was “comfortable” with the decision the panel made not to alert the public. Former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole, however, testified that he felt this process failed to disclose attempts to interfere in specific ridings that, while not serious enough to impact the overall national result, nevertheless are significant for the candidates and voters involved.
O’Toole said ridings in B.C.’s Lower Mainland or the Greater Toronto Area should not be treated as “rounding errors” when decisions are being made as to what constitutes significant interference.
Hogue also will hear separate testimony from a panel of former national security advisers who served the prime minister during the 2019 and 2021 elections, as well the period between the two campaigns: Greta Bossenmaier, Vince Rigby and David Morrison.
At the request of Hogue’s inquiry, Canada’s intelligence agencies have taken the extraordinary step of selectively summarizing or redacting previously classified intelligence information so the public can better understand what happened.
Officials have repeatedly cautioned journalists and lawyers at the inquiry that interpreting intelligence reports can be subjective. These reports may not contain complete information and may not always have been verified by multiple sources, so cannot be assumed to be definitive.
