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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and a handful of cabinet ministers will take questions today about what they were told, and how they responded, to allegations of foreign election interference during the past two federal elections.
Prime Minister Trudeau will testify later this afternoon
Catharine Tunney · CBC News
· Posted: Apr 10, 2024 4:00 AM EDT | Last Updated: 1 hour ago
Trudeau, ministers testify at foreign interference inquiryPrime Minister Justin Trudeau and members of his cabinet will appear before the foreign election interference inquiry on Wednesday.
Former democratic institutions minister Karina Gould says Canada’s spy agency told her after the 2019 federal election that it had observed low-level foreign interference activities by China but that the vote was not compromised.
Gould, who held the portfolio from early 2017 to November 2019, told the foreign interference inquiry the Canadian Security Intelligence Service told her Beijing’s interference activities in the lead up to that October vote were similar to what had been seen in the past.
“Probably in every election that Canada has ever had, there have been attempts at foreign interference just like in probably every election in a democracy around the world — probably since ancient Greece — there have been attempts at foreign interference,” she said Wednesday.
“Whether they are successful or not is another question.”
The minister was questioned Wednesday about her role creating what’s been called the panel of five — a team of five bureaucrats tasked with reviewing possible threats to the federal election.
Commissioner Marie-Josée Hogue has already heard that China and other state actors attempted to meddle in the 2019 and 2021 elections, but that the panel didn’t feel those attempts reached the high threshold to make a public alert.
Gould defends threshold for public alertGould, who now serves as the government’s house leader and is on maternity, defended the creation of the high threshold.
“The very act of making a decision to announce something publicly could be seen as interference itself,” she said.
She also said she wasn’t briefed during the 2019 election about foreign interference because that’s how she designed the process, adding she had a vested interest in the outcome of the election and it would have been inappropriate to receive those intelligence briefings.
Liberal member of Parliament Karina Gould appears as a witness at the Public Inquiry Into Foreign Interference in Federal Electoral Processes and Democratic Institutions in Ottawa on Wednesday. (Sean Kilpatrick/Canadian Press)Hogue is also assessing the flow of information within government related to alleged meddling in the previous two federal elections.
The inquiry was triggered by a series of media reports, citing unnamed sources and leaked documents, and repeated calls from the opposition.
One of those media reports claimed that in 2019, security officials told senior officials in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) that then Liberal candidate Han Dong “was part of a Chinese foreign interference network” and that the party should “rescind Dong’s candidacy.”
The 2019 concerns involved international students being bused to the riding of Don Valley North,Dong’s riding, to vote in the Liberal nomination contest.
‘They just wanted us to have the information’Testifying Tuesday, Jeremy Broadhurst — the Liberals’ national campaign director for the 2019 federal election — disputed those claims.
“They weren’t making a recommendation that the party should do anything,” he said. “They weren’t advising that the prime minister take any specific actions. They just wanted us to have the information that they had at that time.”
Ahead of her Wednesday testimony, Gould spoke to commission staff in a classified setting. A summary of that conversation was made public Wednesday.
According to that document, Gould said she was not briefed on the Don Valley North concerns during or after the election. She also said she was not made aware that security-cleared Liberal party representatives were briefed in late September 2019 about the allegations of foreign interference by China in the Toronto-area nomination contest.
Later today the inquiry will hear from Defence Minister Bill Blair, who served as public safety minister from 2019 to 2021, and Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is expected to start testifying around mid-afternoon.
Trudeau’s high-profile appearance was originally planned to mark the end of this stage of the inquiry, but the commissioner agreed to recall Canadian Security Intelligence Service Director David Vigneault to respond to questions about certain documents by video conference on Friday.
Hogue’s interim report is due in early May.
The inquiry will then shift to broader policy issues. A final report is expected by the end of the year.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Catharine Tunney is a reporter with CBC’s Parliament Hill bureau, where she covers national security and the RCMP. She worked previously for CBC in Nova Scotia. You can reach her at catharine.tunney@cbc.ca
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