As Parliamentarians spar over a DOA non-confidence motion and the prime minister chats with late-night host Stephen Colbert, the drama Canadians should really be watching is Season Two of the Hogue Commission on foreign interference. From a clueless Liberal party apparatchik to the Speaker’s refusal to prioritize issues of national security, it is the best spy show going — if only Canadians would tune in. So here are the highlights from the latest instalments.
Episode One: Liberal national director Azam Ishmael’s wilful blindness:
Last Friday, Azam Ishmael admitted that he had not read the commission’s first report, detailing how China manipulated the 2019 Liberal nomination race in Don Valley West. That’s the riding where the Chinese consulate in Toronto paid for buses to ferry international students to vote for their preferred candidate, Han Dong, threatening them with visa revocation if they did not comply. That report noted that CSIS briefed a Liberal party representative with secret-level clearance several weeks after the nomination meeting, who then briefed the PM the next day.
While Ishmael, who became national director in 2017, said he has secret clearance and participated in the briefing, he told the inquiry — with a straight face — that until he was questioned by the commission, he hadn’t heard that buses had been paid for by the People’s Republic of China, that the students had been told they could lose their visas if they didn’t vote for Dong, or that many students lived outside the riding and were ineligible to vote there. Ironically, in his initial interview by the commission in March 2024, Ishmael recommended that, “Caution should be taken when discussing potential foreign interference in Canada’s elections and democratic processes because sowing misinformation and/or distrust is easy and can effectively undermine an otherwise robust system” — one so robust that he apparently didn’t know what was going on in his own party.
Episode Two: House Speaker Greg Fergus’s not-so hidden agenda:
On Monday, Greg Fergus denied a request by NDP MP Jenny Kwan for an emergency debate on one of the commission’s key findings: that some MPs had been “semi-witting or witting” participants in efforts by foreign states to interfere in Canadian politics. The unredacted version of the report did not name the MPs “and as such all 338 members of this House … are under a cloud of suspicion,” Kwan argued. Maybe, but Fergus ruled that Kwan’s argument didn’t rise to the level of a “prima facie” violation of MPs’ privilege, which would have given it priority over all other House business, and thus get some actual attention.
As Speaker, Fergus is supposed to be nonpartisan, of course, but his faux pas on fundraising and double standard on who gets kicked out of the House and for what, have led a lot of people to wonder whether he ever truly lost his love for the Liberal party.
Episode Three: Elections Canada vs. vote-seeking politicians:
This continuing saga took centre stage Tuesday, with the testimony of Chief Electoral Officer Stéphane Perrault. At issue are the shockingly lax rules around candidate nominations, which are set by the parties themselves. Non-permanent residents and permanent residents are permitted to engage in certain activities under the current Elections Canada Act, including voting in nomination contests; changing that would require legislative amendment, which the government could have included in Bill C-70 this year, but mysteriously did not.
Since then, Elections Canada has advanced several proposals to safeguard security in nomination races, including barring non-citizens from helping choose candidates, requiring parties to publish contest rules and explicitly outlawing such behaviour as voting more than once. But surprise, surprise, representatives of the Bloc Québécois, NDP and Greens objected last week that such oversight would be “unwelcome, difficult to implement or counterproductive.”
In other words, while the Liberals may star in this drama, the supporting actors are just as leery about shining a light on the extent of foreign interference — and who benefits. Foreign states know this, and have gamed the system for decades, undermining our nation’s sovereignty by trading electoral support for political influence. And unless Canadians pay attention and demand change, the show will go on, and on, and on.
Postmedia News
Tasha Kheiriddin is Postmedia’s national politics columnist.