Elections Canada is set to recommend tighter rules for political parties’ nominations after a federal inquiry referred to the contests as a “gateway” for foreign interference.
Documents published by the Foreign Interference Commission Tuesday afternoon suggest Elections Canada expects to publish the recommendations, including greater transparency measures and stronger enforcement of party rules, by the end of September.
Nominations, where candidates vie for the chance to run under a party’s banner, typically receive less public and media scrutiny than elections or byelections. A significant number of nomination contests for the upcoming general election are already in the books.
But they’ve become a central element of the foreign interference probe after allegations, first reported by Global News in November 2022, that affiliates People’s Republic of China (PRC) intervened in the Liberal Party’s 2019 nomination contest in Toronto’s Don Valley North riding.
The independent elections agency will not, however, take a direct hand in administering party nomination contests.
Stéphane Perrault, Canada’s chief electoral officer, told the commission that there were both operational and policy reasons Elections Canada should not directly administer nomination contests.
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“(Elections Canada) does not have the local structures or resources to engage in the ongoing type of operations that would be required to administer nomination and leadership contests across the country,” Perrault told commission lawyers in an earlier interview.
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“With respect to policy arguments, Mr. Perrault recalled the importance of party autonomy and the important value of permitting political parties to establish their own rules and procedures for selecting their leaders and candidates.”
“Mr. Perrault emphasized, however, that just because (Elections Canada) should not itself administer nomination and leadership contests did not mean that there should not be additional rules to reinforce the integrity of these contests.”
In her preliminary report in May, Hogue said allegations about interference in the Don Valley North nomination “makes clear the extent to which nomination contests can be gateways for foreign states who wish to interfere in our democratic process.”
The report considered allegations that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) attempted to tilt the nomination process in candidate Han Dong’s favour.
Hogue’s report referred to intelligence indicating that PRC officials in Canada contrived to transport international students by bus to support Dong. It also included allegations that students were both ineligible to vote and allegedly coerced into supporting the Liberal nominee.
“Before the (2019) election, intelligence reporting, though not firmly substantiated, indicated that Chinese international students would have been bused in to the nomination process in support of Han Dong, and that individuals associated with a known PRC proxy agent provided students with falsified documents to allow them to vote, despite not being residents of (Don Valley North),” the report read.
The report noted that the information came from a variety of sources and had “various levels of corroboration.”
In his testimony at the Hogue inquiry, Dong said that if he was made aware of international students improperly voting in his nomination, he would have put a stop to it.
“I didn’t pay attention to busing international students because … I didn’t understand it as an irregularity,” he said.
Dong’s campaign manager, Ted Lojko, testified that he, too, knew nothing about the busload of students.
Dong is suing Global News’ parent company, Corus Entertainment, over the reporting.