Pierre Poilievre accuses Justin Trudeau of ‘covering up’ support from China

OTTAWA The debate over how to handle allegations of foreign interference took a bitter partisan turn Tuesday when Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre accused Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of working against Canadian interests and “covering up” support he received from Communist rulers in Beijing.

Poilievre asserted that CSIS deliberately leaked information about elections meddling to reporters because it didn’t trust the prime minister, saying there is an “uprising at our intelligence body.”

“They must be very worried about how the prime minister is working against the interests of his own country and his own people. They’ve been warning him for years about this. And what has he done? He’s covered it up, even encouraged it to continue. And so, they (CSIS) are so concerned about how the prime minister is acting against Canada’s interest and in favour of a foreign dictatorship’s interest that they are actually releasing this information publicly.”

“We need to bring home control of our democracy, bring home control of our country, rather than allowing foreign dictatorships to manipulate our interests. We know that Justin Trudeau admires the basic communist dictatorship in Beijing, he said so. It’s no wonder they support him. And they have worked hard to keep him in power.”

On Tuesday, the three main Opposition parties, and some security experts, were critical of a series of steps Trudeau announced a day earlier to probe how Canada’s security and electoral integrity systems detected and responded to the foreign meddling in the 2019 and 2021 election campaigns in the wake of recent media reports appearing to cite detailed security documents and briefings.

Trudeau’s political rivals said a review by a security-cleared committee of MPs and senators doesn’t amount to the public and independent inquiry needed, and took aim at his plan to name an outside adviser or “special rapporteur” to recommend how to close remaining gaps in legislation or to advise if a fuller public inquiry is needed.

The Conservative leader dissed it as a “fake job.” The Bloc Québécois said it would only support someone who believes an inquiry is necessary, and any name must be ratified by a vote in Parliament. The NDP said it would offer potential candidate names, but Leader Jagmeet Singh said an “independent and public” inquiry is the only option to clear the air on election meddling.

And while some security experts also expressed doubts about the plan’s details, Poilievre fired salvos inside and outside the Commons that launched an all-out partisan battle, and the prime minister responded, condemning Poilievre’s rhetoric as irresponsibly “weakening Canadians’ confidence” in institutions

Poilievre last week said he accepted the results of the 2021 election, but on Tuesday, the Conservative leader ramped up his rhetoric.

It illustrated an overriding problem: partisan interests in a minority Parliament with the prospect of an election within two years mean this debate risks inflaming controversy and never reaching timely answers for how to confront foreign interference before the next vote.

Any independent inquiry of the scope required to study the broader issue of foreign influence and interference would take at least three years, said Wesley Wark, a security and intelligence expert at the Centre for International Governance Innovation.

And if it were only focused on elections meddling, then it would be focused on “the wrong problem,” said Wark in an interview with the Star. The most important problem posed by foreign actors, he said, is espionage and intimidation of diaspora communities.

Trudeau warned Wednesday, standing alongside EU Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen, that Poilievre’s partisan attacks “misrepresent” the work of a committee of parliamentarians that can review top-secret or classified information, at risk of undermining Canadians’ trust in their democratic processes and institutions.

“It is upon all of us as leaders to ensure that even as we are strengthening our capacity as democracies and as institutions to respond” to foreign interference, “that we’re not falling into the trap of actually weakening Canadians confidence in those institutions by leaning in heavily on partisan accusations.”

However the Conservatives zeroed in on media reports that detailed intelligence documents and briefings about Chinese government use of social media, illegal political donations and dubious mobilization of seniors and international students to suggest the Chinese government support tilted elections in 2019 and 2021 in favour of Trudeau’s candidates.

“The authoritarian dictatorship and Beijing has been supporting Justin Trudeau,” Poilievre told reporters Tuesday. “They started by giving him, giving $200,000 to the Trudeau Foundation. They helped him in two consecutive elections. He’s known about this for a decade.”

The Trudeau Foundation is a non-profit charity set up in memory of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, focused on academic policy research. Last week the foundation returned $140,000 that had flowed from a $200,000 pledge in 2016 by a Chinese businessman after the Globe and Mail reported intelligence indicated a Chinese consulate office directed the donation. Trudeau’s office says he has not been affiliated with the foundation since he became Liberal leader in 2013.

Poilievre nevertheless accused the prime minister of an ongoing coverup of Beijing’s activities, saying Trudeau knew “they interfered in two consecutive elections” because he was briefed “multiple times and he kept all of those briefings secret.” He said when Trudeau was “caught” he named Morris Rosenberg, a former civil servant, and former head of the Trudeau Foundation, to report on it.

He said Trudeau now wants “secret” probes because, the Conservative leader claimed, those are processes the prime minister can control to protect his own political interests and target leakers.

The source of recent media leaks about alleged electoral interference is currently under investigation by the RCMP and CSIS.

A former CSIS analyst, Jess Davis, president of the Canadian Association of Security and Intelligence Studies, posted on Twitter that leaks “could come from anyone who had access to CSIS reporting” and welcomed the RCMP investigation, saying “these leaks are curious, appear partisan, and have a questionable public value.”

Richard Fadden, a former director of CSIS who has urged a public inquiry into foreign interference, first flagged the issue of foreign influence operations in 2010 when the Conservatives were in power under then-prime minister Stephen Harper.

On Wednesday, Fadden said the steps Trudeau took this week delay the likelihood of useful reports or recommendations. He said that unless the person selected as rapporteur “is as independent and non-partisan and as credible as would be a judge or former judge appointed under the Inquiries Act, it will not sell.”

But for Wark, Trudeau’s chosen route is troubling because it shows a government scrambling to respond to Opposition and media pressure in the heat of a moment, desperate for new ideas when it has ignored reasonable recommendations from the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians that already examined the issue of foreign interference ahead of the 2019 election; and it “outsources” to an inquiry the responsibility of government for national security policy.

“What does this episode tell us about the national security policy capacity of the Canadian government?” he wrote. “The answer: it is fatally weak.”

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