EDITORIAL: A farcical response to foreign interference

Published Sep 21, 2024  •  2 minute read

Justice Marie-Josee Hogue listens during the Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference in Federal Electoral Processes and Democratic Institutions in Ottawa on Tuesday, April 2, 2024. Photo by Sean Kilpatrick /THE CANADIAN PRESS

If federal political parties were serious about combating foreign interference, they would all be committed to reforming the Wild West process by which they currently nominate their leaders and chose candidates to run in elections.

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The fact that none of them have any interest in doing so shows they’re not truly serious about combatting foreign interference by hostile foreign powers because they want to control the process, even if it weakens Canadian democracy.

Justice Marie-Josee Hogue, head of the foreign interference inquiry, calls these easily manipulated nomination meetings — because the qualifications for who can vote are so lax and open to abuse — a “gateway” to foreign interference.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s all-party National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians has warned that party nomination and leadership races are open to abuse because of the lack of coherent and consistent rules on how they are conducted.

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The Canadian Security Intelligence Service has voiced similar concerns, raising the issue of what is the point of these ongoing investigations into foreign interference if the political parties are simply going to ignore their recommendations to combat it?

Testimony by senior Liberal and Conservative party officials at the foreign interference inquiry last week about how their parties ostensibly guard against foreign interference quickly descended into farce.

The national director of the Liberal party testified that while the Liberals had been targeted for foreign interference in nomination races, it had never succeeded — which he later had to correct because he hadn’t read all of a NSICOP report released three months ago, citing specific examples of foreign interference in the Liberal nomination process.

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The executive director of the Conservative party said it had no information to contribute about foreign interference, despite NSICOP alleging that foreign powers interfered in the Conservative leadership race.

All this in a country where Canadians are apparently never going to learn the identity of federal politicians who — according to NSICOP — wittingly or unwittingly, participated in foreign interference against their country.

The purpose of the ongoing government inquiries into foreign interference is to learn what went wrong in the past to prevent abuses in the future.

The fact no federal party is truly interested in reforming nomination and leadership races, a known source of foreign interference, is a disgrace.

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