Image over substance, party before country: Conservatives' closing submission to Hogue Commission

'When it comes to foreign interference, the needs of the Trudeau government, not Canada's, have been the guiding principle,' lawyer for the Conservative Party Nanco Deluca told the Foreign Interference Commission in his closing statement Thursday in Ottawa.

The inquiry, headed by Justice Marie Hogue, heard final remarks from interested parties Thursday after beginning a second round of testimony in September. Hogue is tasked with investigating foreign interference in Canadian electoral processes in the 2019 and 2021 elections. 

The National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP) issued a 94-page report into foreign influence of its own in June.

In paragraph 164, NSICOP found it had "seen troubling intelligence that some Parliamentarians are, in the words of the intelligence services, 'semi-witting or witting' participants in the efforts of foreign states to interfere in our politics."

However, on the first day of the most recent sitting of her commission, Justice Hogue said she would not unmask the contaminated parliamentarians. 

Below are DeLuca's closing remarks offered to Hogue, laying out the failings of the Trudeau government to address foreign interference, explaining Trudeau and other high-level Liberal staff ignored foreign threats to Canadian democratic institutions to benefit the Liberal Party:

First, the evidence this Commission has received points directly to and fully supports the conclusion set out in this morning’s Globe & Mail Editorial (page A12 for those with a print copy), which we say this Commission should also be brave enough to make as a finding of fact.

That is, when it comes to foreign interference – to quote the Globe and Mail: “The needs of the Trudeau government, not Canada’s have been the guiding principle."

The Globe also makes the following assessment which we would adopt and which we submit the evidence in this Inquiry supports:

“Image over substance, and party before country. For many months – for far too many months – that has been how Mr. Trudeau and his Liberals have approached what should be the deadly serious matter of foreign interference”

While the evidence that was made available to the public on this Inquiry was limited by many constraints, some facts became clear:

In the first phase, we learned that Mr. Trudeau was briefed about matters of foreign interference with respect to prospective candidate, Han Dong, within hours of the deadline in the 2019 election to substitute in a new candidate in Don Valley North.

Rather than risk not having a Liberal Candidate on the ballot in a single riding, Mr. Trudeau put party before country and turned a blind eye to the intelligence about Mr. Dong – and Mr. Trudeau cannot hide behind any professed imperfections in his knowledge about the ALL of the intelligence and all of the facts regarding the Dong matter.

He had unfettered access to ALL of the Dong information in 2019 and he has unfettered access to ALL of the information, classified and unclassified, that has been developed in he subsequent 5 years.

Mr. Trudeau wants Canadians to believe he took serious action with respect to the information he received about Mr. Dong, but this is false – instead, Mr. Dong contested a subsequent election in 2021 as a Liberal Candidate and sat in the Liberal caucus for 4 years – until the allegations against him became public in the face of Mr. Trudeau’s inaction.

It was only then, we are told, that Mr. Dong, of his own volition, rose in the Commons and indicated he was withdrawing from the Liberal caucus.

Since then, Mr. Dong is on record that he would like to rejoin caucus and Minister Leblanc is on record as being willing to mediate Mr. Dong’s return to caucus with the Prime Minister, only to have Mr. LeBlanc tell us last week that the Liberals are now waiting for the Commission’s report before taking the matter up again – thus continuing to leave Canadians in the dark 5 years after the fact – on what is a very serious matter.

In the second phase, we learned more about a warrant connected to foreign interference in our democracy that languished in the hands of a Liberal, partisan political staffer for 54 days.

Although Minister Blair confirmed the target of the warrant publicly and under oath in the first phase of the inquiry, the Liberal government lawyers now want us to now pretend that we do not know that it targeted, Michael Chan, a powerbroker with deep and long ties to the Liberal party, both provincially and federally, and that the warrant application would have no doubt affected other high-place Liberals on the Van Weenen list.

Minister Blair and his Chief of Staff, whose own ties with the Liberal party run long and deep, twisted in the wind with no explanations as to how a politically sensitive warrant that would impact their party was allowed to languish for 54 days..

The answer is obvious – upon receipt of the warrant application and its targets, they realized that there were a whole lot of Liberals that were going to be surveilled by security agencies around foreign interference and the information that was going to emerge was not likely to be helpful to the Liberal cause.

So what did they do?

They simply slow-walked the application so that it took 6-TIMES longer than the usual 9 days to get processed and rather than there being any consequences, the Prime Minister declared his full faith in Minister Blair and Zita Astravas.

Of course, he has full faith - Prime Minister Trudeau has full faith that his partisan ministers and partisan political staffers will do whatever they can to stymie investigations that would impede foreign interference that they perceive as helping them.

And finally, the Prime Minister’s nakedly partisan performance here last week -performed only as a drama teacher could - confirmed that, rather than taking foreign interference seriously, he’s content to leverage it for cheap political gain.

With great dramatic effect, and in an oratory reminiscent of Senator McCarthy’s “names” speech in 1950, the Prime Minister announced that he was in possession of a list of current and former Conservative Parliamentarians that were at risk of Foreign Interference.

A few minutes, later though, in cross-examination, we was forced to admit that his list of names included not only Conservative party parliamentarians but, indeed Liberal ones too– a fact that he conveniently omitted in his evidence-in-chief.

And then, when I tried to press him for further details about this salacious bombshell that he had levelled, rather then coming clean with Canadians, the Prime Minister and the Government took refuge in the so-called “national security interest” privilege – which, indeed, appears to be quite malleable in the hands of those who control it.

We saw Ministers and senior staff who have never been briefed (Minister Joly), and when they had – they had no recollection of what they had been told or what they had said or done (Minister Blair and his Chief of Staff Zita Astravas).

It is apparent that the current government has treated foreign interference as a partisan tool that it can ignore or enable when it thinks it is benefitting from it or, as we say here, try to turn into a distraction when faced with other political scandals such as one-third of the Prime Minister’s backbench caucus calling for his resignation.

With respect to Policy, we believe that this commission should find that the government has the constitutional and legislative resources at its disposal to combat foreign interference. When public servants, elected officials or others in public life are being targeted by foreign interference, they can be told.

The Prime Minister has no problem rising in the House of Commons to disclose otherwise classified information when he wishes.

And the commission should conclude that national security actors are already empowered undersection 12.1 of the CSIS Act to employ what are called “threat reduction measures” to brief individuals that are positioned to take action to reduce threats, even if those individuals are not the direct target of the threat.

If there is any ambiguity about that in the CSIS Act – which we do not think that there is– the Commission should provide guidance to clarify it.

Finally, we caution against recommendations that would impede the free speech of Canadian citizens or political leaders. The idea of using the threat of foreign interference in democratic processes as a trigger for the Government to try to further regulate what Canadians see or say is not something that should result from this inquiry. Indeed, it would be a sad outcome if the threat of foreign, totalitarian states interfering in Canadian democracy was greater government curtailment of Canadians’ free speech.

Hogue is required to issue her findings in a final report due December 31, 2024.

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Sheila Gunn Reid

Chief Reporter

Sheila Gunn Reid is the Alberta Bureau Chief for Rebel News and host of the weekly The Gunn Show with Sheila Gunn Reid. She's a mother of three, conservative activist, and the author of best-selling books including Stop Notley.

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  • Bruce Atchison
    commented 2024-10-25 20:07:36 -0400
    Ezra is right to call them the Libranos. What corrupt mobsters they are. The only thing saving them from prison is that they are the government. Any of us doing just one of their dirty deals would be in prison for many years. But those Libranos get rewarded with a pension for life if they hang on long enough.