Senior bureaucrats briefed Liberal Party on foreign interference in 2019 Don Valley North contest
5-member panel decided not to warn public about potential interference during the campaign
Top bureaucrats on a panel tasked with reviewing possible threats to the 2019 federal election warned the Liberal Party of concerns about the riding nomination contest in Don Valley North, the Foreign Interference Commission heard Monday.
Nathalie Drouin, who was deputy minister of justice and deputy attorney general during the 2019 federal election, told a commission hearing Monday that those concerns involved international students being bused to the riding to vote in the nomination contest, and financial allegations that were referred to the Commissioner of Canada Elections.
"Being able to brief a party, here it was a Liberal Party, was contributing in terms of reducing the risk and the potential impacts," Drouin said Monday.
Drouin said that informing the commissioner was a way to mitigate possible threats. She said that the allegations and intelligence the panel received about the nomination contest did not meet the panel's threshold for issuing a public warning.
The panel is tasked with monitoring threats during elections and issuing public warnings if they feel the electoral process is under threat from foreign interference. The Don Valley North riding race normally would have fallen outside the panel's remit, but in this case it overlapped with the 2019 federal election.
The panel of five is made up of the clerk of the Privy Council, the national security and intelligence adviser to the prime minister, the deputy minister of justice and deputy attorney general, the deputy minister of foreign affairs and the deputy minister of public safety.
The five senior bureaucrats representing those offices on the panel in 2019 were briefed on intelligence suggesting several interference incidents during the campaign, according to testimony and documents presented before the commission Friday.
Panel members during the 2019 and 2021 elections are being questioned in front of Commissioner Marie-Josée Hogue.
Drouin, who is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's current national security and intelligence adviser, testified Monday morning about her role during the 2019 election. She said that aside from informing the Liberal Party and the elections commissioner, the panel also asked the Canadian Security Intelligence Service to continue to feed the panel information about Don Valley North.
"One information that was more corroborated was the existence of buses with students. That was more corroborated. All the other elements were not corroborated," Drouin said, adding that while she could not explain what those other elements were, they had a financial element.
After reviewing all the intelligence to which they had access, Drouin said, the panel concluded that the allegations in Don Valley North did not meet the threshold required for a public warning because the threat did not compromise Canada's ability to hold free and fair elections.
Last week, Han Dong, the now Independent MP for Don Valley North, said that while he visited a student residence in his riding in the summer of 2019 to campaign for the support of students at NOIC Academy — formerly New Oriental International College — his campaign did not provide the bus. He said he understood it was arranged and paid for by the school.
Last week, former Conservative leader Erin O'Toole told the commission that Mandarin and Cantonese-speaking campaign workers in B.C. noticed that social media platforms and chat groups in China were spreading disinformation about his party and candidates in 2021.
O'Toole said the party reported their concerns to the Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections (SITE) Task Force, which sends daily reports to the panel of five.
The most worrisome social media messages, O'Toole said, involved Kenny Chiu, then the Conservative MP for the B.C. riding of Steveston—Richmond East.
"The level and volume and tone of misinformation towards Mr. Chiu was horrendous," O'Toole said. "He was fearful for his own well being and that of his family and it was a personal attack of a racially motivated nature, suggesting he was a race traitor."
Chiu told the commission last week that he might not have run for office if he'd known he was going to be targeted by disinformation campaigns coming out of China.
"We wanted a caution, a public notice to voters to be wary of information that they were obtaining from social media, particularly foreign controlled, foreign language media," O'Toole said.
On Monday, Martha Morgan, the deputy minister of foreign affairs who sat on both the 2019 and 2021 panels, said one of the factors the panel takes into consideration when deciding to issue a public warning is whether "other players in the election ecosystem were addressing issues as they arose."
She said if other players, such as the media or candidates and campaigns, were addressing misinformation or disinformation, they would be effectively counteracting efforts to influence election integrity in Canada and so the panel of five might not have to issue a warning.
"We did see Mr. Chiu directly address the issue, which we took as a positive sign that this issue was being addressed by him and that information was then being provided publicly from a credible person about his actual intent," Morgan said Monday.
No threats to elections in 2019, 2021 says panel
Drouin said Monday that during the 2019 federal election, all the intelligence the panel got about possible threats to the electoral process were focused on an individual riding, rather than any overall threat to the federal election.
"We did not observe, in 2019, any incident that we believe even met the threshold at the riding level," Drouin said, adding that because there was no significant threat at the riding level, they did not have to widen their scope to consider how possible foreign interference affected the election as a whole.
Janice Charette, former clerk of Privy Council, who sat on the 2021 panel of five, later told the commission that the panel did not receive intelligence about incidents during the 44th federal election that reached the threshold required to issue a public warning at the riding level or national level.
Despite the fact that the panel concluded that the 2019 or 2021 elections were not compromised, last week the commission heard of a number of reports of interference efforts.
An unclassified witness summary disclosed Friday said that on Aug. 17, only days into the 2021 campaign, the task force was made aware that a member of Parliament had reported "cultivation and elicitation attempts by an official of a foreign state." The country wasn't specified, but the document said that, in deciding what information to send the panel, the task force "erred on the side of providing more intelligence than less."
On Aug. 23, a report from the task force discussed how a foreign official was "liasing with a member of a political campaign to discuss potentially sharing confidential information about the campaign and possibly arranging an introduction with the electoral candidate."
A week later, on Aug. 30, the task force briefed the panel, but the document shows its CSIS representative was not aware of any response by the panel.
Separately, testimony released Friday showed that, during and after the campaign, the task force was briefing the panel of five on what was characterized as "very textbook" foreign interference activity involving the People's Republic of China supporting a particular candidate. Neither the candidate nor the party was disclosed.
This information was presented separately from numerous references to security officials detecting Chinese-language media and social media critical of the Conservative Party, and in some cases circulating false information. On Aug. 31, for example, officials detected Chinese-language WeChat accounts posting a false story about how then-leader Erin O'Toole would ban WeChat if a Conservative government was elected.
On Sept. 10, officials also noted false narratives circulating about Conservative MP (and 2021 candidate) Kenny Chiu's private member's bill to create a foreign agent registry, but the officials noted that the Rapid Response Mechanism team at Global Affairs was not able to assess if this was a PRC-backed campaign or "organic activity."
On Sept. 12, CSIS debriefed officials from the Liberal Party of Canada on a specific foreign interference issue. While security officials were regularly briefing representatives from all parties throughout the campaign on general interference risks, documents and briefing records released so far suggest no other parties received the briefing the Liberals received on this specific issue.
The briefing said the spy agency officials "regret having to inform" the Liberal Party of this issue and said they understood the "difficulties associated with the limitations of what [they could] do with it." The briefing was provided for "awareness and action based on [their] judgment," the note said.
On Monday, panel members appearing before the commission inquiry were cross-examined about reports of election interference by India.
In late August, SITE reports prepared for the panel, and cited at the inquiry, referred to the detection of an "individual who was assessed to be a foreign interference proxy." In a post-election report, officials were briefing on a "Government of India proxy agent who may have attempted to interfere in democratic processes."
But on Monday, members of the panel said that, in fact, they were not made aware of reports of interference from India during the writ period.
"Indian [foreign interference] may have occurred in a covert manner," said a summary of testimony from members of the task force, released Friday. The summary added that intelligence corroborated claims that the government of India intended to "influence the outcome of the Canadian elections."
The summary also said the intelligence "appeared to reveal what could be considered a potential Criminal Code offence." A task force member sought direction on how to proceed with sharing the intelligence with the RCMP, but testified that she was unaware if there was an active investigation based on this intelligence.
Last week, the RCMP disclosed at the inquiry that it is still investigating an undisclosed number of issues related to the 2021 campaign.
The commission of inquiry has heard that a deliberately high threshold was set by the panel for alerting the public, because not only could such a warning affect voter choices and affect the election results further, it could also severely affect Canada's relations with a foreign country to condemn it for election meddling in the heat of a campaign.
Last week at the inquiry, CSIS Director David Vigneault said he was "comfortable" with the decision the panel made not to alert the public. Former Conservative leader Erin O'Toole, however, testified that he felt this process failed to disclose attempts to interfere in specific ridings that, while not serious enough to impact the overall national result, nevertheless are significant for the candidates and voters involved.
O'Toole said ridings in B.C.'s Lower Mainland or the Greater Toronto Area should not be treated as "rounding errors" when decisions are being made as to what constitutes significant interference.
Hogue also will hear separate testimony from a panel of former national security advisers who served the prime minister during the 2019 and 2021 elections, as well the period between the two campaigns: Greta Bossenmaier, Vince Rigby and David Morrison.
At the request of Hogue's inquiry, Canada's intelligence agencies have taken the extraordinary step of selectively summarizing or redacting previously classified intelligence information so the public can better understand what happened.
Officials have repeatedly cautioned journalists and lawyers at the inquiry that interpreting intelligence reports can be subjective. These reports may not contain complete information and may not always have been verified by multiple sources, so cannot be assumed to be definitive.
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