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OTTAWA — Some of the evidence of foreign interference supplied by the Conservative Party of Canada after the 2021 election was disregarded outright by Global Affairs Canada’s Rapid Response Mechanism (RRM) over “privacy concerns,” because it contained personal messages.
The Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections (SITE) Task Force, which is comprised of CSIS, the CSE, the RCMP and Global Affairs Canada, ultimately ruled as “inconclusive” the Conservative party’s concerns that it had lost in some ridings because of foreign interference
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The revelations were contained in testimony and evidence from the SITE Task Force tabled Friday at the Public Inquiry on Foreign Interference on Friday.
Gallit Dobner, who was at the time the director of the Centre of International Digital Policy at Global Affairs Canada and a member of the SITE Task Force, said the RRM noticed some activity on the Chinese-language social media app WeChat about former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole near the end of August 2021.
She explained that there were unfounded rumours that, if elected, O’Toole would ban WeChat.
On September 8, an article in the Ottawa-based newspaper The Hill Times quoted former Liberal foreign affairs adviser Jocelyn Coulon saying that the Conservative foreign policy platform almost wanted to “break” diplomatic relations with China.
Some Chinese media sources picked up that phrase and ran stories falsely suggesting that that was indeed the Conservatives’ intention if they were to form power.
Around that time, the RRM noticed a second false narrative targeting Conservative candidate, and former MP, Kenny Chiu. It claimed that he would force all Canadians of Chinese origin to register as agents of Beijing under his bill to create a foreign agent registry.
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Monitoring from the RRM suggested that those narratives continued until September 12, said Dobner.
Former Conservative campaign co-chair Walied Soliman told the inquiry this week that his team gave some evidence to the SITE Task Force proving that 13 specific ridings in the Vancouver and Toronto areas were targeted by Chinese foreign interference.
Dobner said in her witness testimony that some of the evidence were elements that her team had already seen, and other elements were “anecdotal or not very robust.”
The package also contained a USB stick containing information from a private chat group.
Dobner explained that “the RRM could not look at this information for privacy reasons and because doing so would be inconsistent with RRM’s ethical and methodological framework,” so it removed the information from its systems and did not look at it further.
The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) meanwhile said it devoted a “significant amount of capability and teams” across its agency to verify the claims brought forward by the Conservatives in the weeks following the election.
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“We spent close to three weeks reading all the information we had. We had large teams of analysts and operators from the west coast to the east coast looking at all of this,” said the CSIS representative from the task force, who remained anonymous during the hearings.
Ultimately, the SITE Task Force came to the conclusion that there could be three possible hypotheses.
The first one was that the efforts to discredit the Conservatives could possibly be a Chinese government-sponsored disinformation campaign. The second hypothesis was that this was a “purely organic activity” on social media. And the third, that it was in a “grey area.”
Dobner said there could have been “individuals who are sympathetic” to the positions of Beijing took it upon themselves to spread misinformation about the Conservatives.
“So, it could have been state-sponsored, it could have very well been organic, or it could have been somewhere in between,” she said.
Dobner insisted that Chinese social media is “incredibly difficult” to navigate and that the public service does not have a relationship with the foreign companies who are responsible for platforms like WeChat, the way it had a relationship with Meta or X for instance. WeChat is owned by the Chinese conglomerate Tencent, which has worked with the communist government in Beijing and which the CIA alleges received government funding, although Tencent has denied the latter allegation.
The public inquiry will be hearing from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, as well as a number of ministers and high-profile public servants next week.
National Post
calevesque@postmedia.com
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