Top bureaucrat briefed PM on election interference after media reports

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OTTAWA — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was kept in the dark about instances of foreign interference during the 2021 election by the clerk of the Privy Council Office at the time, and only sought to know who knew what and when after media leaks occurred.

Speaking at the Public Inquiry on Foreign Interference on Tuesday, Janice Charette candidly admitted that she did not brief Trudeau on specific matters related to foreign interference during the 2021 election because she did not need any action on his part.

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In one instance, during the 2021 election, Charette explained that there was a classified briefing done by CSIS and the Privy Council Office to a cleared representative of the Liberal Party of Canada “on a matter that was relevant to that particular party.”

“I did not brief the prime minister on this, either during the election or after the election, and I believe the first briefing of the prime minister on this took place not until 2023,” said Charette, who was Privy Council clerk from 2014 to 2016 and again from 2021 until 2023.

What CSIS told the Liberal representative has not been publicly disclosed.

Charette did not brief Trudeau either on the concerns raised by the Conservative Party of Canada during the 2021 election until two years later when the opposition party’s former campaign co-chair, Walied Soliman, made public comments on social media on Feb. 17, 2023.

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Charette said the Critical Election Incident Public Protocol, of which she was the chair at the time, determined the situation did not meet the threshold to make a public announcement because it did not compromise the integrity of the election.

“I didn’t think that there was any information that required his action,” she said.

The situation changed dramatically after media leaks, especially from Global News and the Globe and Mail, started casting doubt on Canada’s reaction to foreign interference.

The inquiry saw a handwritten note from a May 18, 2023 meeting that Trudeau requested with cabinet ministers Bill Blair, Dominic LeBlanc, Melanie Joly and Marco Mendicino to detangle who knew what and when on different instances of foreign interference.

“At this point in time, there was a fair degree of public attention, media attention, attention in Parliament to matters of foreign interference,” said Charette.

The notes show that a CSIS representative briefed Trudeau and the cabinet ministers at that meeting on foreign interference efforts by China but also by India and Pakistan in the 2019 elections.

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Trudeau’s then-national security adviser Jody Thomas’s “immediate focus” upon reading media reports divulging information about foreign interference based on leaked top-secret documents was to identify the source of the leaks, according to her pre-hearing interview.

That did not mean that the prime minister and his team were not regularly briefed about foreign interference.

An Oct. 26, 2022 note for CSIS Director David Vigneault ahead of a briefing for Trudeau reveals that the spy agency believed that the government wasn’t doing enough to fight foreign interference, leaving the field wide open for Canada’s adversaries to act with “no consequences.”

The note also said Canada was lagging behind its Five Eyes intelligence alliance allies (U.S., U.K., Australia and New Zealand) in terms of dealing with the threat of foreign interference through legislation or proactively publicizing known interference activities to deter future efforts.

“Ultimately, state actors are able to conduct (foreign interference) successfully in Canada because there are no consequences, either legal or political. (Foreign interference) is therefore a low-risk and high-reward endeavour,” reads the note.

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“Until (foreign interference) is viewed as constituting an existential threat to Canadian democracy and the Government forcefully and actively responds, these threats will persist,” it continues.

Charette said that those were notes for Vigneault, but it did not mean all of their content was delivered to the prime minister during the briefing.

Senior officials from Trudeau’s office are set to testify later Tuesday; Trudeau is set to testify on Wednesday.

Former Public Safety deputy minister Rob Stewart testified that there was a noticeable uptick in foreign interference activities in the 2021 election compared to the 2019 election, particularly from China.

“In many cases, it was either foreseen and mitigated or it was just ineffective. But in terms of the information we were receiving, I would say that in particular, as it pertains to China, we were seeing a steady increase in the amount of activity that was going on,” Stewart told the inquiry.

National Post
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