A public investigation into foreign election interference encounters secrecy

USA

There were no dramatic revelations from the first week of the hearings possible foreign interference during the last two Canadian federal elections.

Instead, the country found itself in a very Canadian discussion about how to balance the desire for public access with the need to keep intelligence safe in a government that practices secrecy by default.

Let's take a moment to think about how the country got here.

Last year, The Globe and Mail and Global News reported that classified and top-secret intelligence showed that the Chinese government and its diplomats in Canada had interfered in the last two elections to ensure Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's Liberal Party took power . The newspaper published a total of seventeen articles and police are still searching for the unnamed source. The source wrote a first-person account indicating that he or she was facing jail time due to frustration over the limited attention paid to Chinese state interference at the higher levels of the Canadian government.

[Read: Claims of Chinese Election Meddling Put Trudeau on Defensive]

The leaks do not provide any evidence that Chinese officials successfully carried out their plans for interference or that their efforts changed the election results. But they did raise troubling questions about the integrity of Canadian democracy and ignited a political firestorm in the House of Commons.

[Read: He Won Election to Canada’s Parliament. Did China Help?]

[Read: Canadian Politicians Who Criticize China Become Its Targets]

[Read: Did China Help Vancouver’s Mayor Win Election?]

The opposition, especially the Conservatives under Pierre Poilievre, quickly demanded the public inquiry that began this week, after months of resistance from Mr. Trudeau. It is the first study on this subject to raise questions about the extent to which the public can have access to classified intelligence.

There had been other studies before, some beset by similar problems.

First came a report last February from a group of senior officials, all of whom had the highest security clearances and had been tasked with looking for foreign interference during the last two elections. Their heavily redacted report concluded: There was evidence that Russia, Iran and especially China tried to interfere in the votes held in 2019 and 2021, but failed to 'influence' the outcomes.

Mr. Trudeau also appointed David Johnston, a former governor general, to investigate election tampering by foreign governments.

Through a closed process, rather than a public inquiry, Mr Johnston issued a preliminary report. In it, he said his broad overview of classified intelligence, which he was not allowed to describe, suggested that The Globe and Mail and Global News had misinterpreted much of the information they obtained through leaks, and he broke some of their specific stories dismissed as false.

Although Mr Johnston advised against a public inquiry after concluding it would be an impossible task with top-secret intelligence agencies, he did promise to hold some public hearings.

That never happened. Mr Johnston resigned after opposition parties passed a motion calling for his resignation, saying his longstanding ties to the Trudeau family created an “appearance of bias”.

The government has also asked a special committee, made up of senators and members of the House of Commons with top-secret security clearances, to investigate foreign interference. But it has not yet reported its findings and almost immediately complained about the lack of access to relevant Cabinet documents. That complaint was echoed by the independent agency that oversees Canada's security and intelligence services, which is also conducting an ongoing investigation into election interference.

Following Mr Johnston's departure and repeated recommendations for a full public inquiry by a House of Commons committee, which stood its own hearings in foreign interference, Mr. Trudeau eventually relented.

But the problem — how to handle the top-secret intelligence at a public hearing — remains. And the week of discussion aimed at resolving that dilemma ended on a disheartening note for anyone hoping for a full public broadcast.

The first classified intelligence documents that the committee asked the government to approve for public release, most of them from Canada's Security Intelligence Service, were turned over in their censored versions Thursday.

“The result of the exercise is that the CSIS documents are redacted almost in their entirety,” the Justice Department said in a letter. It added: “It is reasonable to assume that foreign officials are monitoring the investigation in such a way that the disclosure of sensitive information would become known to them. This will likely result in an immediate loss of access to the intelligence that Canada considers its highest priority.”

The conflict could delay the work of Judge Marie-Josée Hogue, a judge at the Quebec Court of Appeal who was appointed to lead the investigation but has not been generously given much time for her complex task. Even with an extension, she must submit a preliminary report by May 3. Her final submission is due by the end of this year.

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Ian Austen, born in Windsor, Ontario, educated in Toronto, lives in Ottawa and has been writing about Canada for The New York Times for 20 years. Follow him on Bluesky: @ianausten.bsky.social

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