Director Marie-Josée Hoag’s duties in investigating foreign interference are wide-ranging, but one of her key duties is to investigate and evaluate the flow of information related to allegations of interference in the past two federal elections. It is.
Testimony and documents released during the second week of the inquiry’s hearings suggest that Canada’s approach to securing these elections was plagued by failures to communicate critical information.
Common questions emerged from senior officials tasked with protecting the integrity of these elections, political parties, and the candidates who were allegedly targeted. “Why weren’t we informed?”
party in the dark
The inquiry, led by Quebec Justice Marie-Josée Hogue, is expected to hear testimony from more than 40 people, including local residents, political party representatives and federal election officials.
Former Conservative Party leader Erin O’Toole, who led his party in the 2021 federal election, received a confidential briefing in May 2023 about foreign interference activities by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).
O’Toole said he had received a briefing “several years ago” when asked by a senior lawyer at the Foreign Interference Commission during a hearing earlier this week whether the briefing had been helpful. He said he wished he had.
Mr. O’Toole said the Select Committee on Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections (SITE), the federal agency tasked with protecting Canada’s elections, told members of his campaign team at the start of the campaign that the 2019 campaign did not actually include He said that he was told that there were no problems. And SITE did not expect any serious issues to arise in the 2021 campaign.
“We had fallen into a complacency that everything should be fine… There were no real problems in 2019,” he told the inquiry. “Now we know that’s not the case.”
O’Toole said his campaign team then began seeing what appeared to be Chinese state media-backed disinformation reporting targeting his leadership, party and certain Conservative candidates during the campaign.
O’Toole said his team raised concerns with SITE, but the select committee downplayed them and did not disclose to the Conservative team intelligence assessments that appeared to support what the campaign was observing. .
The intelligence assessment was drafted by the Canadian Rapid Response Mechanism, an agency established in 2018 to identify and respond to foreign threats to democracy. The date was September 13, 2021, seven days before Canadians were due to vote.
The confidential document says RRM “observed what appears to be a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) intelligence operation aimed at dissuading voters from voting for the Conservative Party of Canada.”
The investigation resulted in the publication of a redacted version of the document. But O’Toole told the inquiry that this assessment was never shared with his campaign.
The assessment added that RRM was unable to determine whether there was coordination between Chinese Communist Party media and WeChat news accounts serving Chinese-speaking Canadians to amplify the coverage.
Liberal, Conservative and NDP 2021 campaign representatives working with SITE all told this week’s inquiry that the task force’s briefing was general and did not provide any useful or actionable information. He said he did not.
Lyall King, who chaired SITE during the 2019 and 2021 elections, told the inquiry on Friday that the purpose of the task force’s briefings was to educate parties and “understand what foreign interference is. “The aim is to provide a more detailed understanding of how this was done.” And then looking at what kind of spaces that is taking place so that they can look at their own campaigns and their own spaces and see if they can potentially identify that kind of activity. It’s for a reason. ”
Asked about criticism from party representatives, King said that while he understood their frustration, it was “never intended” for SITE to share specific information with parties.
He also said that briefing political parties on sensitive information is a new endeavor for SITE. “There’s a learning process on both sides,” he says.
Secrets in the Silo
Another redacted top-secret document released by investigators this week shows that King himself was dissatisfied with the flow of information from Canadian intelligence agencies to SITE during the 2019 election.
On October 31, 2019 (10 days after Election Day), Dr. King wrote an email to the CSIS representative on the SITE task force expressing regret about the CSIS national security briefing that was disclosed to the task force after Election Day. expressed. It is not clear what was revealed at the press conference. Email has been heavily redacted.
“This document is extremely problematic from my perspective and will raise many questions,” King wrote in a letter to a CSIS representative whose name was also redacted.
“The site was completely unaware of this report,” King wrote. “I can’t help but wonder why this wasn’t shared with the site ahead of time, especially given the seriousness of the suspicious activity.”
King said in an email that the limited distribution of the press conference made the information virtually useless.
“If only five people are receiving the information and no one is in a position to operationalize it, how can we identify and understand the bigger picture and look for ways to mitigate the problem?” King said. wrote. “Siloing doesn’t help.”
Dr. King went on to say that certain statements in the top secret document were “very problematic.”
“This is going to raise so many questions, and a week after the election, this information was clearly known in advance and has been accumulating over time. Why didn’t we reveal this sooner?” Questions will arise,” Dr. King wrote.
“SITE’s entire purpose was to investigate, share, assess, and respond to foreign interference. This puts us in a very difficult situation and brings into question SITE’s integrity.”
CSIS Deputy Director Shelly Henderson was asked Thursday about Dr. King’s 2019 email in the Foreign Interference Investigation. He said it was a matter of timing and that the report in question was the culmination of an investigation that began before the 2019 election campaign. SITE only manages issues that arise during the election period.
Henderson said the confidential report, which was ultimately prepared and shared with SITE after the 2019 election, states that “this individual has already influenced the 2019 federal election and remains committed to foreign interference after the election.” “The threat will remain,” the statement said.
“When we looked back at the report and the assessment, we felt internally that it was a bit of a leap too far. The threat actor would have had an impact on that particular time frame and that particular issue, but that’s what Henderson said in the investigation. “It didn’t affect the integrity of the 2019 election. It’s just that the ratings were a little too strong,” he said.
Henderson said CSIS rewrote and resubmitted that portion of the report.
Site: An informed public is the ‘best’ defense
National security and intelligence expert Wesley Wolk said in an interview with CBC News that sharing secrets with the public goes against the core instincts of intelligence agencies.
“For intelligence agencies, especially when they have to appeal to a general audience, whether it’s a general audience in Canada or a security-passing format audience, it’s important to allay concerns about confidentiality and protection of secrets. “It’s always a challenge: political party representatives,” Wark said.
“It’s not in the intelligence agency’s DNA to do that. So they have to get over it.”
SITE itself admitted after the 2019 election that the level of communication with the public regarding foreign interference was inadequate.
“There is an overreliance on single talking points agreed upon before the election period, resulting in a lack of nuanced messaging that actually addresses media questions and allows SITE-TF to tell its story. RESULTS,” the post said. -The 2019 Election SITE document has been released due to investigation.
“A more nuanced approach to public messaging and an increased willingness to share more information will help the public better understand both the relevant threats and government responses to those threats.
“A well-informed public is the best line of defense against foreign interference.”
