The national chair of the Liberal Party of Canada says he has yet to read a bombshell report that concluded one of the party’s nomination contests was influenced by foreign interference by China, three months after it was tabled in Parliament.
Azam Ishmael testified at a hearing on foreign interference on Friday and initially told the hearing he did not believe the Liberal Party had been a victim of foreign interference.
Under questioning from Sujit Choudhury, lawyer for NDP MP Jenny Kwan, Ishmael acknowledged that he had not read the full report prepared by the National Security Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP), which was released in early June.
“Not page 92,” Ishmael replied.
Choudhury then went on to investigate several paragraphs in a report on Han Dong’s 2019 Liberal nomination race victory in the Toronto-area riding of Don Valley North, but Ishmael admitted he had never read those paragraphs.
The report, based on information from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), reported that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) Consulate in Toronto hired buses to bring between 175 and 200 Chinese students to the nomination meeting and tell them they must vote for Dong if they wanted to keep their visas to study in Canada.
The consulate also said that by providing false documents to a student living outside the constituency, he had violated Liberal Party rules that require voters to reside within their constituency during the nomination process.
“By successfully interfering in the nomination process in constituencies deemed safe for the Liberal Party of Canada, the PRC positioned itself to ensure that candidates it supported were elected to Parliament,” the report said.
According to the report, CSIS notified a Liberal representative with secret-level clearance a few weeks after the nomination meeting, who then notified Prime Minister Justin Trudeau the next day. “The Liberal Party of Canada has endorsed Don to run in both the 2019 and 2021 federal elections,” the report said.
Ishmael, who became national chair in 2017, said he had security clearance and attended the briefing but told investigators he had not heard until Chowdhury asked about it that bus fares were paid for by the Chinese Communist Party, that students had been told they could lose their visas if they did not vote for Dong, or that many of the students lived outside their constituencies.
As he left the poll, Ishmael refused to take questions from reporters and referred all questions to the Liberal Party press office.
Ishmael’s testimony came on Friday as the second phase of hearings in the foreign interference investigation, led by Judge Marie-Josée Hogue, continued.
The inquiry was set up following media reports accusing China of meddling in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections.
In his first report, released in May, Hogue concluded that there may have been foreign interference in a small number of precincts but that it did not affect the overall election outcome.
The second phase of the investigation will focus on how prepared the government is to counter foreign interference in elections and how that capability has evolved over time.
Over the past two days, the investigative committee has been looking into how federal parties are guarding against foreign forces that may seek to interfere in donations and nomination contests.
The hearing was suspended Monday for International Translators Day but is scheduled to resume on Tuesday with witnesses from the House of Commons Clerk’s Office, the Senate and Elections Canada’s Stephane Perreault.
The second phase of the investigation, fact-finding hearings, is scheduled to conclude on October 16 with testimony from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
