Opinion: Foreign interference: Who knows what and when? We will have to wait until the final report of the investigation.

Faced with an incredibly short deadline to complete the initial report of the public inquiry into foreign interference in federal elections (only two weeks from the close of hearings to publication), Judge Marie-Josée Hogue has decided to address some of the issues expected key. that she will address until her final report at the end of the year.

That, at least, must be the hope. This first installment is, perhaps understandably, largely a “what we heard” exercise, summarizing the evidence without passing judgment on what it means.

In any case, it is a damning document, because the conclusions it reaches, which may now seem so obvious that they are hardly worth mentioning, were until recently much disputed.

Thus, Judge Hogue finds, among other things, intelligence reports that confirm:

• that foreign interference was widespread in the last two elections;
• that China was by far the most important player;
• that although the overall outcome of the election was not affected in any case (a matter that was never in doubt), it may have been enough to affect the results in some individual constituencies, and certainly to influence the electoral “ecosystem”;
• that the 2019 nomination race in Don Valley North, a safe haven for the Liberals, may have been decided by Chinese interference, deciding in the process who would be its deputy;
• that in 2021 Conservative MPs Kenny Chiu and Erin O’Toole, and NDP MP Jenny Kwan, were victims of disinformation campaigns, likely at the instigation of Beijing.

However, in many other respects the judge reaches only the most provisional conclusions, especially on two issues that she was ordered to examine, according to the terms of reference of the investigation, in her first report: “the flow of information” to and between “responsible “senior decision-making levels,” including elected officials” and “actions taken in response.”

Certainly, there is much in the report to suggest that the bilateral Plan to Protect Canadian Democracy established before the 2019 election – the first, to assess intelligence on foreign interference; the second, alerting the public, if necessary, did not work as well as it should have.

The latter in particular, assigned to a panel of five senior officials under the Public Protocol for Critical Electoral Incidents, suffered a very uncertain mandate, which the panelists seemed to define on the fly.

To be fair, the panel had just been created. And there are legitimate questions about what the appropriate threshold is for notifying the public. Too low and you risk unnecessarily calling into question the integrity of the electoral process. Too high and you risk looking like you’re covering up.

But whether or not it was necessary to alert the public, why couldn’t some private warning have been given to those most directly affected? Parliamentarians targeted by China’s disinformation campaigns were never informed until much later. Nor was Conservative MP Michael Chong, a target of Chinese intimidation efforts.

Compare that slowness, as far as opposition MPs are concerned, with the speed with which misinformation about Justin Trudeau was shot down: a call from the Prime Minister’s Office to Facebook, in the middle of the 2019 election campaign, and a post Was eliminated. . Which raises its own troubling questions.

Even more worrying are the questions that continue to swirl around the Premier’s handling of the Don Valley North nomination. There is no longer any doubt that he was informed of the intelligence service’s “well-founded suspicion” of Chinese involvement. There is also no doubt that he decided not to do anything about it.

Furthermore, according to Judge Hogue, one of the reasons given by the Prime Minister for not intervening, in closed-door testimony, was that it “would have direct electoral consequences, as the LPC expected to win” the race. However, you can’t draw any conclusions about their lack of action at the time, or what follow-up there has been since then, if any. (“I’m not sure what steps were taken.”)

Perhaps that is yet to come. The judge strives to declare that the various issues assigned to her according to the mandate of the investigation “are not watertight compartments”, that her work “in this part of my mandate cannot and will not end on May 3, 2024” and that “My Final Report will have my full set of conclusions and recommendations on these issues.”

Very good. But in that case what is the basis for your statement, on the last page of your initial report, that “the evidence I have heard to date does not demonstrate bad faith on the part of anyone, or that the information was deliberately and improperly”?

Maybe she’s right. Perhaps it is simply, as she suggests, that “on some occasions, information related to foreign interference did not reach its intended recipient, while on other occasions the information was not adequately understood by those who received it.” The failure theory of history is in most cases the correct one.

But surely these are some of the questions that, in his opinion, “require more study before definitive recommendations can be made.”