ELECTION INTERFERENCE??

Trudeau continues to ask Canadians to just trust him

Just trust me. That has been Justin Trudeau’s  mantra since the story of election interference by China broke last fall. It remains the prime minister’s mantra now, repeating time and again that there are processes in place to ensure the integrity of our elections.

So where is the proof?

Each report, each government statement says that there was interference, just not enough to impact the outcome of the election. How are we to know if the level of interference crossed the line? We can’t know because where the threshold is, is something only the government and its handpicked civil servants on its panel are allowed to know.

Calls for a public inquiry have been growing in recent days with the former head of Elections Canada, the former head of CSIS and a national security advisor to two PM’s as well as Trudeau’s own former principal secretary  Gerry Butts, making the call. The opposition New Democrats, key to propping up the Trudeau government, even moved a motion at the Commons Procedure and House Affairs Committee calling for a public inquiry.

Asked several times last week if he supported such calls, Trudeau refused to give a direct answer.

“Right now, as we’re speaking, a parliamentary committee is hearing directly from national security experts and officials as to the work that they’ve been doing over the past many years to counter ongoing interference,” Trudeau said in Vancouver.

What did the committee hear?

That in no uncertain terms foreign interference happened but that Canadians can’t know the details and we need to trust the government.

National Security Adviser Jody Thomas confirmed that Trudeau has been briefed many times on foreign interference, including regarding the 2019 and 2021 elections. She said these attempts at interference didn’t change the outcome of the election.

Yet what we learned from the official government report on election interference, released a week ago Tuesday, is that they don’t look for interference outside of the official writ period that governs elections. One of the claims is that Liberal MP Han Dong received assistance from the Chinese consulate in Toronto in winning his nomination by busing in students and seniors to vote for him.

Since his nomination isn’t considered part of the official election cycle, that wouldn’t be considered interference.

We also learned from the report that attempts at interference that target one ethnic community or just a single riding don’t meet the threshold of interference. Vancouver area Conservative MP Kenny Chiu was targeted via Chinese language social media for a policy Beijing disagreed with but, according to the government, that’s not significant interference.

At the committee Trudeau referenced, the Liberals did their best to stop MP’s from getting to the truth. At one point, Liberal MP’s argued that elected officials shouldn’t be given access to classified documents that public servants were the “guardians” of such information.

As the Tories moved a motion calling for government to hand over in a secure manner, emails, memos, briefing notes and other documents related to election interference, the Liberals sought