Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government was “insufficiently transparent” about foreign interference in Canadian politics and sometimes took “too long to act” against attempts to meddle in the country’s past two general elections by foreign powers including China and India, a government commission said on Tuesday.
“Trust in Canada’s democratic institutions has been shaken, and it is imperative to restore it,” the commission said in its final report, which summarized 18 months of hearings, testimony and examination of classified intelligence documents.
The government’s efforts to rebuild trust have been “piecemeal and underwhelming,” said Marie-Josée Hogue, a Court of Appeal justice from Quebec, who led the commission.
The final report included 51 recommendations by the commission to strengthen Canada’s electoral system, ranging from stricter rules for the country’s political parties and third-party financing to better sharing of intelligence and oversight of disinformation during campaigns.
Justice Hogue said about half the recommendations “should be implemented promptly, perhaps even before the next election.”
The Trudeau government had no immediate response to the report.
But the recent announcement by Mr. Trudeau, who is deeply unpopular, that he will step down as Liberal Party leader and prime minister makes it unlikely that the commission’s recommendations can be put in place before upcoming elections, experts said. Members of the Liberal Party are expected to elect Mr. Trudeau’s successor by early March, and a general election is likely to take place a couple of months later.
“It seems lamentable that the timeline makes it impossible to implement any of these recommended safeguards,” said Ryan Alford, an associate law professor at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario. “Sadly and perhaps paradoxically, it’s going to reinforce the notion that the same attempts that occurred in the last two federal elections are inevitably going to take place in this election.”
The report’s release capped a yearlong public inquiry into foreign interference, which Mr. Trudeau’s government had fiercely opposed. It finally relented only after an extraordinary series of leaks to Canadian news outlets of intelligence reports that revealed Chinese meddling in the past two general elections, in 2021 and 2019.
Months of public hearings, as well as the sworn testimonies of witnesses and the release of intelligence reports, revealed how rising foreign powers — especially China and India — had tried to further their interests in Canada by backing or opposing certain candidates in the elections.
While the elections’ overall outcome was not affected, the interference could have affected a handful of individual races, according to the inquiry commission.
China and India focused their activities in electoral districts in Toronto and Vancouver, where large and well-organized Chinese and Indian diasporas are…
2025-01-28 17:07:58
Article from www.nytimes.com
