Failure to communicate: what week two of the foreign interference inquiry revealed

Commissioner Marie-Josée Hogue's mandate for the foreign interference inquiry is sprawling — but one of her key tasks is to examine and assess the flow of information related to alleged meddling in the previous two federal elections.

Testimony and documents published during week two of the inquiry's public hearings suggest Canada's approach to safeguarding those elections was plagued by failures to communicate important information.

From a top bureaucrat tasked with safeguarding the integrity of those elections, from political parties and from candidates who allegedly were targeted, a common question emerged: Why were we not informed?

The inquiry, led by Quebec judge Marie-Josee Hogue, expects to hear testimony from more than 40 people, including community members, political party representatives and federal election officials.

Former Conservative leader Erin O'Toole, who led the party during the 2021 federal election, received a classified briefing on foreign interference activities by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) in May of 2023.

When he was asked by senior counsel for the Foreign Interference Commission during a public hearing of the foreign interference inquiry earlier this week if he found that briefing useful, O'Toole said he would have appreciated getting the briefing "a few years earlier."

O'Toole said the Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections Task Force (SITE) — the federal body tasked with safeguarding Canadian elections — told a member of his election team at the beginning of the campaign that there were no real problems in the 2019 election campaign and SITE didn't expect any serious problems in the 2021 campaign.

"We were kind of lulled into a sense of complacency, that everything should be fine ... there were no real problems in 2019," he told the inquiry. "We now know that not to be the case."

O'Toole said his election team then started seeing what appeared to be Chinese state media-backed disinformation reports targeting his leadership, the party and specific Conservative candidates during the campaign.

O'Toole said his team raised their concerns with SITE but the task force downplayed them — and did not disclose to the Conservative team an intelligence assessment that appeared to support what the campaign was observing.

That intelligence assessment was drafted by the Rapid Response Mechanism Canada, a body established in 2018 to identify and respond to foreign threats to democracy. It was dated Sept. 13, 2021, seven days before Canadians cast their ballots.

The top-secret document said RRM had "observed what may be a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) information operation that aims to discourage voters from voting for the Conservative Party of Canada."

A redacted version of the document was published by the inquiry. But O'Toole told the inquiry the 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 that were amplifying the narrative.