Government won't commit to releasing names of MPs who allegedly conspired with foreign actors

Senior cabinet ministers wouldn't say Tuesday if the government is prepared to release the names of parliamentarians who are alleged to have conspired with foreign governments and to have consciously shared sensitive information with their agents — conduct that one expert says could amount to treason.

There may still be police investigations into these allegations, the ministers said, and details could eventually be released as part of that process.

But that raises the question of whether the voting public will know who's alleged to have engaged in such conduct before the next federal election, which is expected sometime in 2025.

The National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP), a cross-party group of MPs and senators with top security clearances, released a report Monday that paints a troubling picture of what some unnamed parliamentarians are said to have done to undermine Canadian democracy and benefit the interests of a foreign state.

The report was compiled after committee members reviewed information and intelligence gathered by ten federal bodies, including the RCMP, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), the Department of Justice and Elections Canada. It claims some unnamed parliamentarians — MPs and/or senators — failed in their duty to conduct themselves in the best interests of the country.

The committee said an unknown number of parliamentarians inappropriately communicated with foreign missions ahead of a political campaign and accepted money from foreign governments or their proxies.

Unnamed parliamentarians also provided foreign diplomatic officials with "privileged information on the work or opinions of fellow parliamentarians," knowing that the information could be used to manipulate some other MPs and senators, the report said.

Certain parliamentarians also responded to requests from foreign actors to "improperly influence parliamentary colleagues" to benefit another country, and disclosed confidential government information to "a known intelligence officer or foreign state," the committee said in its report, which was heavily redacted.

The names of the alleged parliamentary conspirators are blanked out in the report. They've been replaced with the words, "This paragraph was revised to remove injurious or privileged information."

Under the law that governs NSICOP, the prime minister can direct the committee to submit a "revised version" of any of its reports that leaves out information that could be seen as "injurious" to national security, defence and international relations, or that is protected by solicitor-client privilege.

The committee wrote in its report that, after submitting the initial draft version of this study to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in March, some information "which the prime minister believed would be injurious" was stripped out of the report released to the public.

It's not clear what information was left out at the prime minister's request.

Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland told reporters Tuesday the government takes the threat of foreign political interference "very seriously" and said the country can't be "naive" about authoritarian governments seeking to undermine our democracy.

When asked if she could guarantee that the Liberals will eject from their caucus any parliamentarian found to have engaged in the activities cited in the report, Freeland would not make that commitment.