Judge Marie-Josée Hogue’s report on foreign interference last week contained a warning: party nominations can be a “gateway” for foreign interference.
This is because parties are largely left to set the rules or enforce them – or not – free from the kind of independent oversight given to general elections.
There was also concern that arose over the course of Hogue’s investigation that security agencies such as the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) might not be as familiar with the, shall we say, questionable tactics employed by domestic political actors in the close nomination campaigns.
“My concern was more that perhaps (CSIS) didn’t understand as deeply as political actors do the prevalence of busing different community groups in nomination campaigns,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told the inquiry on the 10th. April, referring to intelligence information about alleged “irregularities” during the 2019 Don Valley North Liberal nomination.
There is some validity to that. More than 30 years ago, the Lortie commission on democratic reform drew attention to the “decentralized” nature of responsibility for nomination elections themselves.
“The decentralized approach to nominations in Canada makes it more difficult” to ensure that women are better represented in the House of Commons, Lortie’s report concluded, “because it requires the full commitment and cooperation of local associations.”
Different parties and their local associations have different approaches to nomination competitions: there are no centralized standards or application of uniform rules.
But Hogue’s caution comes at a time when the risks of interference are much greater, when regimes with hostile intentions are trying to subvert the democratic process.
Hogue’s report makes clear that the nomination process itself is vulnerable, but the major federal parties seem very reluctant to address the situation.
“The parties are their own private clubs, and that’s how the courts view them, where they can make their own rules,” said Fred DeLorey, former national campaign director for the Conservative Party, in an interview with Global News.
And that’s a good thing, DeLorey said. Parties must be able to carry out their own vetting or “green light” process for candidates, to ensure that potential MPs align with the party’s principles and do not embarrass them in the middle of an election campaign with skeletons in your closet.
But in the absence of real oversight, Canadians must take the parties’ word that they are taking the threat of foreign influence in nominations seriously.
Hogue’s report does not explicitly lay out his reasoning that nominations are a potential “gateway” for foreign influence. But a close reading of the report’s main case study, the 2019 Liberal nomination in Don Valley North, pointed to some reasons why she might be concerned.
The report considered allegations, first reported by Global News, that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) allegedly attempted to tilt the nomination process in favor of candidate Han Dong.
Those allegations, detailed in Hogue’s report, include that PRC officials in Canada arranged to bus in international students to support Dong, who were ineligible to vote and were allegedly forced to support the Liberal candidate .
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“Prior to the (2019) election, intelligence reports, although not firmly substantiated, indicated that Chinese international students were bussed to the nomination process in support of Han Dong, and that individuals associated with a known proxy agent of the People’s Republic of China provided students with falsified information. documents that would allow them to vote, despite not being residents of (Don Valley North),” the report reads.
The report noted that the information came from a variety of sources and had “varying levels of corroboration.”
In his testimony at the Hogue inquiry, Dong said that if he had known that international students improperly voted in his nomination, he would have stopped it.
“I didn’t pay attention to the transportation of international students by bus because… I didn’t understand it as an irregularity,” he said.
Dong’s campaign manager, Ted Lojko, testified that he, too, knew nothing about the bus full of students.
However, the 2019 race would hardly be the first time a campaign has been accused of profiting from bused voters, or the first accusation of ineligible citizens attempting to vote in a nomination contest.
Accusations of dirty tricks and party officials titling a nominating race for their preferred candidate are probably as old as nominating races themselves. What seems new is that foreign states – such as China, Iran or India – use the same type of “questionable” tactics used by national political agents for decades.
Hogue’s report makes clear that the nomination process itself is a vulnerability when it comes to defending Canadian democracy from foreign meddling.
“This incident (in Don Valley North) makes clear the extent to which nominating contests can be gateways for foreign states that wish to interfere in our democratic process,” Hogue’s report said.
While Judge Hogue might be clear on this, what is less clear is what can be done to prevent it.
If a foreign country wanted to covertly influence Canadian politics, it could take the risky path of meddling in a general election, which is held when security agencies and election officials are on high alert and the public is paying most attention.
Or they could consider nomination contests in so-called safe seats (a Conservative seat in Alberta, for example, or Liberal seats in the heart of downtown Toronto) and try to influence who wins the nomination. In those seats, winning the nomination can almost guarantee a trip to Ottawa.
At the federal level, nominations are largely left to the parties themselves, with almost no independent oversight of the races.
Elections Canada has a limited role in monitoring financial performance for compliance. It does not resolve disputes over alleged questionable tactics, much less investigate possible cases of foreign interference.
There are good reasons for this, according to DeLorey.
“If a party wants to change its rules and simply nominate candidates, it can do so. It’s really not Elections Canada’s or any other entity’s place to comment on that. The party needs to take its own responsibility to its members and to its founding or current values and apply it that way,” DeLorey said.
Instead of turning to outside oversight, DeLorey said parties should take Hogue’s caution — that nominations can be a vector for foreign meddling — seriously and approach their own process accordingly.
Jack Siegel, a lawyer with a long history of involvement in the Liberal Party, shares this opinion. As someone who says he has personally overseen more than a hundred nominations, Siegel wondered how party volunteers are expected to scrutinize nomination races for possible foreign interference.
“If we’re going to look at these factors, I suspect we have to ask ourselves ‘how are we going to get the information?’ “That’s where you have to address the process and the challenge that we face, beyond the level of the individual member or applicant for membership in the party,” Siegel said in an interview.
“Why in that moment, numbers and the ability to implement reasonable controls take you far, certainly beyond what would be my comfort zone. How are we going to do this right? Because remember that every time you make a mistake, you are rejecting someone who is eligible, you are distancing him or her from the political process.”
Global News reached out to liberals, conservatives and New Democrats to ask if they would favor greater oversight of their nomination processes. Neither party addressed that issue.
A Liberal Party spokesperson said in a statement that the party had the “strongest” nomination rules in Canadian politics.
“All of our candidates who have participated in an open nomination contest have been nominated by locally registered Liberals, in processes that have been fully in line with all of our national nomination rules and that were in effect at the time of their nomination,” Parker wrote Lund in a statement to Global.
In a statement provided by a spokesperson, NDP national director Lucy Watson called its nomination process “rigorous.”
“After each election, our federal council creates a committee to review the nomination process from the last election and develop the rules for the next election. These rules reflect our values and priorities. For example, we have strict criteria to ensure fairness in our candidate search process,” Watson is quoted as saying.
“We welcome Judge Hogue’s interim report and will examine the recommendations closely. “We are committed to ensuring that our party’s actions always ensure a fair and democratic nomination process.”
Sarah Fischer, director of communications for the Conservative Party, did not respond to a request for comment. However, on Thursday he posted on social media about allegations of irregularities in the Conservative nomination contest in Aurora-Oak Ridges-Richmond Hill.
One candidate, former National Post columnist Sabrina Maddeux, dropped out of the race on Thursday, making explosive claims that the official list of party members in the race received “defamatory attacks” about her and questioned the integrity of the race.
Fischer responded in a public post on X, formerly Twitter, that Maddeux’s claims were “completely false.”
“It is common for the party to receive complaints from nomination candidates about their competitors over suspected irregularities and the use of lists,” Fischer wrote.
“In fact, we received a complaint that Ms. Maddeaux’s campaign emailed current and former party members when they should not have had access to a list of members.”
This is the typical type of dispute that Canadians tend to see in nomination contests, particularly in constituencies where the candidate has a good chance of winning the seat. One political veteran told Global that it’s a common refrain in nominations that if you don’t have a slate of members, you probably don’t have a chance.
Absent real oversight, the Aurora-Oak Ridges-Richmond Hill nomination will not be the last race to see this type of complaint. And Canadians will have to trust that the parties can protect themselves against more insidious forms of interference.
