Procedure and House Affairs Committee on April 25th, 2023

[Jennifer O'Connell, Liberal, Pickering—Uxbridge, ON]

Thank you.

Following up on that, it was even a Conservative candidate in the 2021 election, Mark Johnson, who in the Toronto Star on February 22 was quoted as saying, “The Chinese-Canadian community were deeply offended and antagonized by the highly critical and villainizing positions on China taken by Erin O’Toole and a few other Conservative MPs”. To continue the quote, he said, “The Chinese government didn’t need their agents to drive Chinese-Canadian votes away from the Tory party. Our own MPs were doing a great job of it themselves.”

I want to refer again to the podcast you were on with David Herle, in which you said, “At the same time we're dealing with a pandemic where everyone was blaming China, and there's a lot of anti-Asian racism, and it was certainly never the intent of the campaign or the party or anything, but I think that may have been...they just felt we didn't have their backs in all of this because our message was very hard.” You go on later to say in this, “Pierre Poilievre has been very crafty in his messaging. He never uses the word 'China'. He says, 'Beijing' or 'Beijing communist'. He's been very smart on that.”

Given the perspective of the local Conservative candidate in Scarborough—Agincourt and probably some of your own reflections post election—I was the PS to health during that time, and I certainly remember some of those hard lines about the Chinese-Canadian community feeling very scared after the pandemic and there being an increase in anti-Asian hate, and perhaps the messaging and the campaign being in fact that Chinese-Canadians, as you said, felt that Conservatives didn't have their backs. Do you still feel as though that is an accurate reflection you had?

[Fred DeLorey]

Mr. O'Toole had a very hard-line but principled approach on dealing with the Chinese government, but I think some of the language could have been better. Mr. Poilievre is using better language. He talks about “Beijing” instead of China as a whole. It certainly has an impact when people feel they're being singled out, even though they were not, and it was not intentional.

[Jennifer O'Connell, Liberal, Pickering—Uxbridge, ON]

Thank you.

Following up on that, there were other campaign choices, and I understand that you may or may not be able to speak to this. For example, in Alice Wong's riding, I believe she had hired staff in the 2019 election and had cut those hired staff and something like a third of those staff were no longer on the 2021 election. Is it also possible that campaign resources and choices have impacts in close election races?

[Fred DeLorey]

I really can't comment on that.

[Jennifer O'Connell, Liberal, Pickering—Uxbridge, ON]

Fair enough, but campaigns make decisions based on.... I'm sure your campaigns would be similar where you're looking at data and determining in the last run of an election where to send resources and where maybe you don't send any more resources.

Does the Conservative Party make those sorts of determinations leading into elections?

[Fred DeLorey]

Every campaign would, of course, any sophisticated campaign.

[Jennifer O'Connell, Liberal, Pickering—Uxbridge, ON]

Thank you.

Following up on the last comments regarding the removal or candidates during campaigns, Mr. Marshall spoke about the decision that would have to be made on that. We've all seen it happen in all parties. It's certainly not pleasant when it's your own party.

Would you agree that those decisions would have to be made based on really solid evidence?

[Fred DeLorey]

Absolutely.

As Mr. Marshall mentioned, it is very challenging to remove a candidate. You have to have a good reason to do it. The person was chosen at some level and for some reason to be the candidate for our party in that riding. We have a process, and our National Council expects true hard evidence. You can't just come up with a gut feeling.

[Jennifer O'Connell, Liberal, Pickering—Uxbridge, ON]

Thank you so much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bardish Chagger]

Thank you.

Ms. Gaudreau, you have the floor.

[Marie-Hélène Gaudreau, Bloc, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

My question is very simple, and it's addressed to both witnesses.

To follow up on your statement, we want to investigate. What were the deficiencies?

Mr. DeLorey, do you want to start?

[Fred DeLorey]

In terms of dealing with the task force and all that, this is my fourth national campaign team that I've been a part of. It was the first time we had any kind of structure like this. I think that's something to remember, that this is new.

Again it felt like the big shortcoming was it feeling like a one-way street and this whole shrug at the end that we weren't able to get anything done and we were told that there are legislative gaps. Whatever those gaps are, if CSIS is aware of what those gaps are, I think they should be telling you, and you folks should be working with Elections Canada and other entities and creating something. It could be an act. It could be an amended Elections Act, but whatever it is, it should be something that would give us real teeth so we could dig into things. It feels right now that it's a good start, but it's not solid enough.

[Marie-Hélène Gaudreau, Bloc, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

There's obviously legislative gaps.

What do you think, Mr. Marshall?

[Hamish Marshall]

Thank you very much for the question.

For me, there are two aspects that I think need to be improved. One is, as I mentioned earlier, the co-operation of political parties. I was in those briefings. I was one of the representatives on the task force. I very much felt, certainly at the beginning, that these people were being asked to meet with us and it was almost like we were a burden to them, that we were these weird outsiders who weren't part of government in the way things really worked, and therefore, our views would be solicited in sort of the briefest, most vague form.

Perhaps now that we've been through two elections that has improved. This was very new in 2019, so I hope that has improved. I think that a regular relationship will help with that. If parties, between elections, are given briefings maybe three or four times a year, and there's a back and forth and trust can develop, that will be helpful. As the intelligence services learn more about how we operate campaigns, that would be very helpful.

The other thing that we really need to do is understand what that threshold for public notification is, because it was very vague to me and it was clear to me that nobody else really knew what that was. Is it one riding being influenced? If three ridings were influenced for whatever party, party A or party B, it doesn't matter, but it does impact the outcome of who is the national government, and in a minority Parliament, three seats could obviously make a difference.

They say, “Well, it was only three seats and it didn't meet the criteria of the threshold.” To the hundreds of thousands of Canadians who live in those three seats who are now represented by a party that may have been the result of foreign interference, that's fundamentally problematic. I don't know what that threshold is. We need to have a discussion on it, and it needs to be crystal clear to everybody involved, because my overwhelming sense was unless.... You know, the threshold was so high it would never actually be met. Because the committee was so concerned, to try to have the Clerk of the Privy Council go out and say this election is under threat is such a high bar it would be such a disruptive event in and of itself that they weren't willing to do it.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bardish Chagger]

Mr. Marshall, I was quite lenient—

[Marie-Hélène Gaudreau, Bloc, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Thank you for your generosity, Madam Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bardish Chagger]

If you see the tape later, you'll see that I provided as much flexibility for the answer I could, but I was enjoying it, and I hope one day we get to have a political discourse, because I think the back rooms are very different, and it's nice to see the different things that are being considered.

Mrs. Blaney, you have three minutes.

[Rachel Blaney, NDP, North Island—Powell River, BC]

Thank you.

I'm going to come to Mr. Marshall this time.

It was interesting to me that you talked about the information you received as being very high level, very vague. It didn't really provide any structure for you to be able to make a decision moving forward. I guess I'm just trying to understand. From your perspective, do you think any other party received anything different?

Throughout this study, it seems like there's an assumption that one party received information that other parties didn't, so I'm just trying to figure out if that is something you were concerned about and if you brought forward that concern at any point.

[Hamish Marshall]

At the time, I certainly wasn't concerned about that. I got the feeling they were dealing with us all on an equal basis. As we've now seen some leaks in the press, that may or may not have been true, but at the time I didn't feel we were getting more or less than anybody else.

[Rachel Blaney, NDP, North Island—Powell River, BC]

I have a last question for both of you, and I'll start with Mr. Marshall.

I've heard a couple of times that intelligence does not understand how politics works. What do we need to do to educate the system, the process, to understand how it works a little more effectively? I think the answer is legislative, but I'm wondering about it. What are the things that you feel intelligence needs to understand?

[Hamish Marshall]

I think the nomination process and the process of firing candidates is a perfect example. We've seen the report that CSIS told the Prime Minister to remove the candidate in Don Valley North, and since I've read that report, I've often thought what I would have done in that situation if CSIS had come to us.

Our parties are not set up in a way that we can sort of just take it as read that something came from the security services and, therefore, we should change the candidates. Candidates are nominated by the membership. I know that's true in the NDP as well. The process to remove them.... As campaign manager, I didn't have a magic wand to remove or appoint candidates. Everything has to go through the national candidate selection committee. In another life many years ago, I was our party's chair of our national candidate selection committee. It's a volunteer position, and it's something that our party members take seriously.

Understanding that, it's going to be very, very important for the intelligence services to work co-operatively. I think the solution is to be working with each other on an ongoing basis, not just suddenly two or three months before an election, and their turning up and saying, “Here's a variety of information.”

I think that by working co-operatively, they will have a better education of how we work and we will get a better education of how they work, and that hopefully can be better for the democracy in our whole country.

[Fred DeLorey]

Just to follow up with what Mr. Marshall said, I would take it a step further.

Other countries have political partisans as part of their election commissions appointed by parties who have real input on legislation and what's going on and give real experience on how this all works. If you want intelligence officials to know how campaigns work, then put political people around them who do campaigns. These are the experts. This is an expert profession. We have so many different experts in different fields who we bring in for different things, but in politics, for some reason, we don't.

Again, at Elections Canada, no one who works at Elections Canada has ever run a campaign, so they don't have the same.... Until you're in it, you don't know what it looks like.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bardish Chagger]

Thank you.

Mr. DeLorey, do you have about five extra minutes for us today to go past the hour?

[Fred DeLorey]

Sure.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bardish Chagger]

Mr. Marshall, are you okay with a couple of extra minutes for us?