Madam Chair, good afternoon, and thank you for having me here.
My name is Fred DeLorey. I served as the national campaign manager for the Conservatives in the last general election.
In regard to the matter at hand, I'm going to tell you what I heard and what I know, but given the limited amount of time for my opening statement, my expert opinions will come through my answers to any of your questions later. With that, I'll jump right in.
When it comes to foreign interference during the campaign, we did hear the odd rumbling that something was going on, but it was anecdotal at best. During campaigns, the rumours of misconduct are common and usually end up going nowhere. However, after the campaign was concluded, we noticed some results that felt off. That's when internal rumblings of foreign interference became much louder. Hearing these, I had instructed our field operations teams to investigate the matter by communicating with various local campaigns and reporting back to me.
The report I received came back in memo form. I will read this memo into the record now, and I'd be happy to provide the committee with the electronic version of the memo later, as well as the attachments referenced in the memo.
This is from the memo:
"There's a strong case to be made that there was a degree of influence exerted by an outside actor in the Chinese community during the 44th general election. From speaking with campaign teams and regional organizers, we believe this influence negatively impacted our standing in these seats: Metro Vancouver: Richmond Centre, Steveston—Richmond East, Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, Fleetwood—Port Kells; in the Greater Toronto area: Markham—Stouffville, Markham—Unionville, Richmond Hill, Willowdale, Don Valley North, Scarborough—Agincourt, Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill, Newmarket—Aurora, and to a certain extent Mississauga Centre.
"Through message groups on WeChat, text-based and news-content-style articles were circulated which directly targeted the Conservatives or expressed support for the Liberals. From what we've been hearing, these articles have been popping up on all sorts of groups, especially non-political ones. However, when one of our supporters posted some of the pro-Conservative articles, they were told that their content was too political and was removed from the groups.
"In one example there's an article that starts with 'Crisis for Chinese Canadians, we need to save ourselves', 'Stop the Conservative extremists from getting in power'. Another is, 'The Liberals want your money; the Conservatives want your life', a third is 'The Canadian version of Trump, leader of the Conservative Party wants to block WeChat and vowed to fight China to the end.' Attached you'll find additional examples of other articles that were posted and shared."
As you know, WeChat is the main messaging social media platform used by the Chinese-speaking community in Canada and is directly controlled by Chinese corporations. There were also anti-Conservative ads without authorization tags that were displayed on digital screens in a Chinese grocery store in Scarborough—Agincourt.
The concluding part of this internal memo directed to me reads:
"It's our understanding that the federal Liberals were not expected to do as well as they did with the Chinese community and that they did not coordinate this campaign directly."
Again, I am prepared to forward this memo and the attachments referenced to the committee.
After I received the memo, I forwarded it to our representatives who were sitting on the task force, as we had been instructed to take everything through that.
I was briefed later by our representatives that when they brought the evidence to the task force, they were informed that there were legislative gaps and there was nothing that could be done.
That concludes my opening statement, Madam Chair.