Thank you, Madam Chair.
My name is Hamish Marshall. I was the Conservative Party of Canada's national campaign manager in the 2019 federal election.
Obviously, the 2019 election was conducted in the shadow, or the lead-up to it was in the shadow, of allegations of foreign interference in a variety of western democracies. It was something that our party took seriously and pushed the government to take action on. It's something that I took seriously as campaign manager and with our campaign team.
Early in my time as the national campaign manager, I met with a senior academic from one of Canada's leading universities, who made clear what the operating assumption for myself and everyone in our senior campaign team should be: We should assume that all of our electronic communications were compromised by Chinese intelligence and possibly other countries as well. That's something we took seriously. We took the approach that this was something that was being monitored by foreign powers, at the very least.
The government created the protocol and a committee of senior civil servants with the mission to go public if certain thresholds of interference were broken, not if there was any interference; we've seen that there was. There were reports after the 2019 election that there were small instances of interference, but none of them at the threshold.
I was one of the Conservative Party of Canada's representatives who was security-cleared and got the secret clearance on SITE, the security and intelligence threats to elections task force. I went to briefings before and during the election. There were probably half a dozen briefings overall. I was instructed at those briefings not to speak about the specifics of what was discussed and what was shared with us as part of our secret clearance. I will not be able to give specifics from that.
I will say, though, that including political parties was a good idea. When the process first started, it was very clear that the intelligence services, and frankly many of the civil servants there, took a very sort of standoff and confused view of political parties. I think Mr. Broadhurst said earlier that he felt there wasn't a lot of understanding of what we do and our processes, and I would echo that. There was a feeling that political parties were these odd institutions that were sort of on the side of government. There was almost a level of discomfort in dealing with political parties.
I believe political parties are institutions that are fundamental to the nature of democracy in Canada, so incorporating them in the SITE process was good. My regret is that it ended at that point. I think we should be looking at a scenario where political parties are briefed on and included in these matters around election interference between elections, and not just in the immediate lead-up and during elections. I think that would build more trust and be a better way of interfacing between the intelligence services and political parties, which, frankly, will often be the first organizations to see evidence of foreign interference. The ability to have those dialogues I think is extremely valuable.
I will also say, I think to echo something Mr. DeLorey just said, that there seemed to be an extreme, I would say, or a great deal of reticence—I can only speak to 2019—around declaring anything above the threshold for public disclosure. It seemed to me that the people involved, the civil servants involved, were more concerned about being accused of interfering in the election themselves by making something public than the possibility of foreign interference. It's my belief that almost anything that came there would not have met the threshold, whatever the threshold was, for disclosure, because they were so concerned about being seen to interfere.
Perhaps that's rightfully so, but that is something that needs to be fixed going forward. We've now had the 2019 election. There was a report afterwards saying that there was interference, but it wasn't enough to mention during the campaign. Where that line is drawn I think can only help to undermine confidence in Canadian elections. We all have to be very, very, very careful about that.
I'm happy to discuss any of this further.