GOLDSTEIN: O’Toole contradicts Johnston on foreign interference (2024)

The discrepancies between what Conservative MP Erin O’Toole says a CSIS agent told him about foreign interference by China, aimed at him and his party in the 2021 election, and the dismissive way Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s “rapporteur” David Johnston, treated O’Toole’s concerns in his report, are enormous.

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Both versions cannot be accurate.

They are yet another example of why we need a public inquiry — already rejected by Johnston — headed by an independent commissioner jointly approved by the government and opposition parties, to get to the truth.

Here is how O’Toole described the contents of his confidential briefing from a CSIS agent, saying he was not going to reveal anything that would hamper security and intelligence operations: “I will break down the nature of the threats identified to me by CSIS into four distinct categories of threats.

“Each of these threats was intended to discredit me, to promote false narratives about my policies and to severely obstruct my work as a member of Parliament and as (the then) leader of the official opposition. The numerous examples also demonstrate that there was an orchestrated campaign of foreign interference in the 43rd Parliament and in the 2021 general election.”

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O’Toole said he was told by CSIS that these threats included payments by the Chinese Communist Party through its United Front Work Department, to create a misinformation campaign aimed at him as a Tory MP and as leader of the Conservatives; using people working for or aligned with the UFWD in Canada to amplify this misinformation; using “foreign-controlled social media platforms … related specifically to the WeChat communications platform” to spread it and an “active campaign of voter suppression against me, the Conservative Party of Canada and a candidate in one electoral district.”

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Based on his CSIS briefing, O’Toole said: “I also believe that my privileges as a member and officer of Parliament were infringed upon by the government’s unwillingness or inability to act on intelligence related to foreign interference.”

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He said it “confirmed … what I had suspected for quite some time, which is that my parliamentary caucus and I were the target of a sophisticated misinformation and voter suppression campaign orchestrated by the People’s Republic of China before and during the 2021 general election.”

None of this is in the unredacted version of Johnston’s report, perhaps consistent with O’Toole’s impression that “my meeting (with Johnston) was nothing more than a box- checking exercise,” given that his report was already being translated into French when they spoke.

O’Toole said his request to delay the meeting until after his CSIS briefing was refused.

Johnston’s report largely dismisses O’Toole’s concerns.

He said the WeChat issue O’Toole had raised was largely based on a legitimate article in The Hill Times and that the government’s Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections (SITE) Task Force, couldn’t confirm whether it was spread through an organized campaign or organically.

“There is certainly a possibility that some part of the Chinese Canadian community did not agree with the (Conservative party’s) position on China,” Johnston wrote, adding “this is not foreign interference; it is the democratic process.”

Johnston said since O’Toole’s claim that Beijing’s interference had cost the Conservative party eight or nine seats in the 2021 election was rejected by SITE and the Critical Election Incident Public Protocol it was “hard to accept” and even O’Toole’s own “campaign team questioned the impact of foreign interference.”

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