Changing The Subject, Burying The Story.

Sunday Special: Pulling Beijing's election interference operation off the front pages is an all-hands-on-deck damage control strategy that's taking Team Trudeau's full attention.

It’s becoming increasingly unlikely that any “official” body will provide Canadians with any credible and final answers about what’s been going on here, anytime soon.

This newsletter was supposed to be a kind of Part II to last Wednesday’s main attraction, specifically the part that began under the heading The United Front and the Long March of the New Huaqiao. Part II It’s in the hopper and it’s imminent.

It’s kind of a rogues’ gallery of China’s friends in high places in Canada. They’re deeply entrenched in corporate offices and university faculties, in the federal bureaucracy and of course in politics. They’re not all Liberals. There are New Democrats too and the Conservative Party has a big problem of its own.

But as the saying goes: Events, dear boy, events. No paywall today.

To get yourselves caught up on the latest I’ll just point you to my backgrounder in this weekend’s National Post (I’m also on Bob Mackin’s podcast, here). The main takeaway is that the Liberal government, aided by the New Democrats, is working frantically at a damage-control strategy that comes down to this: Change the subject, bury the story.

You never know. Right now, it looks like it just might work.

“Little Potato” parades in the footsteps of his father Pierre, Beijing’s most shameless public-relations asset from the Swinging Sixties to the Disco Generation.

By last Thursday, the Liberal and NDP members of the Commons’ Procedure and House Affairs Committee had already shut down Opposition efforts to get some clear answers about what the hell was going on during the 2019 and 2021 federal elections. Real Story subscribers got the whole backstory on that nearly two weeks ago: We’re At The Point Of No Return.

This past week, the Liberals lost a House Affairs Committee committee vote, but in doing so they may have won the information war. The committee voted 6-5 in favour of a non-binding NDP motion to introduce a non-binding House of Commons resolution for a public inquiry, but it would be an open-ended public inquiry into “allegations of foreign interference in Canada’s democratic system, including but not limited to allegations of interference in general elections by foreign governments.”

The motion didn’t even mention China.

Changing the subject:

To give you a sense of where this should be expected to lead, the motion’s sponsor, the NDP’s Peter Julian, took up the committee’s time last week badgering everyone to apprehend foreign influence operations in the context of Brexit, the so-called Freedom Convoy, “anti-vaxx” conspiracy theories and Russian psyops during the 2016 U.S. presidential election — anything but Chinese interference in the 2019 and 2021 elections.

Even though they notionally lost the vote, this should not displease the Liberals, because it’s been this way with them for years: Sure, let’s talk about foreign meddling if we have to, but let’s take care not to mention China.

Back in 2018, when the Trudeau government was first roused to give the appearance of doing something serious about foreign interference in our democratic institutions, I wrote a piece for Macleans about Trudeau’s strange comportment at the time: China is a bigger threat than Russia—but you won't hear Trudeau say it. . . when it comes to clear cases of Chinese meddling in Canada, why does he stay mum?

Nothing has changed since then. This week, the Liberals continued pretending that they were opposed to what what before the committee: a non-binding motion to introduce a non-binding resolution to establish a platform for Peter Julian to declaim his fantasies about the Kremlin paying the Freedom Truckists’ diesel bills.

There’s an even greasier move in play.

Burying the story:

Prime Minister Trudeau has said no to an Inquiries Act probe - although surely the NDP version would hardly annoy him - but he’s also hinted broadly that he’d be okay with the subject of election interference being taken up by the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians, which goes by the cumbersome acronym NSICOP.

In any other circumstances, inquiring into threats to Canada’s national security would be a useful thing for NSICOP to do, but that’s beside the point of the matter immediately at hand, and it’s a sure way to keep everything under the tightest wraps.

For one thing, for all the use NSICOP sometimes serves in shining some light on national-security matters, the Trudeau government likes its work to be kept in the dark. NSICOP is a weird hybrid body with a wide-ranging but constitutionally dubious mandate, and the Trudeau government happily ignores it anyway.

Last September, NSICOP protested that Ottawa was sitting on five years’ worth of NSICOP questions and recommendations that had gone without a response. Coincidentally, one of the NSICOP’s unanswered queries was this one: Canada faces a significant threat of foreign interference by hostile foreign powers; does the federal government have a whole-of-government plan to respond to the threat?

Crickets.

NSICOP isn’t an independent body. Established in 2017, NSICOP doesn’t answer to the House of Commons; it’s a function of the executive branch and reports to the Prime Minister’s Office, which appoints its members. Its chair at the moment is an unerringly loyal Liberal MP David McGuinty, brother of the former Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty (NB an error in the emailed newsletter version; I named the chair as Dalton).

And NSICOP has already been enlisted in the Trudeau government’s weirdly compulsive reluctance to allow the public to know what Beijing is up to in Canada.

Two years ago, in a move without precedent in Parliamentary history, the Prime Minister’s Office took House of Commons Speaker Anthony Rota to court to block the release of documents related to National Microbiology Laboratory’s firing of two Chinese scientists affiliated with the People’s Liberation Army. The Trudeau government insisted that only NISCOP should be permitted to inquire into the matter.

Conveniently, NISCOP’s senators and MPs are subject to a permanent, lifetime gag order so draconian and intrudes so brazenly upon the House of Commons’ privileges that an Ontario Superior Court ruled last May that the Constitution would have to be amended to allow the gag order to stand, if challenged.

So that’s where things sit now, and my reluctant conclusion is that the only version of an Inquiries Act probe that Trudeau will agree to is a negotiated-down version of the already weak-sauce NDP proposal crafted by Peter Julian, which is pretty much exactly what former Trudeau adviser Gerald Butts had already cunningly endorsed, which I reckoned here last week to be the one we’d end up with.

Bottom line: Whatever we might make about the thrilling inside baseball and the ‘gotcha’ headlines and committee intrigues and the claims and counterclaims about what’s accurate and what isn’t, which reporter is a racist and which one’s a liar and which party is gaining or falling in the polls and so on, here’s the bottom line.

Beijing’s diplomats, proxies, bagmen and errand runners went to extraordinary lengths to secure China’s desired outcome in the 2019 and 2021 elections - a win for the Trudeau Liberals and the defeat of the Conservatives. The Trudeau government knew this was happening, when it was happening, and said nothing, and did nothing.

All for now.

Up next in The Real Story: Beijing’s too-clever-by half Canadian cronies, compradors and collaborators, the creepy cast of characters that got us into this mess in the first place.