Trudeau says foreign interference affects all parties

Article content

OTTAWA — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Canadians should be skeptical of political parties who claim that foreign interference has not affected them.

In an interview with CBC’s Power and Politics, Trudeau directly contradicted NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh’s suggestion last week that there is nobody in his caucus he needs to worry about after reading an unredacted classified report on foreign interference.

Article content

After a pause, Trudeau said he was not aware of Singh’s comments.

“I would be wary of any party leader drawing any sort of conclusion like that,” he said.

Trudeau declined to offer more specifics after host David Cochrane suggested that viewers might understand from his comments that there are reasons to be suspicious about the New Democrats.

“I am implying that interference in our parliamentarians goes beyond party lines from many different sources, and we need to make sure that before we go accusing anyone from any party of anything, there are really important processes to go through,” said Trudeau.

Trudeau, Singh and Green Party co-leader Elizabeth May are the only party leaders until now who have had access to the full text of a report on foreign interference from the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP).

In the redacted version, the committee writes that it has seen “troubling intelligence that some Parliamentarians are, in the words of the intelligence services, ‘semi-witting or witting’ participants in the efforts of foreign states to interfere in our politics.”

Article content

Article content

May said that she was “vastly relieved” after reading the report last week, but Singh said he felt the opposite and was in fact “more concerned” than he was before reading it.

Trudeau, who has had access to the full report for nearly three months, said in a press conference at the end of the Ukraine Peace Summit in Switzerland this weekend there are “a number of conclusions” that his government does not “entirely align with.”

Trudeau told CBC that interpreting intelligence is “a really challenging thing.”

He pointed out that Singh and May, which he described as “two thoughtful parliamentarians,” read the fully classified report and “drew very different conclusions from even what was in the report.”

He also blasted Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre for refusing to get his security clearance so he could read the classified report. Poilievre has refused to do it until now because he said he would be bound by secrecy.

Article content

Singh also said that Trudeau should have acted sooner in the case of Toronto-area MP Han Dong, who left the Liberal caucus following media reports that he participated in Chinese interference efforts but Trudeau said he would not “get into specific cases.”

The public inquiry on foreign interference led by Justice Marie-Josée Hogue said it would be looking into the parliamentarians mentioned in the NSICOP report as part of its work after all MPs — except the Green Party — called on her to shed some light on the issue.

Trudeau said it is a “good thing” that the inquiry will be looking at this report and said he would welcome its conclusions and recommendations on the way forward.

National Post
calevesque@postmedia.com

Get more deep-dive National Post political coverage and analysis in your inbox with the Political Hack newsletter, where Ottawa bureau chief Stuart Thomson and political analyst Tasha Kheiriddin get at what’s really going on behind the scenes on Parliament Hill every Wednesday and Friday, exclusively for subscribers. Sign up here.

Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our newsletters here.

Article content