Welcome to Need to Know, The Hub’s roundup of experts and insiders providing insights into the political stories and developments Canadians need to be keeping an eye on this week.
The foreign interference report finally arrives
By Dan Stanton, former CSIS executive manager and an intelligence officer with 32 years of experience
This week, Canadians learned through the release of the Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference report that foreign states use clandestine means to cultivate and assist politicians for the long game rather than the Herculean task of placing their favourite party in office. Surprisingly, Commissioner Hogue advised that foreign (and domestic) disinformation is far more threatening to our democratic institutions than the political influence conducted by foreign states and their proxies. That said, the commissioner took the government to task for:
- taking too long to act against the foreign interference threats;
- its lack of transparency and poor communications.
The ridiculously delayed s.21 warrant application—which allows CSIS to conduct more comprehensive investigations—was not adequately explained. If the two-month delay was not Liberal Party interference, then what do we call it? CSIS would have lost valuable time in executing those warrant powers. Hopefully, this issue will not become fodder for conspiracy theorists.
Considering the inquiry’s central mandate, and the fact the commissioner was sidelined (broadsided, more accurately) by the NSICOP report’s breathtaking findings and the attendant “traitors in Parliament” accusations, it was a success.
The time wasted contextualizing the NSICOP report’s “witting and unwitting” parliamentarians (more of Lenin’s “useful idiots” than Xi and Modi’s “traitors”) should serve as a cautionary tale in providing intelligence on foreign influence to politicians.
We have far bigger national security threats than disinformation
By Sean Speer, The Hub’s editor-at-large
The much-anticipated Hogue report notably shifted its target from the threat of foreign interference as set out in the NSICOP report to the much more nebulous issue of “disinformation” which appeared 50 times in the report’s executive summary alone. Indeed, Hogue herself is quoted as saying that the latter amounts to the “biggest risk” to Canadian democracy.
In response, she recommends the creation of a government entity to “moderate the domestic open-source online information environment for misinformation and disinformation that could impact Canadian democratic processes.” It would also be responsible for “identifying and countering false information that threatens the integrity of elections and public trust in democratic institutions.”
If this is principally about addressing online efforts by foreign state actors to manipulate Canadian democracy, it’s far from obvious why this isn’t (or couldn’t be) the purview of Communications Security Establishment Canada.
If however the intention is for such an agency to be responsible for “identifying and countering” disinformation more generally, including from Canadians themselves, then they should have real concerns.
What for instance would such an entity have done four years ago if someone posted on Facebook or Twitter that COVID-19 leaked from a Chinese lab? We know the answer of course. It would have undoubtedly drawn on the authority and power of the state to designate it as “disinformation.” Never mind today that the C.I.A. now favours this theory of the pandemic’s origins.
Canadians should also be concerned about the commission’s various recommendations on how the government ought to interact more closely with the news media. It’s far from clear how the commission went from determining if any members of Parliament had been coopted by foreign interests to recommending that “the government should pursue discussions with media organizations and the public around modernizing media funding and economic models to support professional media.”
The whole report is a reminder of the inherent tradeoffs in addressing national security issues and the tendency of public officials to underestimate these tensions and preference policy solutions that aggrandize state power.
Canada’s national security regime no doubt has weaknesses that require fixing. But new bureaucracies to sanction (or disapprove of) certain ideas and speech and more funding for the country’s already heavily funded legacy news media are odd priorities.
The Liberals are leaving Canada high and dry
By Howard Anglin, former deputy chief of staff to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, now a doctoral student at Oxford University
While the Liberals are wasting their—and everyone else’s—time on party infighting, events in the real world are getting serious fast. Trump’s tariff threat is not just the most important thing for Canada right now, it’s the only thing that matters. Everything else is a distraction.
Trudeau, who is technically still prime minister, has shown no sign that he understands the threat, let alone that he was prepared for it. His answer, as always, is to shower us with more borrowed money to soften the blow (with all the usual inefficiency, soft corruption, and inflation that follows). But spending isn’t a strategy and tit-for-tat retaliation is only stalling for time—and not much help if the tariffs are a shift in U.S. economic policy and not just a negotiating tactic.
Unfortunately, a real strategy would require options we don’t have because the Liberals spent the last ten years unilaterally disarming our economy. Because they ran deficits in the good times, turning on the money-tap now will be generationally crippling. And because they canceled pipelines and discouraged major infrastructure projects, they left us at the mercy of our neighbours.
They can’t say that they weren’t warned. None of what Trump is doing should be a surprise. Robert Lighthizer may not be joining the administration, but Trump is following the plan he laid out in a book two years ago and in articles for years before that. Trump-affiliated think tanks also spelled out the strategy years ago. Neither the tariffs nor the rationale behind them was remotely a secret.
Because our government ignored the flashing lights and screaming sirens and carried on with its increasingly indulgent economic and climate policies, Canada is now left high and dry without good options, fiscal overhead, or a fully functional prime minister while the Liberals fight over which responsible actor—their finance minister or their economic advisor—will inherit the mess they made.
Mark Carney, candidate for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada, participates in a scrum with journalists on the sidewalk outside the venue of his campaign event in Ottawa, Thursday, Jan. 23, 2025. Justin Tang/The Canadian Press.
How Mark Carney wins
By Scott Reid, principal and co-founder of Feschuk.Reid and former communications director for Prime Minister Paul Martin
Mark Carney is winning. Which means he must now turn his attention to winning.
Dominating the Liberal leadership was never likely to be the challenge. The country’s stampeding desire for change was always going to advantage the lone candidate able to claim real distance from Trudeau. Even after a decade in power, Liberals can still read polls.
Now, the untested Carney has the luxury—and the burden—of training his focus on the whole of the country. Policy pronouncements need not be drafted with an eye to Chrystia Freeland or Karina Gould. They can be tailored solely to recapture popular support from a Canadian public that feels threatened and anxious.
But to succeed, Carney will have to adopt an utterly foreign posture. He must seize the mantle of “against.” Against Donald Trump. Against MAGA. Against America First’s manifest destiny—and all its simpering O’Leary turncoats. He must strap himself to the beaver nickel and the red maple leaf. And he must tell Trump no in terms so loud and unmistakable that it will leave Pierre Poilievre looking faded and feckless.
This will not be easy. An ocean of status-quoers and conventional wisdom advocates will warn Carney to be the “adult in the room.” To remain the celebrated technocrat. They are weak and they are wrong.
To take on Trump and to pressure Poilievre, Carney cannot rely upon conventionalism. Mild grey men are dropped in times like these, laid beneath tombstones chiseled with names such as Meighen and Heath and Ignatieff.
Carney must radiate strength and project conviction. He must startle the establishment and shock his critics by taking the fight to Trump and campaigning as the candidate of the against.
