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Foreign interference hearings are the best spy show going
Forget Trudeau’s appearance on The Late Show. For real drama, tune in to Season Two of the Hogue Commission inquiry
As Parliamentarians spar over a DOA non-confidence motion and the prime minister chats with late-night host Stephen Colbert, the drama Canadians should really be watching is Season Two of the Hogue Commission on foreign interference. From a clueless Liberal party apparatchik to the Speaker’s refusal to prioritize issues of national security, it is the best spy show going — if only Canadians would tune in. So here are the highlights from the latest installments.
Episode One: Liberal national director Azam Ishmael’s wilful blindness:
Last Friday, Azam Ishmael admitted that he had not read the commission’s first report, detailing how China manipulated the 2019 Liberal nomination race in Don Valley West. That’s the riding where the Chinese consulate in Toronto paid for buses to ferry international students to vote for their preferred candidate, Han Dong, threatening them with visa revocation if they did not comply. That report noted that CSIS briefed a Liberal party representative with secret-level clearance several weeks after the nomination meeting, who then briefed the PM the next day.
While Ishmael, who became national director in 2017, said he has secret clearance and participated in the briefing, he told the inquiry — with a straight face — that until he was questioned by the commission, he hadn’t heard that buses had been paid for by the People’s Republic of China, that the students had been told they could lose their visas if they didn’t vote for Dong, or that many students lived outside the riding and were ineligible to vote there. Ironically, in his initial interview by the commission in March 2024, Ishmael recommended that, “Caution should be taken when discussing potential foreign interference in Canada’s elections and democratic processes because sowing misinformation and/or distrust is easy and can effectively undermine an otherwise robust system” — one so robust that he apparently didn’t know what was going on in his own party.
