Matt Gurney: At the interference inquiry, Trudeau elbows another boob

And guess what? We're the boob.

By: Matt Gurney

What Justin Trudeau did on Wednesday from the witness standing at the foreign interference inquiry — when he made his dramatic announcement of having seen a list of Conservatives who are compromised by or vulnerable to foreign interference — makes a kind of sense.

It does. It was an effective attack on Pierre Poilievre, who has stubbornly led with his chin for months. The reaction of many of my Conservative friends was telling. They knew Trudeau landed a hit, and they were pissed. They were ready for it — I think their counterattack was as good or better. But this whole story, or at least this little snippet of it, starts with Trudeau taking a swing, and not missing.

Trudeau was on the stand on the last day of witness testimony — and that's important, since it basically gives him the final word on the proceedings. His government had spent the recent days taking a beating. No plausible explanation was ever offered for why a CSIS warrant, which news reports claim was aimed at a prominent Liberal, sat unsigned on then-public safety minister Bill Blair's desk for almost eight weeks, when the usual turnaround time was days. But Trudeau is good in these kinds of situations, and always has been. I'm not one of the bafflingly large number of Canadians who continue to underestimate his political skill. I expected him to put on a show. 

Did he ever.

"I have the names of a number of parliamentarians, former parliamentarians and/or candidates in the Conservative Party of Canada who are engaged, or at high risk of, or for whom there is clear intelligence around foreign interference," the prime minister said. "And I have directed CSIS and others to try and inform the Conservative Party leader to be warned and armed, to be able to make decisions that protect the integrity of that party, of its members, from activities around foreign interference."

Well. Alright, then.

It’s not that this information was shocking, per se. The smart money has always been on every major party being compromised, to some extent, by foreign interference. I don’t think the Conservatives have any illusions about that. Still, the PM’s comments were a grenade rolled directly into Poilievre’s tent. And a well-aimed roll, at that. The problem, as those who've followed this story know, is that Pierre Poilievre has not received the relevant briefings. The intelligence is so classified that it requires special clearance to be briefed. A condition of the briefing is that the information must be kept secret, which clearly limits how it can be used.

Poilievre deems this a trap. He feels that if he takes the briefing, he'll be bound by secrecy. He doesn't think that's a good trade. That said, Poilievre’s refusal to seek a security clearance doesn’t extend to the party as a whole. Other Conservatives have seen the materials — there are Tory members of the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP), which wrote the report! But the CPC leader himself has not been fully briefed, by choice, and that's something that has been "noted" with emphasis by many of his critics. Some of the criticisms and theories for that choice are fair, and some of them are deranged, but in any case, like I said, Poilievre set himself up for this.

In that context, Trudeau’s decision to tease the possibility of some unnamed Conservatives being involved in the machinations of foreign interference makes sense. He saw Poilievre's chin and decided to shove his fist into it. It's politics. I get it.

But, once again, I'm not sure that the PM thought this through all the way. Our PM has a habit of occasionally letting his combative instincts get the better of him. The man has a weakness for showy, dramatic gestures, and loves to try and seize the big moments. Sometimes they blow up in his face. I think this one will, too. It is, I suspect, less a punch to the face, and more of an elbow-to-the-boob. It'll cause more problems than the gesture was worth.

Not that Poilievre didn’t deserve it. Poilievre is wrong to refuse the briefing, on both philosophical and political grounds. Philosophically, the man is likely to be our next PM, and he should should show Canadians that he can lead. Politically, the Poilievre defence, which relies on explaining who is authorized to receive what materials within the broader CPC fold, is too complicated and technocratic to work. It’s a strange error by a guy who is otherwise well versed in the effective use of the short, sharp and punchy one-sentence talking point. Until Poilievre gets briefed, his critics can and will hammer him with their own short, sharp and effective question: “What is he afraid of? What is he hiding?” And when they do, they’ll be beating him at his own game.

But that’s another column, now saved and tucked away in its own file. This one is about what Trudeau did. The PM chose Wednesday to take his swing. You can see why he would! Trudeau and his party are getting kicked around on every front these days. He’s down 20 points in the polls. He’s losing cabinet ministers the way I lost my hair. The very same day that Trudeau swung at Poilievre also brought news that the caucus revolt that has been simmering in the background since last week might soon finally break into the foreground, with a group of Liberal MPs apparently set to call for Trudeau's resignation next week.

Trudeau doesn't get a lot of opportunities to look like a tough leader these days, and he got two this week. His eviction of six Indian diplomats that Canadian intelligence believes were involved in guiding violent crimes in Canada, aimed at politically connected members of Canada's large Indian diaspora, was one (and I am not yet cynical enough to believe the timing was politically motivated). The second, of course, was Trudeau's bombshell testimony. Given the shellacking he’s been taking of late, it probably felt amazing go on the attack yesterday.

The problem for the prime minister is that, today, having had his dramatic moment, there's no follow through. He dropped the mic and then Poilievre did what he was always and obviously going to do: the opposition leader picked that mic right back up again and started talking into it.

Here's part of Poilievre’s statement (full statement is here):

My message to Justin Trudeau is: release the names of all MPs that have collaborated with foreign interference. But he won't. Because Justin Trudeau is doing what he always does: he is lying. He is lying to distract from a Liberal caucus revolt against his leadership and revelations he knowingly allowed Beijing to interfere and help him win two elections. … If Justin Trudeau has evidence to the contrary, he should share it with the public. Now that he has blurted it out in general terms at a commission of inquiry — he should release the facts. But he won't — because he is making it up.

If Poilievre’s decision to forgo a security clearance is overly complicated and technocratic, then Trudeau’s decision to attack him for it suffers the same drawbacks. By comparison, Poilievre’s approach, here, is better, simpler, and most crucially, it’s right: Release the names!

If MPs from any party have been compromised, the public deserves to know.

I don't say that lightly or impulsively. There are absolutely downsides to releasing the names, including the very real risks to compromising our investigations and destroying the reputations of people who may have committed no crime. This sucks. But there are greater downsides to not releasing the names — until the Canadian public knows them, our entire democratic system is suspect. To put it another way, if it is inappropriate to release the names in full, then it is equally if not more inappropriate for a prime minister to publicly tease those names during his testimony, while hiding behind oaths of national security in order to avoid handing over the receipts. Protections of “national security” are intended to protect real sources and reputations — not to serve as a launchpad to lob allegations at foes while dodging accountability and transparency.

The PM is the one who opened the door. He has, yet again, outsmarted himself for the short-term win. Because in trying to underline that Poilievre hasn't taken the briefing, the PM has also reminded all of us that he has information that the voters do not. Further, Trudeau cannot claim to be hyperinformed about the vulnerabilities in his opponent’s party, and innocent about the same kinds of problems in his own. That’s just not plausible.

That's why Poilievre has the winning hand here — he countered with a reply that is not only better politics, it's simply right. And he’s the only one saying it. Releasing the names is what our democracy requires.

It should also be pointed out that while, in my opinion, Poilievre has been stubbornly wrong about refusing security clearance, Trudeau has acknowledged that other Conservatives are being briefed at the top-secret level, and that the info he was alluding to has not been passed on. This is a complicated issue; it’s one I’m still trying to get some clarity on myself. I hope to have more to say soon. Suffice it to say that, for now, Poilievre has effectively framed the issue as the PM holding back information that he’ll tease in public but won’t share even in private. This is a problem for Trudeau.

And for all of us. Because in the end, Poilievre correctly identified the final outcome of this, and he's asking the PM to do the right thing, evenly and transparently. Release the names. All of them. How can Trudeau argue against it? Up until yesterday, he could play the secrecy card, but after taunting Poilievre, in what even the PM conceded, on the stand, was an unusually partisan move on his part?

Sorry, Prime Minister. You don't get to do that. Your government has screwed up on this file far too often to get any benefit of the doubt, and if you're going to dangle super-secret things in front of the public, you now owe them some transparency. The public deserves it. The public should demand it.

An election looms. Whether it's in six weeks or next year, it will be spectacularly unhealthy if we next head to the polls with this being the status quo. Only transparency fixes this. The gentle disinfectant of sunlight … or the searing flash of a thermonuclear transparency bomb, which might be more what's needed. 

I wish we lived in a better, more mature country. I wish we had better, more mature leaders. I wish we hadn't made such a total epic hash of our national security in recent years. I wish we weren't so prone to getting mugged by reality, and I wish we demanded better. 

I wish for a lot of things. But what I actually have is a government with a proven track record of screwing up on security files, an opposition leader who boxed himself into a trap he's too stubborn to escape, and a waning PM who saw a chance to dunk on a hated opponent, and didn’t really think through what the hell would happen next.

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