Matt Gurney: Canada's extremely non-mystifying surrender to foreign interference continues

Political harassment targeting our people is a horrible problem that exists in a weird Bermuda Triangle of overlapping Canadian political dysfunctions.

By: Matt Gurney

Jenny Kwan, NDP MP for Vancouver-East, says it’s “mystifying” that Canada does not yet have a Foreign Influence Transparency Registry. Such a registry, to use the chosen verbiage of the federal government, would require “individuals and entities that enter into an arrangement with a foreign principal ... to register their arrangements and disclose any foreign influence activities undertaken where they are in relation to government or political processes in Canada.” Similar registries are already in place in many countries that we count among our closest allies, to the alarmingly unclear extent that Canada still has allies.

Our lack of such a registry, alas, is extremely not mystifying. Honestly, at this point, it would probably be more mystifying if we did have one. The need for such a registry is obvious. The explanation for why we don’t have one, and will probably utterly half-ass any efforts to establish one is, sadly, equally obvious.

I don’t want to come down too hard on Kwan. Her comments, reported in a Hill Times article by reporter Stuart Benson, are basically correct. Kwan knows of what she speaks — readers may recall that Kwan herself was one of the Canadian parliamentarians who was reportedly targeted by China in an interference operation. She has consistently been on the right side of this issue. Her recent comments, which correctly noted the incredible hardship that Canadians targeted by foreign regimes endure, typically with no help from an apathetic Canadian government, are important and deserve amplification — we must all hammer home just how vicious a foreign influence campaign can be for those on the receiving end, and how little help they can normally expect from Canadian officials.

But mystifying? I wish.

A recap of the timeline is useful: The Liberals were “actively considering” such a registry as early as 2021. Late the next year, the magnificent Marco Mendicino, living embodiment of Trudeau-era ministerial excellence, was talking about launching a consultation, to see if it was an idea worth pursuing. A few months later, Justin Trudeau himself said that Mendicino would be “moving forward” to study “various proposals” in the coming weeks.

And then, well. You know. Nothing happened. In short order the government had the foreign interference scandal blow up in its face. A public inquiry was eventually called, after a long, drawn out process of increasingly pathetic attempts to dodge the issue. The initial report by Justice Hogue was released in May of 2024, and that month, the House unanimously passed Bill C-70, the Countering Foreign Interference Act. This gave the government the legal tools to establish the registry, a process they said would take about a year. That year ran out five months ago, and at that point ... the office wasn’t even operating yet, even just in preparation for eventually going live. The Carney government then said they’d appoint a commissioner by September of this year. This would mark the beginning of the registry’s work.

It’s now late October, with nary a new-fangled commissioner to be found.

The Hill Times article places Kwan’s comments, and the government’s overall lackadaisical effort on this front, in the specific context of the Carney government’s efforts to offset our lopsided reliance on trade with the United States by improving relations with China and India. These are not countries with which we have lately been swapping friendship bracelets, and a foreign influence registry would largely — not exclusively, but largely — be intended to address their interference. “I am constantly worried about [foreign interference], but that doesn’t mean I’m not also worried about affordability issues for Canadians; I can do both,” Kwan is quoted as telling The Hill Times. “The Carney government needs to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time; they need to address both with the level of seriousness and attention they require.”

Later in the article, Dan Stanton, a former senior CSIS official and current national security expert at the University of Ottawa, adds that the Carney government has likely postponed any further announcements on the registry to avoid complicating ongoing talks with the Asian giants.

Well, yeah. That’s pretty clearly an issue. Kwan and Stanton have the government about dead to rights on that one. You can see the proof of that everywhere — Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand’s recent trip to India and China, after which she called China a “strategic partner,” is a pretty clear signal. The latest blowup in U.S.-Canada relations, with Trump cancelling all trade negotiations with Canada because (or so he claims) Ontario ran anti-tariff ads on U.S. TV, will only increase the desire in Ottawa to realign our economy toward literally anyone else but the Americans.

So trade is a big part of this. There is a real and justified desire to cut our dependence on D.C. But as far as explaining the delay on the registry, the problem is much bigger than that. We can explain, at the most, the last year or so of delay on a desire to reboot relations with India and China. That doesn’t usefully explain what the hell the problem was before that.

And there actually is a pretty easy explanation for what the problem was. Foreign interference targeting our people is a horrible problem that exists in a weird Bermuda Triangle of overlapping Canadian political dysfunctions. That’s why it’s not mystifying that nothing happened. A decent working knowledge of how things happen in Ottawa makes this one really easy to diagnose.

First of all, a foreign interference registry would not be unanimously popular, even at home. One of the dirty little secrets of foreign interference targeting Canadians in Canada is that it’s often done via proxies — by Canadians in Canada. There are lots of people in this country making a lot of money off their dealings with foreign governments, and there would be a lot of subtle (and not-so subtle) pushback against anything that would shine a light on that. Every major Canadian political party has become enamoured with treating ethnic and religious groups in Canada as vote banks — places where you can build relationships that translate into ballots and donations.

Anything that might rock those boats is going to be viewed with skepticism, if not outright reluctance, by our politicians. They won’t want to say so in public, since this part of politics can get grubby, but you can bet your bottom dollar that every elected official in Ottawa nominally tasked with doing something on this file has pondered how best they can do it without causing too many problems for their next campaign.

And then there’s the broader problem, of course. Foreign interference is, fundamentally, a national security issue. And we don’t really do national security in this country. There remain, even to this day, massive amounts of denial about the risks this country faces, and a lot of outright reluctance to do much about whatever problems we actually can bring ourselves to admit exist. That work is hard, expensive, politically fraught and not particularly appreciated by voters. This is a can that our leaders would really prefer to kick down the road, so they can spend their time and money announcing things the public gets more excited about.

And, finally, we’ve got our usual state capacity issues. The Trudeau guys no governmented good, as we’re fond of quipping at The Line. Even if they could overcome the two issues noted above, and chose to really put their backs into it, the efforts immediately ran into their chronic deliverology problems, and ended up going about as well as all the other things Mendicino was tasked with doing. Which is to say, not all that great.

The six-month mark of Carney’s election win is now just days away. Line regulars will know that I’d promised to give the government six full months before making a sweeping conclusion. I’ll abide by that — Carney’s still got some time on the clock. Let’s see what he does with it.

But countering foreign interference is an area where major improvements from the Trudeau government were necessary, and overdue, and, all things considered, not that hard to accomplish, if we chose to try. It’s important because the victims are our people — Canadians. And they are often vulnerable and afraid and suffering terribly and without support. That’s morally wrong. It’s offensive. This really is a moment where we need to remember what the most basic first duty of a government is — protect the people from harm from abroad.

And yet we’ve seen nothing at all on this file — no progress, no sign of increased urgency and focus. And it’s a damned important file. I’d like to tell you I find that mystifying. But I don’t. If I’m totally honest with you all, I’m mostly just worried.

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