Matt Gurney: O'Toole passed the statesman test. Trudeau flunked.

It's not just that the PM was being nasty. He was. But he was also being dishonest. Do I dare suggest he was even peddling in disinformation?

A screen cap of former CPC leader Erin O’Toole’s testimony to the Foreign Interference Commission on April 3, 2024.

By: Matt Gurney

Justin Trudeau has always been good at striking the right tone. Not perfect! He's had some faceplants. But on balance, among my many criticisms of the man, an unwillingness to use the profile of his office to say nice things about deserving people hasn't been one of them. When a Canadian athlete wins a prize or hits a career milestone, when a Canadian performer bags an award, when a political colleague resigns or passes away, the PM usually has a kind word. I'm sure some of the time it is insincere or pro forma, because, yeesh, he has to comment on a lot of stuff. But he's still been solid at striking the right prime ministerial tones. That's something that we should appreciate. I further suspect it'll be something we eventually come to miss.

That's one of the reasons why it was so strange this week to see the PM take a weird swipe at former Conservative Party of Canada leader Erin O'Toole. But the other, more important reason, was that the PM was displaying a remarkable lack of self-awareness when he did so. Perhaps he was so excited to get a shot in at O'Toole that he let his eagerness to throw a punch get the better of him. That's been known to happen to the PM, from time to time.

The comment in question came on Wednesday. O’Toole had spent his morning testifying before the ongoing Foreign Interference Commission. During his testimony, O’Toole was strongly critical of the Security and Intelligence Threat to Elections (SITE) task force. He felt it should have provided the Conservatives more warning about information it had about foreign interference aiming to suppress the Conservative vote in ridings with large numbers of Chinese-Canadian voters. O’Toole had some mild (and I think fair) criticisms of Justin Trudeau, particularly around the PM’s willingness to blame concerns about Chinese interference on anti-Asian racism, and also in the opportunistic timing of the 2021 election. And O’Toole also said that he believes that Chinese interference cost the CPC between five and nine seats, though, critically, he grants that those seats would not have been enough to make him prime minister.

O’Toole’s testimony was fair, measured and reasonable. I want to quote two specific parts of what O’Toole said in his testimony on Wednesday. I think it’s important because it captures both his overall message and the tone of his remarks (which you can read in full here).

Here’s the first quote. It’s from pages 37-38 of the transcript linked above. He’d just been asked if he had any closing remarks before cross-examination and he replied with this. My emphasis added in bold.

The one thing I would just add at the end is we did not raise any of [his concerns about what he’d been hearing during the 2021 campaign about Chinese electoral interference] on election night or in the weeks after because our democratic result was clear, and it was more important to me to safeguard our institutions and our democracy rather than to express disappointment in the loss of a few seats. But as I said, I've seen enough to know that the process last time failed and failed a lot of Canadians, and so I really hope that we look to safeguard these institutions in a non-partisan way, and I really hope this inquiry can do that because I think this problem will only get worse, and so we have to create the tools to really have a robust system that values every single voter.

And here’s the other section. It’s from page 16. O’Toole is talking about the five to nine seats he believes his party may have lost due to interference. My emphasis in bold, again.

[The total was] nowhere near enough to change the results of the election, but for people in those seats, if they were undergoing intimidation or suppression measures, their democratic rights were being trampled on by foreign actors.

Now. Onto the prime minister.

The PM was asked by reporters for his reaction to O’Toole’s testimony, and said this: “I can understand where someone who lost an election is trying to look for reasons other than themselves why they might have lost an election.”

He says more after that, but that’s the part of the quote I really want to zoom in on, because, wow.

It’s wow on three fronts. First: the PM’s reply is nasty, and uncharacteristically so. I’m not saying this to clutch my pearls; I’ve largely moved onto the acceptance phase in terms of how unpleasant our federal politics has become (and I suspect it’s going to get a lot worse). So I’m not here to defend O’Toole against hurt feelings. He’s in the private sector now, no doubt making boatloads of money, and can simply shrug off the PM’s petty shot. But the fact that the PM took the petty shot is interesting. It stands in extremely stark, and extremely unflattering, contrast to O’Toole’s testimony that day. O’Toole and Trudeau both had their chance to comment on Wednesday, and only one of them sounded like a dignified statesman willing to put the national interest ahead of partisan bitterness.

It was not the prime minister.

Second: even if the PM somehow felt like he had to lob some snark at his defeated former rival, it could have been accurate. The PM asserted that O’Toole was looking to blame someone else for an undoubtedly upsetting loss. He extremely clearly wasn’t. O’Toole went out of his way, repeatedly, to stress that he accepts that Chinese electoral interference did not shift the outcome of the election. He has been consistent in that. He is literally on the record. The PM’s characterization of O’Toole’s testimony goes beyond nasty. It’s dishonest. A lie. I’d dare even go so far as to call it disinformation.

That’s a loaded term these days, and one the Liberals don’t appreciate having flung at them, but consider the facts here. Look at O’Toole’s quotes above. Read his full testimony. Look at how the PM reacted to it. And I dare any of you out there to tell me that the PM is fairly and honestly characterizing O’Toole’s remarks. Again, I’m pretty much resigned to the fact that this is just how things are going to be now, and politics always has made room for, ahem, creative interpretation. But this goes beyond that: the PM’s response to O’Toole’s testimony is fundamentally misleading and dishonest. If we are to avoid descending into a truly nasty and dysfunctional period in Canada, and that’s an awfully big “if” by my reckoning, there has to be some standard of behaviour, especially for prime ministers, and the PM’s comment on Wednesday would not meet any reasonable bar we could set.

But neither of the above two points actually addresses the real problem with the prime minister’s remarks.

Which is, this: has Justin Trudeau not realized that he has even more reason to reach for a soothing narrative than Erin O’Toole does?

Let me be extremely clear about something: I believe that Trudeau won the 2021 election fairly and legitimately. I agree with O’Toole’s assessment: Chinese electoral interference, though serious, does not seem to have swung enough votes in enough places to have mattered to the final outcome. Trudeau won the 2021 election lawfully and is the legitimate prime minister of Canada. Period.

As important as the above is to say loudly and clearly, the fact remains that if Trudeau wants to imply that O’Toole is looking for someone to blame for his defeat, it is equally fair to ask if the PM has been unwilling to take allegations of foreign interference more seriously precisely because he won those elections. If we’re going to start thinking that O’Toole might be allowing his emotions and ego to cloud his judgment, we have to ask what the PM’s emotions and ego are doing to his, and those of the victorious team around him.

The PM opened the door here, and fairness demands we all step through it together. If Erin O’Toole can be accused of shifting blame because of his feelings, we should ask if the PM feels like this entire issue questions or impugns his win.

And frankly, that would fit the facts. It’s important to recall how we got here. Since the first reports of serious electoral interference emerged, the PM and his government have done their best to ignore or downplay them. First we were all lectured about racism. Then the Liberals decided to filibuster or outright skip committee meetings. When that eventually failed, instead of a full inquiry we got the Johnston Report. Only when Johnston eventually quit under Conservative fire did the PM agree to a full inquiry. He was very clearly forced into it.

And even at this early date, the inquiry is producing results. Nothing that has yet blown our national socks off, but we are learning things about foreign interference in this country that we did not learn from the media leaks, did not learn from the committee hearings that Liberals showed up for and neglected to filibuster, and did not learn from the Johnston Report.

Remember all the controversy about Han Dong’s nomination? We now know a lot more about how international students may have been used to help his campaign. And speaking of Dong, remember how strongly he denied ever having suggested to Chinese officials that they hold onto the Two Michaels a bit longer? Because I do. A year ago, he said this: "To all my colleagues in the parliament, media reports today quoting unverified and anonymous sources have attacked my reputation and called into question my loyalty to Canada. Let me be clear, what has been reported is false. And I will defend myself against these absolutely untrue claims.”

He’s since amended that. Now he “can’t recall” making those remarks. This might explain, as helpfully tracked by Global News, why Justin Trudeau is suddenly much more reserved when talking about Dong’s place in the Liberal party.

We’ve learned about China funnelling money around in Canada. We learned about a strong CSIS warning about electoral interference being watered down in 2019.

And we’re only a few days into the real meat of the testimony. The Canadian public is being well served by the ongoing work of the commission, and none of it would have happened if Trudeau and the Liberals had been successful in their vigorous and sustained attempts to stop the commission from ever being established.

It’s important to remember that. It’s important to ask why that might be. It’s important to remember that we’ve already seen, as with the recent Winnipeg lab leak documents, that this government tries to bury embarrassing scandal under bogus or, at the very least, torqued claims of national security. And it’s important to always demand more transparency and accountability from our government, even if only on general principles.

And it’s important, above all else, to put the country first. To be patriots, as trite as that sounds. To remember that just because foreign interference didn’t swing an election, it doesn’t mean that it’s not a bad thing, that has real and bad consequences for Canadians. It’s a problem. It’s a problem that we need to take seriously.

Erin O’Toole took it seriously. He still does. He doesn’t use it as a crutch, and what he’s asked of the commission is what we all should desire. Not because we’re Liberals or Conservatives or the rest, but because we’re Canadians.

And that’s why it’s so damned strange to see the prime minister go after him the way he did. Trudeau could have taken the moment to agree with O’Toole that more must be done to safeguard our democracy and help Canadians being subjected to foreign pressure, and said he’d save the rest of his comments until next week, when he will testify. He went for a cheap dunk on a defeated rival, instead.

That’s bad. And when you consider the rest of how he and his party have responded to this scandal from the beginning, it’s not unreasonable to ask if the PM’s letting his emotions override his better judgment here, to the detriment of the country. He and his supporters may bristle at the suggestion, but it’s what he said of O’Toole. Fair is fair, right?

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