On foreign interference, ignorance is not bliss
National Post's Tristin Hopper did a fine job this week explaining the migraine-inducing politics behind whether or not an opposition leader ought to read the unredacted National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP) report that apparently implicates more than zero parliamentarians in wilful collusion with foreign influences. The conundrum, in a nutshell, is that once you've read it, you're sworn to secrecy about its contents.
Or at least, you're semi-sworn to semi-secrecy.
Green party Leader Elizabeth May was the first to provide her opinion on the report, assuring us there is “no list” therein of potentially treasonous parliamentarians. It was an oddly specific attempt at defusing the situation — who said there would be “a list”? Who cares if there's “a list”? — that blew up only hours later when NDP leader Jagmeet Singh publicly came to something like the opposite conclusion.
“There are a number of MPS who have knowingly provided help to foreign governments, some to the detriment of Canada and Canadians,” he told reporters. “There are also politicians at all levels of government who have benefited from foreign interference. Some of this behaviour absolutely appears to be criminal and should be prosecuted.”
He went so far as to call the unnamed parliamentarians “traitors to the country.”
This is not the sort of rhetoric in which Singh normally traffics. He's more the party leader you might expect to say that worrying about foreign interference in Canadian elections is terribly outré, probably racist, stop it at once. It's tempting to say that if Singh smelled smoke, there's probably fire.
But then, there's no obvious reason May would want to be a fire-denier. It's very perplexing, to say the least.
This brings us to Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, and whether he specifically ought to read the NSICOP report. He has thus far declined to do so, and he has some perhaps unlikely backers when it comes to that position.
Bloc Québécois Leader Yvesfrançois Blanchet has argued the government would use showing the report to opposition party leaders, knowing they would be sworn to secrecy as to its contents, as false proof that “everything is fixed.” (Singh's comments seem to have proven this concern unfounded, at least to some extent.)
Former NDP leader Thomas Mulcair, meanwhile, told CTV News this week he wouldn't have accepted the proposition now being put to Poilievre when he was leader of the official opposition: read the report, sure, so long as you keep shtum about it.
“I don't want to be told that now that I've seen this I can't say that,” said Mulcair.
It seems to me that if I led a Canadian political party, even a third or fourth party in the House of Commons, I would want to read the unredacted report if only to assure myself there were no traitors in my own trenches. That seems like its own reward, really.
But there's one big difference between Poilievre and Blanchet and Mulcair. The latter two have no chance of ever becoming prime minister, and never did have — in Blanchet's case by definition, in Mulcair's case because it turned out Jack Layton really was one of a kind when it came to federalist anglophone New Democrats wooing Quebecers.
Barring extraordinary events, Poilievre is going to assume the position of prime minister inside 18 months. He vows, unsurprisingly, that he would expel any MP from his caucus found to have colluded with foreign powers. He needs to know the names in that report, and Canadians need to know that he knows the names, before he starts appointing cabinet ministers and other senior positions, as a matter of basic trust in governance.
Blanchet's and Mulcair's defences are essentially tactical. “Why would I want to know something I couldn't weaponize against my political opponent? Suddenly I'm hamstrung in what I can say, keeping a secret from the Canadian people, and it's not even doing me any good.”
To repurpose a disreputable recent remark from Liberal MP Jennifer O'connell, on the matter of foreign interference in Canadian politics: “Boo hoo, get over it.”
Canadians need to know the names in that report. Period. Poilievre reading the unredacted version won't accomplish that, unless he adopts an even more liberal view of secrecy than May and Singh and spills more details. But party strategists aside, perhaps, it does nobody any good for him deliberately to keep himself in the dark. And credibility-wise, a Conservative leader worthy of the title can't afford to be anything but right out in front of an issue as fundamental to national security and sovereignty as this.