Oh, but it is, fellow Canadians, and it’s going to continue because our government can’t or won’t lift a finger to stop it:
The cover of the NSICOP special report on foreign interference (PDF – https://nsicop-cpsnr.ca/reports/rp-2024-06-03/special-report-foreign-interference.pdf )
[Vancouver-East MP Jenny Kwan]’s 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.
