Some 2019 candidates ‘appeared willing’ to engage with foreign interference: Hogue inquiry

The overall integrity of the 2019 and 2021 elections held, a federal inquiry finds, but foreign interference remains a significant threat.

A handful of candidates in Canada’s 2019 federal election “appeared willing” to go along with foreign interference schemes, a federal public inquiry has found.

Commissioner Marie-Josée Hogue’s preliminary report, released Friday, concluded that while hostile states attempted to covertly influence the 2019 and 2021 general elections, those efforts did not change which party took power.

But it also uncovered details about foreign interference operations in Canada, which Hogue called a “stain on Canada’s electoral process.”

The efforts include a group of “known and suspected” affiliates of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) that “worked in loose coordination with one another to advance” Beijing’s interests.

Those actors had “direct connection” to 11 political candidates and 13 political staff members, some of whom “appeared willing to cooperate in foreign interference-related activity while others appeared to be unaware of such activity due to its clandestine nature.”

Hogue could not say “with certainty” whether foreign interference tipped the scales in individual ridings.

But Hogue’s report – and the weeks of testimony and dozens of previously classified documents that led to it – confirmed “troubling” instances where foreign states may have attempted to interfere in Canada’s democratic elections. Those include:

All of these instances were concerning, Hogue concludes in her report, even though they did not change which party took power in both 2019 and 2021. That is not to say the foreign interference operations had no impact, however.