How the Hogue Commission Explains Its Call of No ‘Traitors’ in Parliament

Justice Marie-Josée Hogue speaks about the interim report following its release at the Public Inquiry Into Foreign Interference in Federal Electoral Processes and Democratic Institutions, in Ottawa on May 3, 2024. The Canadian Press/Adrian Wyld

News Analysis

The Hogue Commission’s conclusion as to whether lawmakers have been colluding with foreign powers was highly anticipated by the Canadian public, after months of uncertainty over the integrity of some MPs in the country’s Parliament.

While Commissioner Marie-Josée Hogue said she found no evidence of “traitors,” she confirmed the government has intelligence that an MP had accepted the support of a foreign state. Hogue also said there’s an incomplete picture of lawmakers’ activities because the information is usually obtained collaterally while collecting intel on threat actors.

As previously reported by The Epoch Times, during the commission hearings, Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) leadership said that the agency’s focus is on foreign actors rather than on the elected officials themselves when it comes to intelligence gathering. This aspect could have a bearing on any assessment that the agency itself can perform and the conclusions that a commissioner reviewing those assessments can draw.

In any case, no names were released in Hogue’s report. The Foreign Interference Commission had been clear that, in order to protect national security information and due process, it would not be releasing the names of any parliamentarians. However, the commission did provide more clarity on the controversy.

The commission’s final report, released on Jan. 28, criticized last year’s report by the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP) that had sounded the alarm, saying the allegations it contains contributed to the “erosion of Canadians’ trust in their democratic institutions.”

In a bombshell June 2024 report, NSICOP said some lawmakers were “semi-wittingly” or “wittingly” colluding with foreign states. It reported on China seeking a “quid pro quo” relationship with some MPs, while others allegedly provided confidential information to India.

Opposition parties and members of the public demanded that the parliamentarians be named. The issue eventually died down when the House of Commons passed a motion before summer requesting the matter be studied by the Foreign Interference Commission.

Hogue conducted a review of the NSICOP report, gaining access to information the committee of security-cleared parliamentarians had not seen. This includes the “raw intelligence and operational reporting” that formed the basis of the materials used by NSICOP in its report.

“The Commission’s investigation led me to conclude that the consternation caused by the NSICOP Report, while understandable, is in some important respects unwarranted,” Hogue wrote.

The commissioner said the behaviour of some lawmakers “may be concerning” but she has not seen “evidence of ‘traitors’ in Parliament.”

She also said China is the “most active perpetrator” of foreign interference targeting Canada’s democracy and identified India as the second most active country in that regard, with much of that activity being related to India’s concern with Khalistani separatism.

A CSIS assessment made public by the inquiry says at least 11 candidates and their staff in the 2019 federal election were “implicated” in a Chinese foreign interference network. CSIS said some appeared unaware of the threat activity whereas others appeared to “willingly cooperate.”

Review of NSICOP’s Assertions

Hogue reviewed the NSICOP’s assertions pertaining to the collusion of lawmakers and found that the committee made judgments not supported by facts and mixed up information, leading to inaccuracies.

She also expressed concerns about how raw intelligence is transformed as it gets summarized while making its way into reports, particularly public ones, leading the end product to be “inevitably incomplete.” She said there’s a “very real danger that it can be misleading.”

In the review of an NSICOP assertion describing a “textbook example of foreign interference that saw a foreign state support a witting politician,” Hogue said the underlying briefing to support the allegation didn’t refer to the incident as a “textbook example.” Another document not referenced by NSICOP does describe the incident as “textbook” but doesn’t describe the MP as a “witting politician.”

The Hogue report says CSIS provided clarification on the matter but said it didn’t know whether the MP was aware the matter constituted foreign interference.

“CSIS assessed that the politician was aware of and had accepted the assistance of a foreign state. But CSIS did not assess that the politician was wittingly engaging in foreign interference,” says the report.

Hogue said this nuance is important.

The fact remains, however, that CSIS believes the MP was knowingly being supported by a foreign state. While this doesn’t necessarily make the MP a traitor—especially given the high bar of what constitutes treason if it is to meet the Criminal Code definition—it has to be taken into the larger context of intelligence collection.

Hogue states clearly in her NSICOP review that intelligence collection is most often not directed at politicians but rather at foreign or threat actors. This means there is no active collection on the politician, creating a vacuum of information and increased difficulty in fully assessing whether a politician is effectively and wittingly engaged in threat-related activities.

This issue surfaces in another NSICOP assertion examined by Hogue, which describes “members of Parliament who worked to influence their colleagues on India’s behalf and proactively provided confidential information to Indian officials.”

CSIS told the commission it had not assessed whether the implicated MP was witting, leading to Hogue saying NSICOP went “too far” in making assertions about whether the MP was complicit.

“I recognize that NSICOP, as a committee of parliamentarians, considered the information before it from the viewpoint of parliamentarians commenting on the behaviour of their colleagues who they considered to have crossed a line. However, in my view, these conclusions went beyond what the available intelligence could support,” she said.

The claim that the MP was providing information to Indian officials was not challenged by the commission, although it said NSICOP had made a mistake in labelling it as “confidential.” Hogue said the government had already made the information public at the time and the same error appeared in the CSIS document NSICOP relied on.

Hogue points to other errors in the NSICOP report, such as in describing two instances where a single MP allegedly assisted a foreign state. She said the commission was able to determine the allegations appear to involve two separate MPs.

Hogue says this is relevant because with two separate instances implicating one individual, it could be inferred there is a higher likelihood of the MP potentially aiding a foreign state.

On the flip side, using the premise of limited intelligence collection on MPs, it could be concerning that there is more than one MP who is potentially compromised.

Classified Version

Hogue also delves into the classified version of the NSICOP report, which apparently states that an MP has been compromised by a particular foreign state. The commission said the CSIS intelligence report this information is based on uses the same language but identifies a different foreign state.

Along with NSICOP improperly identifying the country, Hogue said CSIS itself had not assessed the MP was compromised, but the qualifier came from a third party.

“‘Someone told CSIS the MP was compromised’ is very different from ‘CSIS assessed that the MP was compromised,’” she wrote.

The fact remains that a CSIS intelligence source provided information to the effect that an MP is compromised. There are no details available to determine the credibility of that source.

Beyond the errors Hogue found in the NSICOP report, there remains a body of intelligence in CSIS and other agencies’ holdings about the potential compromise of Canadian lawmakers.

NSICOP members, as parliamentarians of all stripes from both chambers, identified this information as being extremely problematic. But the Hogue Commission, working with greater access and from a different standpoint, concluded NSICOP went too far.

The commission has made available on its website a large amount of previously guarded information about foreign interference. By sifting through government intelligence summaries and intelligence assessments from CSIS and other security bodies—even though a lot of content is redacted—people have the opportunity to come to their own conclusions.