Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino is blaming the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) for failing to brief Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Beijing’s attempts to threaten the family of Conservative MP Michael Chong.
“It is a serious issue that neither the prime minister nor the public safety minister at the time were informed directly by CSIS about the case involving Mr. Chong,”
said Mendicino, speaking to reporters outside the Liberal Party convention in Ottawa on May 6.
A national security source cited by a May 1 Globe and Mail
article alleged that Zhao Wei, a Chinese designated consular officer in Toronto, was involved in
threatening Chong’s family in Hong Kong following passage of a motion Chong sponsored in February 2021 declaring Beijing’s treatment of Uyghurs in China’s Xinjiang region a genocide. The Globe article also cited a July 2021 top-secret intelligence assessment from CSIS.
Chong
told the
House of Commons on May 4 that National Security and Intelligence Adviser (NSA) Jody Thomas told him the CSIS report was shared with Trudeau’s then-NSA two years ago.
Chong, MP for Wellington-Halton Hills in Ontario, said the report “contained information that I and other MPs were being targeted by the [People’s Republic of China].”
Trudeau
said on May 5, also at the Liberal convention, that “the information never made it up to the political level in my office, to me, or even to the minister of public safety at the time.”
This contradicted a statement he made May 3, when he
said CSIS didn’t share the information at all. “On Monday morning, two days ago, we asked what happened to that information. Was it ever briefed up out of CSIS? It was not,” he said.
“CSIS made the determination that it wasn’t something that needed to be raised to a higher level because it wasn’t a significant enough concern.”
At the convention, Trudeau didn’t answer questions about the briefing process.
“I get briefings regularly from various sources. I’m not going to go into details on that,” he said. “I shared the best information I had at the time on Wednesday, both to Mr. Chong and to Canadians.”
Mendicino
said at the convention that the government is “going to great lengths to ensure that there are stronger protocols in place when it comes to any allegation or report of foreign interference on parliamentarians, so that that information is brought directly to my attention and directly to the attention of the prime minister.”
“We’re on top of the situation,” Mendicino said.
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Ian Brodie, who served as chief of staff to former prime minister Stephen Harper from 2006 to 2008, told
CBC’s Power & Politics that Trudeau’s comments suggesting CSIS did not share information didn’t add up.
“It’s natural for CSIS to share its reporting of this sort broadly across other security services and the cabinet office,” he said.
“In my experience, anything that deals with an MP or anyone at the political level would be automatically shared with the Prime Minister’s Office and brought to the prime minister’s attention as quickly as possible.”
Chong was critical of the Liberal government’s reaction to foreign interference and threats against his family.
“We are basically putting up a giant billboard for all authoritarian states around the world that says we are open for foreign interference threat activities on Canadian soil targeting Canadian citizens, and you can conduct these activities with zero consequences,” Chong
said at the May 4 meeting of the Commons foreign affairs committee.
Trudeau said at the convention on May 5 that expelling a Chinese diplomat is a decision that has to consider backlash from China.
“This is a big step, not a small step, to expel diplomats. It’s one that has to be taken with due consideration on all the potential impacts and all the very clear messages that it will send,” he
said.
Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly
told the foreign affairs committee on May 4 that she had instructed her deputy minister to
summon the Chinese ambassador over the issue. She said the federal government is assessing the possible “consequences” that Beijing might take if Canada expels Zhao.
The Chinese Consulate in Toronto on May 4 issued a
statement in Chinese denying the accusations and saying that “certain Canadian media and politicians are spreading related false information, deliberately damaging the reputation and image of our consulate.”
The Canadian Press, Noé Chartier, and Andrew Chen contributed to this report.
