Trudeau adviser plays down concealing foreign interference documents

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OTTAWA — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s national security adviser is playing down concerns over the government concealing cabinet documents from the commissioner looking into foreign interference, saying the government has chosen to provide the cabinet confidences it considers “most relevant” to the inquiry.

“We have already shared four MCs (memorandums to cabinet) with the commission and those cabinet documents were the most relevant, to the point, really addressing foreign interference,” Nathalie Drouin told the House of Commons committee of procedure and House affairs on Thursday.

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“So, we shared with the commission, in a very transparent way, things that were relevant, to the point, with them,” she said.

Conservative MP Eric Duncan compared the situation to “a courtroom trial where the accused that’s on the stand gets to choose what evidence the judge gets to see.”

The foreign interference inquiry commissioner, Marie-Josée Hogue, who is expected to publish a second report later this year, noted in her interim report published in May that the commission was challenging certain redactions in more than 1,000 documents provided by the government, which cited “cabinet confidence, solicitor-client privilege or protection of personal information.”

On Thursday, commission spokesperson Michael Tansey said discussions about the redactions with the government are still ongoing. He said the commission has no further comment at this time.

Opposition MPs remained unconvinced by Drouin’s testimony and proceeded to press Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc over why the government is withholding information from a commission that is working under a tight deadline to have a final report completed by Dec. 31.

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“Ultimately, what we all want coming out of this inquiry is to have faith in the process and in the inquiry and its outcome. If documents are withheld, you are going to undermine and undercut the work of the commissioner,” said NDP MP Jenny Kwan.

LeBlanc reiterated that public servants, not politicians, were involved in deciding what information is considered a cabinet confidence.

Bloc Québécois MP Marie-Hélène Gaudreau urged LeBlanc to “stop fooling around” and asked him to “rectify the situation quickly.”

“I don’t think there is any fooling around going on,” he replied. “On the contrary, we are very engaged in making sure the commission has access to all the documents and witnesses that it needs,” he said.

LeBlanc said that, as a fundamental principle of a Westminster parliamentary system “no government since Confederation is going to evacuate cabinet confidence to somebody other than the sitting head of the government.”

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He added that it was “very clear” when all recognized political parties were discussing the terms of reference of the inquiry last year that “protecting solicitor-client privilege and cabinet confidence was well understood.”

Drouin also told MPs in her testimony that the government did not withhold any documents from intelligence agencies, and that the commission had access to “everything it wanted.” However, she acknowledged that the commission had made very specific requests in terms of intelligence relating to foreign interference related to leaks in the media in the months prior.

The National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP), an intelligence watchdog that recently conducted its own review into foreign interference in Canadian democracy, said in its annual report recently that it, too, is fighting the government to obtain all the documents it requires to fulfill its mandate.

NSICOP, which was seemingly given the same access to the same four memorandums to cabinet on foreign interference as Hogue, said the government was “inappropriately” withholding over a thousand documents covered by cabinet confidence.

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“The Committee is concerned that some departments and agencies may be inappropriately using claims of Cabinet confidences to avoid disclosing information to the Committee,” read the report published earlier this month.

Drouin explained that senior public servants who work on memorandums to cabinet “can generate an incredible array of documents” — including emails and talking points for ministers — but that those documents were not necessarily relevant to the NSICOP’s work on foreign interference.

“I am extremely comfortable that we are not talking of a thousand files from cabinet as such,” she said.

National Post
calevesque@postmedia.com

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