Enough — Johnston should step down

Opinion

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This article was published 09/06/2023 (854 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

This week brought more shenanigans related to the federal government’s new special rapporteur on foreign interference, former governor-general David Johnston. The entire spectacle threatens to sink any chance of Canada decisively addressing concerns about China’s foreign interference networks that have meddled in our recent elections.

Johnston was appointed to this role back in March with a mandate to provide a binding recommendation to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on whether a public inquiry into concerns over foreign interference should be called. At the time, I rolled my eyes at what seemed like an obvious stall tactic on Trudeau’s part. But I was willing to cut Johnston, an illustrious Canadian, some slack.

Time passed and Johnston eventually made his recommendation: no public inquiry. To no one’s surprise, Trudeau happily accepted this. The recommendation was shocking and inexplicable enough, but Johnston then announced that he wasn’t done. To the contrary, he would be holding his own public hearings in the absence of a real public inquiry, and would report back on what he had found sometime in the fall.

Johnston confirmed this in a piece written for the Globe and Mail, grandly titled “My work to protect Canada’s democracy from foreign interference is not done.”

Just as virtually no one knew what a rapporteur was when Trudeau created the position, so too were observers caught off guard to learn that Johnston’s mandate was apparently much more expansive than originally reported.

Since then, Johnston has found himself in the intense hothouse of Canadian partisan politics. Opposition MPs have made much of his personal connections with Trudeau. It was revealed that an adviser retained by Johnston is quite a generous donor to the Liberal Party of Canada. These stories in the news assist Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre in arguing that Johnston is in the tank for Trudeau and the Liberals, and can’t be trusted to get to the bottom of the foreign interference challenge. And we learned that Johnston, using taxpayer’s money, retained a crisis communication firm to assist him as he endured scrutiny.

Most damaging for Johnston was the result of two votes in the House of Commons that reject his recommendation and instead demand a full public inquiry with teeth, and which explicitly calls for Johnston to resign from his position. But Johnston, while being grilled by a parliamentary committee earlier this week, committed to ignoring the results of these parliamentary votes and will stay in the role despite them. His argument is that he was appointed by the prime minister and so is accountable to him, not parliament.

Johnston is formally correct but nevertheless deeply misguided in taking this position. He was indeed appointed by and so can be removed by the prime minister or the government.

But, that aside, the stark reality is Johnston will never be able to do the work he envisions himself doing under the cloud of two parliamentary votes expressing concern about his work and opposition to him personally. And there are significant and reasonable concerns about Johnston investigating foreign interference in opposition to the wishes of parliament when one of the questions raised is whether the government failed to act to address the problem because of the perception that the interference was conducted in such a way as to help the Liberal Party.

Whatever Johnston does, it will have virtually no democratic legitimacy.

This is all a massive shame because it distracts from a clear focus on addressing and rooting out China’s foreign interference networks in Canada. And, Johnston’s misguided stubbornness to the contrary notwithstanding, there are two politicians to blame for this.

First is Trudeau himself. When a civil servant or government employee messes up, it’s the elected cabinet that ultimately must be held accountable for that. That applies to Johnston. If Trudeau truly wants to get to the bottom of the foreign interference scandal, Johnston’s tainted public hearings won’t achieve that. Trudeau should release his special rapporteur.

The second politician who must shoulder some blame is NDP leader Jagmeet Singh. The NDP leader talks a big game on Johnston and foreign interference, and in fact it was an NDP motion calling on Johnston to resign that was approved by the House of Commons. But the Liberals are a minority government that is dependent on the NDP to survive, and Singh appears unwilling to pull the plug on Trudeau’s minority, no matter the provocation.

If Singh genuinely believes that a public inquiry is necessary to clear the air on foreign interference in Canadian elections, then he should threaten to withdraw his party’s support from the government unless Trudeau brings the Johnston fiasco to an end and calls an actual, credible public inquiry.

Hopefully, Singh will soon find a bite to match his bark, but I’m not holding my breath.

Royce Koop is a professor of political studies at the University of Manitoba and academic director of the Centre for Social Science Research and Policy.