David Johnston's Necessary Exit
On How We Got Here And Where We Go
There are a few things that are all true at the same time.
David Johnston is an eminent Canadian who did a job when asked by his government.
His ties to the Trudeau Family meant that plenty of people would never believe his motives were pure if his work suggested the Liberals didn’t fail, or if he debunked the politically sensitive stories out there.
And now that he has resigned the country can move forward with trying to fix this actually very serious problem of having the Chinese actively trying to fuck with our elections.
I know a lot of my more liberal/left wing followers won’t like to hear this, but political reality meant that whatever David Johnston said, nobody would hear him. Nobody would hear his denials of Sam Cooper’s salacious reporting as real and authentic even if it was because the person saying it was indelibly tainted in the eyes of people. Not just rabid Conservatives, but plenty of progressives and liberals too.
And now, we can attempt to do what this country fucking needs.
…
I’m unsure of the value of a public inquiry at this point, but it’s the will of the House Of Commons that there should be one so we should have one. At this point there’s been two stories mixed together, which is Bob Fife and the Globe’s reporting mostly centered on what China has tried to do and our institutional failures to solve any of it, and then Sam Cooper’s bullshit. Cooper’s bullshit has been found out to be that, but it’s obscuring that there are a lot of real issues here.
Now, most of those issues aren’t necessarily – or, at this point, are clearly not – political failures, except in the sense that the Ministers responsible for CSIS have overall responsibility for their actions. Most of what we’ve found that’s actually serious and worth criticism – the fact Michael Chong found out in the Globe and not from CSIS about threats to his family, for example – has ended up mired in a political fight, which overshadows the governance issues of how the fuck did CSIS think that was okay to hide from Michael Chong?
What we have now is a country that doesn’t have any reason to doubt the results of the next election but does have a lot of doubt about the competence of people who are supposedly running very important parts of this country. This is a clusterfuck of epic proportions, and my advice to those on the left would be to stop defending David Johnston and start trying to bring the conversation back to the governance failures.
We know Pierre Poilievre will act with his narrow self interest above the national one, so bitching about that is a waste of time. There are a lot of things that need to be solved – Friday’s Power & Politics had a expert panel on about those issues – and a ticking clock. Trying to focus on CSIS reform, information sharing inside government, and additional technocratic fixes while an inquiry works on the big picture stuff will have the dual benefits of being good for our country and a political boon for the Liberals.
For all the defeatism and all the cynicism that the CPC have in some way won, the next election is what matters, and the best way out of the current malaise this government is in isn’t going to be a leadership change or waiting out the storm, it’s going to be the Government getting its head out of its ass, being willing to concede defeat earlier than they do, and being willing to accept more internal transparency and scrutiny than they’re instinctively willing to do. If they show some of the nimbleness they have showed at times on other issues here, they’ll get back on firmer footing.
Let’s be honest here – the security apparatus has been a mess my whole life, if not longer, and nobody will blame the Liberals for the institutional rot and racism inside CSIS. Our media does not have the capacity to blame them for it anyways, given their allergy to covering any story that isn’t about the here and now. And, frankly, it would go a long way to fixing the broadest problem, that the diaspora doesn’t fucking trust CSIS.
Half the time CSIS views Chinese Canadians as sympathizers and the other half of the time they’re dismissed as alarmist. There is no faith that if a member of the community tries to do anything about what’s going on – be it about election interference or broader intimidation – that CSIS will do anything. You have CSIS investigating a former Liberal Cabinet Minister in Ontario for 13 years without doing anything, but clear and credible threats to the welfare of the diaspora go uninvestigated and ignored.
At the end of the day, the government has to actually do something about the active problem they face, not just the risk of bad PR they’re dealing with, and if the government continues to stumble from point to point like I will be in 3 hours, then they’re going to continue to fail both on a political and a governance level. This is not an easy issue but it is an issue where the road forward is clear.
David Johnston is an eminent Canadian. He was also the wrong Canadian to be involved in the most politically charged investigation into government since 2004. These two things can be true together, and in this case they are. If we care about trying to find out what the fuck happened in a way that will bring this country together and make the next election harder to influence than the last two, then the Government has to step up to the plate with a serious offer on a public inquiry, and a serious internal reform agenda for CSIS.
Anything short of it will be to act in the bad faith the Liberals are accusing the Tories of acting in, and if the Liberals concede that they’re no better than the Opposition they might as well resign. Step up to the fucking plate – your country fucking needs it.
Well I agree with most of your argument, I wonder who you could/would/should have been selected?
Are we dumbing down our expert candidates for analysis of International security issues?
For what?
Did you think anyone that the Libs, or Justin Trudeau chose were going to get a smooth ride from our click bait opportunists and opposition?
Really?
I don’t think this is right.
First a couple of facts. What ties does Johnston have with the Trudeau family? Skiing together 4 decades ago does not count. I have a hard time seeing a meaningful connection. I find it strange you present this as a fact.
Secondly, Michael Chong’s family was not threatened. There was some intelligence (we do not know the reliability of this intelligence) that one Chinese diplomat claimed that his government would take an interest in (that is: collect information about) his family in Hong Kong. Of course the media jumped on the term “targeted”, but in this situation this targeting was limited to collecting information about and we don’t even know that this even happened. While we can argue if it was the right decision, the CSIS decision to wait and watch was not unreasonable in this situation.
Unfortunately we are dealing with a number of actors that are clearly acting in bad faith. Obviously the most enthusiastic bad faith actor is Poilievre and the CPC. Their claim is that Trudeau and his government did not only ignore the Chinese threat, but also at the same time masterfully used and played the Chinese to their advantage. In order words, Trudeau committed a peacetime version of treason according to the CPC. And the modus operandus is to repeat it often and eventually people start believing it.
Singh and the NDP are the reluctant spineless bad faith actors. They would like to take Trudeau a peg down, but are not interested in an election. They know that treason accusation is bullshit, but they are happy to ride the CPC “Trudeau is a traitor” train as long as it gives them some perceived advantage.
And the biggest bad faith actors are the media. Happy to repeat the CPC talking points without questioning them. Happy to smear the reputation of Johnston with bogus arguments like “too many people think he has a conflict of interest therefore there is a perception of a conflict”. Torqued stories using selectively intelligence information leaving out any reliability assessment. I could go on for hours.
All of this is a shame, as Johnston actually made the 100% correct proposal. Parliament needs to keep government to account, not a public inquiry, and with classified information that happens behind closed doors and in these special committees. That is where parliament needs to start, and once they have done that, they can say, without revealing classified information, the government acted reasonably or was incompetent or whatever judgement they want to make.
The fact that the opposition leaders do not want to see this information should tell you enough. Their goal is not to keep the government to account, their goal is to score political points. And of course aided and abetted by the bad faith press.