Johnston, The Trudeau Foundation, And Journalistic Poison
A Victim Of Crossfire
There are two separate and distinct questions now raised by the controversy over David Johnston’s appointment as special rapporteur on Chinese election interference – the effects on the process of investigating Chinese interference, and the politics of the CPC attacking their own former Governor General as a Liberal partisan.
I’ll dispense with the politics here – this is a stupid line of attack that won’t work. David Johnston was twice appointed to key roles by Stephen Harper, Harper’s former Director of Communications Andrew MacDougall has called him an unimpeachable choice, and to the extent that anyone has heard of him they’ve heard of him as a former Governor General appointed by Stephen Harper, which will (and already is starting to) pay off for Liberals with many a clip in the CPAC archive floating around of Harper saying nice things about his bipartisanship and loyalty to country.
The political choice that Poilievre and Jenni Byrne have chosen is ludicrous, and will not work. This is not John Manley or some Liberal appointment to something, and pretending it is will make the Tories look insane – and more importantly, like people uninterested in the policy of this, and playing politics with our democracy. They’ve already overplayed their hands massively by not focusing on a line of attack people would believe (Trudeau didn’t take this seriously enough because it was LPC candidates who got helped) and going to a genuinely insane one (Trudeau is working with/for China), and here they’ll do so again.
The source of the allegation that he’s some partisan is simple – David Johnston is a family friend of the Trudeaus, and is a Board Member of the Trudeau Foundation. If you want to think this is disqualifying, that’s your right to think it, and I’m not really here to put on the cape for the guy in a sense. I don’t think there’s a perfect choice if anyone who is a Liberal or who has ever been appointed to anything by a Liberal counts, but whatever.
But let’s be very clear about something – the Trudeau Foundation isn’t actually a subject of this inquiry, and the reason people think it is is Bob Fife is bad is journalism.
…
Let’s walk through the timeline of events here carefully. On February 17th, Bob Fife runs a front page Globe And Mail front page story about CSIS docs revealing China’s strategy for election interference. On February 24th, Global publishes the allegations about Han Dong. The next week, the week of Feb 27th to March 3rd, Fife releases more stories about the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation and donations that emanated from China (and, allegedly, Chinese state interests). The next week, on Monday the 6th and Friday the 10th, Global publishes the allegations of a ring of dirty campaign donations, and names the PCPO MPP as the ringleader/funnel through which the money came through.
I want to make this clear because the allegations against the Trudeau Foundation came out in and around stories about election interference, and so a lot of people think they’re in this whole morass of stories. They’re not, even if you concede they’re important stories that need scrutiny. The Trudeau Foundation is a registered charity that does basic, fairly bog standard charity things – fellowship and scholarships and mentorship programs. It’s the kind of charity that you put your name to. It’s why former Liberal turned Conservative David Emerson is on the board, why a Chretien-appointed former Supreme Court Justice who harper gave the Order of Canada to is on the board, why the (Harper-appointed) former Ambassador to Italy is on the board. It’s a charity, guys.
If you would like to scrutinize what happened with those donations Bob Fife reported on, fine, have at it, it’s your right, but those donations are not germane to the actual discussions of election interference. What actually seems to have happened is very simple – China, being a dictatorship and not actually understanding how this works, thought that a donation to the Trudeau Foundation was in some way a bribe or a payment to Justin Trudeau, and therefore that they bought something from Trudeau – some good will or some promise of future consideration, something in case he became Prime Minister (which, he did).
The Foundation, looking at an influx of money and as far as anyone has alleged so far, accepted the money. There’s no allegation Justin Trudeau knew about it, having divested his interest when he became Liberal Leader in 2013, and there’s no allegation so far that the Foundation knew it was accepting dirty money or that the Chinese donors were trying to buy influence with Trudeau the younger.
You can want an investigation into wider Chinese influence in Canada that would encompass the Trudeau Foundation, the allegations in today’s Globe that the Chinese consulate in Vancouver interfered in their 2022 municipal elections, the allegations about the Chinese police stations, that’s fan-fucking-tastic. Go for it. We probably do need a lot of investigations into the systemic role of China to influence the Chinese-Canadian community and the role of intimidation and threats. But that’s not what David Johnston has been tapped to do.
His remit is election interference. There is no allegation that the Trudeau Foundation has anything to do with the actual, substantive allegations about the conduct of the 2021 campaign in heavily Chinese seats or the (in my view, less substantive) allegations against Han Dong and Vincent Ke. That is what is under investigation, because that is the actual election interference that is being alleged.
The reason I say Bob Fife is bad at journalism is simple – his reporting has muddied two very different, and very important elements of this story. What the Trudeau Foundation is accused of having done has quite literally nothing to do with the meaningful and substantive questions about election interference, but Fife connected that reporting, in time and in his writing, through the connective tissue of being “China” stories. They’re not the same, though.
Based on what we know right now the Trudeau Foundation is guilty of being a charity that was desperate for some money in mediocre economic times and they took it from who was offering. Your mileage on whether or not that story is important or not in a vacuum is irrelevant. But what isn’t up for debate is that bad and sloppy reporting and a goal to narrative build from Fife has left his readers, and a lot of people in this country, with a flawed understanding of the issues.
You can think David Johnston is fit for the gig of rapporteur or not. You can think Justin Trudeau is a Chinese agent or not, even. Hell, you can even think the Trudeau Foundation is evil. But Bob Fife has, in reporting a story in a sensationalist way, roped in a charity with nothing to do with election interference into this, and poisoned the brains of a lot of people who think because Trudeau’s in the name every donation to it is a bribe.
And that is going to have consequences for a long time to come.
One further point that most people do not understand. As someone who is part of a family that set up a foundation in our name, there is no way that any member of our family has now or will ever have access to money that is currently invested in the foundation. There were three primary reasons for setting up the foundation in the first place. The first was taxes. After we sold a family business, part of the proceeds from that sale went into the foundation, to minimize the tax implications. The second, was to have funds available to my husband and I, and eventually the extended family to donate to charities we support. And finally the third, was to ensure that these funds could not be used for anything other than doing good in the world. In other words. No member of the family has access to these funds. This whole China/Trudeau Foundation connection is all smoke and mirrors.
We hear Chinese influence and election interference shouting from almost every Postmedia owned newspaper while their "reporters" go about doing the exact same thing they accuse the Chinese of. Except there is SILENCE from the CPC on that interference. I think this has become a case of "we know we can't win, so we'll break it".