EDITORIAL: Interference inquiry takes credibility hit

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A key challenge facing Canada’s public inquiry into foreign interference is to determine how Canadians of Chinese, Iranian and Russian origin can be protected from threats, intimidation and blackmail by these dictatorships.

Members of these diaspora communities, who courageously and publicly oppose these regimes and their attacks on fundamental human rights, are often targeted by agents of these countries, including threats against their families still living under tyrannical regimes.

Counteracting these activities is important because members of these communities can provide valuable information to Canada’s intelligence, security and policing agencies about foreign interference.

Disturbingly, as the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians — created by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — warned him in its 2019 annual report, citing testimony from Amnesty International Canada:

“Those who are targeted do not know whether to turn to CSIS, the RCMP or municipal police and … they rarely receive a coherent response from officials.”

While foreign dictatorships deny wrongdoing, Canada’s Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project (URAP), representing Canadians of Muslim origin protesting China’s genocide of the Uyghurs, withdrew from the inquiry Wednesday, citing safety concerns.

“URAP refuses to participate in a process meant to address and reconcile foreign interference that uplifts individuals complicit in and benefiting from foreign interference themselves,” it said.

“The Commission’s protection of questionable national actors and its simultaneous failure to safeguard victims of transnational repression reveals systemic dysfunctionality in its process.

“This failure is incongruous with the Commission’s proposed mission and Canadian values of democracy, transparency and rule of law.”

URAP says several individuals inquiry Commissioner Marie-Josee Hogue has granted status to are part of the problem when it comes to intimidating their community in Canada.

URAP said it still “wholeheartedly supports” the commission’s work, but given that its own executive director, Mehmet Tohti, has endured “relentless victimization, intimidation and harassment by Chinese officials for his advocacy for the Uyghur community,” it’s “disheartening that the Commissioner has failed to protect individuals like Mehmet and other diaspora community members” in the inquiry.

If members of these communities in Canada, under siege from foreign dictatorships, don’t trust the inquiry to act in their best interests when it comes to foreign interference, it’s unlikely Hogue will achieve her goal of getting to the truth, no matter where it leads.