The Liberals’ delays on foreign interference carry profound costs

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It’s 2024, and Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government has tabled the foreign-interference bill that would have been so useful in 2019.

A new offence for foreign interference, with serious jail time as the penalty, would have been in effect before the last election. A foreign registry would not just be on the drawing board, but in place and working years before the 2025 election. Now it will almost certainly come after the vote.

The Canadians from diaspora communities who were intimidated by proxies of foreign governments or police and felt like there wasn’t much of a response when they called the cops – maybe they’d already feel more secure.

But Mr. Trudeau’s government hemmed and hawed and delayed. Then there was a year and a half of troubling headlines and half a public inquiry and, finally, legislation about foreign interference.

By now, even the Liberals have to wonder how much trouble they might have spared themselves if they had just done this stuff sooner. Only the screaming urgency of political necessity made them act, and by the time they did, political damage had been done.

Even the hodgepodge of security measures in this bill have been on the to-do list for a long time.

Five takeaways from the foreign-interference commission’s report

The Canadian Security Intelligence Service has for years complained that a few words in the 1984 CSIS Act accidentally set up legal barriers for them to collect easy-to-obtain information about foreigners from sources outside Canada. Monday’s bill proposes to fix that with the addition of one word.

If anything, the message carried by Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc and Justice Minister Arif Virani was not that they were taking the initiative to protect Canadians as a new age dawns, but rather that they were finally updating outdated laws. Mr. LeBlanc noted the CSIS Act was written before the digital age and Mr. Virani remarked that it changed sabotage laws that date from the 1950s.

Still. Finally, some important measures are on the table.

The new foreign-interference offence is an attempt to make it possible to prosecute interference that has been hard for Canadian authorities to pursue.

In the past five years, U.S. prosecutors have charged a number of Chinese nationals and Americans with intimidating Chinese expats in the U.S. in an attempt to coerce them to return to China and face arrest.

In Canada, prosecuting the same act has required proving harm to national interest, but the new bill removes that condition, making it easier to prosecute the offence of inducing someone to do something with threats or intimidation at the behest of a foreign state.

That’s a step up in consequences for working with a foreign state’s secret police. Now, Chinese Canadians or Iranian Canadians who feel intimidated might feel something will happen if they call the cops.

The bill would create a foreign-agent registry, requiring transparency from people who arrange with foreign governments to lobby, do public relations, or disburse funds for a foreign government in an attempt to influence Canadian politics or government.

That’s a long-awaited transparency measure that is supposed to tell us who is acting for a foreign government in Canadian politics – and make it possible to prosecute those who do it secretly without registering.

But even after all this time, the bill did pull a punch in that it does not allow for the government to demand registration for a broader set of activities by people working for states that are deemed more serious threats.

Britain’s 2023 National Security Act created a similar registry but also established a second tier of registration, for a broader set of activities, for people working on behalf of countries designated as threats – so that, for example, a private investigator hired by that country would have to register.

It’s been a long wait. Kenny Chiu, the former B.C. MP who was targeted by a misinformation operation during the 2021 election campaign, faced attacks over his calls for a foreign-agent registry. That was three years ago.

Now the bill must wind through Parliament, and a bill this complicated – which also adds new secrecy provisions to criminal trials dealing with national-security issues – should not be rushed. Even if it passes through Parliament this fall, the registry would only be set up in another year, in late 2025.

But a lot of time got away, and the Liberals’ big national-security update is now an exercise in cleaning up a mess.