Foreign meddling attempts didn’t change who won the last two federal elections in Canada, but may have changed the result in one B.C. riding in 2021, according to a public inquiry that concluded Friday.
The inquiry was launched in January after being triggered by media reports last which, citing unnamed security sources and classified documents, accused China of interfering in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections.
A preliminary report by commissioner Marie-Josée Hogue releaed Friday said the extent of the impact of foreign interference is unknown, though the number of races involved is small.
“The ultimate effects of foreign interference remain uncertain,” she said in her interim report.
She singled out the 2021 results in the British Columbia riding of Steveston—Richmond East, where she said there is a “reasonable possibility” that a foreign interference campaign targeting Conservative candidate Kenny Chiu may have cost him the seat.
In her report, Hogue wrote that the campaign “could have impacted the result” in Chiu’s riding in 2021. But in a subsequent statement, she appeared to go a step further.
“There is one riding where disinformation may have led to the election of one candidate over another,” said Hogue, who did not take questions Friday.
“But I cannot say for sure.”
Overall impact uncertain
During the campaign, misinformation about the Conservative Party, Erin O’Toole — who was Conservative leader at the time — and Chiu circulated on social media platforms with ties to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), such as WeChat.
Chiu has said he believes he was targeted over his proposed bill to set up a public registry in Canada that would track foreign influence campaigns.
Hogue’s report said while no definitive link between these false narratives and Beijing has been proven, “there are strong indicators of PRC involvement.”
She said there’s a “reasonable possibility that the media narrative” could have affected the result in Steveston–Richmond East, but it’s difficult to determine.
“Nonetheless, the acts of interference that occurred are a stain on our electoral process and impacted the process leading up to the actual vote,” she said.
“The facts revealed by the evidence I have heard so far show that intelligence agencies collected information about troubling events that occurred in a handful of ridings during the 2019 and 2021 elections.”
O’Toole testified in April that he believes his party lost five to nine seats because of a foreign misinformation campaign aimed at Conservative candidates in B.C. and Ontario, and at his party more generally.
Hogue said in her report she didn’t see evidence to match O’Toole’s numbers but she did conclude that foreign interference “likely impacted some votes.”
“The fact that the narratives targeting Mr. Chiu and Mr. O’Toole had died down by election day does not mean they had no effect,” Hogue wrote.
Chiu, who was first elected in the riding in 2019 after coming second in 2015, was defeated in the 2021 election by Liberal Parm Bains, by a count of 16,543 votes to 13,066.
Former Conservative MP Kenny Chiu told the public inquiry into foreign interference that he might not have run for office, if he’d known Canadian intelligence showing he was the target of Chinese government interference would not be shared with him.