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Green Party Leader Elizabeth May and Kitchener Centre Member of Parliament Mike Morris attend a news conference in Ottawa on June 11. Adrian Wylde/The Canadian Press
The two party leaders read out the same secret report and gave the public very different assessments, but Green Party leader Elizabeth May didn't think it was all that different.
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh said some MPs were traitors to the country. Prime Minister Theresa May said there were no traitors in the House of Commons.
“I don't think we would have come to a different conclusion,” May said in an interview.
As May explains how she links her views with Singh's, we need to interpret a few words to understand it. Let's do so.
May was the first leader to read out the full, uncensored report on foreign interference by the Parliamentary National Security and Intelligence Committee, known as NSICOP, in Ottawa, which found some MPs had “knowingly” engaged in foreign interference.
Singh said the report showed some MPs were “traitors to the nation” and accused Trudeau of embracing foreign interference.
She told reporters she felt relieved to read it. Singh said he was surprised when he read it.
“I may have been more nervous going into the room,” May said.
She said after reading the redacted version of the report that was made public, she was concerned that the secret version included the names of sitting lawmakers who actively sold out their country.
She was referring to cases in which, according to the public version of the NSICOP report, a former member of Congress, who was not named, maintained relationships with foreign intelligence agents and “actively” provided them with information that was tipped off to them.
“If that person is a sitting Member of Parliament I would move a motion immediately to remove that member from office,” May said.
But she argued there were no “current examples” that met that standard.
Singh used the word “traitor,” but May argued that the word only applied to someone who actively worked for a foreign country and received kickbacks in exchange for favours.
To be sure, some MPs have allegedly taken advantage of foreign governments – for example, some published reports allege that Chinese government agents arranged for busloads of voters to help nominate the now-independent MP Han Dong for the Liberal Party – but they don't rise to that level in May's view, and it's also not clear exactly to what extent some MPs acted “knowingly”.
“I said there are members of Congress who may be at risk because they're too close to foreign governments, and that's true. There aren't many. There's only a handful who are actually named in the uncensored version,” she said.
“To receive a benefit without receiving something in return is willful blindness, ignorance, stupidity, and immorality. But treason and traitor are special words with real meaning, and I do not use them lightly.”
May believes the differences with Singh's portrayal are mainly a matter of vocabulary and tone, but while she initially expressed goodwill towards the MPs around her, she said she questioned their ethics and judgment.
Singh went a step further, suggesting Prime Minister Justin Trudeau should have punished some Liberal MPs, and argued that by failing to do so, he had effectively accepted a level of foreign interference.
The Green leader also pointed to parts of the public report that suggested intelligence officials and NSICOP themselves were frustrated with the Liberal government's failure to do more to tackle foreign interference.
And she argues that all party leaders need to act quickly, obtain security clearances to read the full NSICOP report and meet with intelligence officials to address issues such as making nominations vulnerable to interference and tightening rules on open leadership elections.
She also said she believes lawmakers' obligations to act in Canada's interests, not against them, should be codified so that they can be enforced. May said she supports NSICOP's call to empower the House of Commons ethics commissioner to allow intelligence agencies to ask the commissioner to intervene in cases of unethical interactions with foreign governments.
“I think we can move forward a lot quicker if they can go to an ethics commissioner and say, 'We believe this individual has violated their oath of office,'” he said.
