Trudeau may have saved his political skin, at the cost of public confidence in the next election

Open this photo in gallery:

Of course, Justin Trudeau’s decision to kick the question of Chinese interference in Canadian elections over to parliamentary committees and a yet-to-be named rapporteur is inadequate.

But it might save the Prime Minister’s political skin – at the high cost of undermining public confidence in the next federal election.

Under measures Mr. Trudeau announced Monday, two committees will examine in secret evidence of election interference by Beijing. A rapporteur will decide whether more needs to be done.

The difficulty, says Fen Hampson, Chancellor’s Professor at Carleton University’s Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, is that any final report may not arrive in time to ensure the integrity of the next election.

“The problem with kicking the can down the road is that it doesn’t address the fundamental problem that Canadians are not confident, as a result of the storm over this issue, that the next election is going to be free of foreign interference,” he said in an interview.

Margaret McCuaig-Johnston, senior fellow at the Institute for Science, Society and Policy at University of Ottawa, agrees. “The Chinese need to be held accountable,” for illegally interfering in Canadian elections, if that is the case, she told me. By putting off any reports and recommendations for months and possibly years, “we’re giving China a pass for what they’ve done,” she said.

All of this could be prevented if Mr. Trudeau convened a public inquiry with, say, a one-year time frame to investigate allegations of Chinese interference and to recommend how elections can be better protected in the future.

But such an inquiry would be bound to ask whether the Prime Minister knew of the Chinese activity and did nothing because his party stood to benefit.

The answer might hold Mr. Trudeau blameless. But for the Prime Minister, the question itself is politically intolerable.

Will Mr. Trudeau’s efforts at deflection work? Certainly they have worked in the past. Whether it was during the SNC-Lavalin affair or the WE Charity controversy or any of the other imbroglios, he has been able to wiggle his way out by appointing this, referring the matter to that, or pointing the finger at someone else.

The Prime Minister is further aided and abetted by NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, who continues to prop up this minority government. And Mr. Trudeau has also benefited from problems within the Conservative Party.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has chosen not to punish three MPs who met with a far-right member of the European Parliament, further tainting him as someone who turns a blind eye to extremists within his own political base.

Liberals will comfort themselves with the thought that Mr. Trudeau, if he chooses to stay on as leader, will have plenty of ammunition as he seeks to discredit Mr. Poilievre in the eyes of the voters before and during the next election campaign.

But Mr. Trudeau’s political future remains at risk from the possibility of future leaks. Those leaks are now a greater threat to his survival than anything said or done by opposition politicians. If people within the public service or security services or elsewhere believe that this government is willfully covering up misdeeds committed by Beijing in this country, there could be more front-page stories.

Even before the first election-interference stories appeared in The Globe and Mail and on Global News, Liberals in Ottawa were debating among themselves whether it would be better to fight the next election with Mr. Trudeau as leader or for the party to choose someone else.

The general feeling was that, even if the Liberals lost, Mr. Trudeau would be able to “save the furniture” – to hold the party’s base in Quebec and in downtown Toronto and Vancouver.

Before Mr. Trudeau became leader, the Liberals were broke, faction-ridden and no longer even the official opposition in the House. In many ways, the Liberal Party of Canada is really just the Justin Trudeau Party. What it will look like without him might not be pretty.

But if these leaks continue, then the question will arise of how badly the Prime Minister has been damaged, and how much furniture might in fact be lost. If the leaks continue, it’s 50-50 whether he stays or goes.