Since David Johnston resigned last week as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s special rapporteur, a lot of outlets have been wondering what comes next on the Chinese-meddling investigation.
But not me. I’ve been wondering what comes next for someone with the brilliant investigative skills of our former governor general.
CSIS director David Vigneault said the spy agency deliberately sent a May, 2021, note warning about China’s targeting of a Conservative MP and his relatives to then-public safety minister Bill Blair’s office and intended for this information to reach the minister because it was considered of high importance.
The testimony from the head of CSIS appeared to be an effort to defend the spy agency as a Commons committee probes why Conservative foreign affairs critic Michael Chong wasn’t warned of the 2021 intelligence collected by CSIS for two years.
A Liberal Cabinet Minister lying! Unheard of.
Now that David Johnston has stepped down, the serious work of putting in place a commission of inquiry can begin.
Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc embarrassed himself by saying the Liberals were never opposed to a public inquiry. But at this stage, who cares?
The important thing is that Canadians will finally have a chance to know what really happened with Chinese government interference in our elections.
He’s a delusional wee tyrant, far too much the narcissist to ever consider stepping down.
So it looks like there’s going to be a public inquiry into Chinese communist meddling in our elections after all. At least Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc is hinting as much. Who saw that one coming?
Not David Johnston, evidently. He finally stepped down from his untenable position, which I greet with the same grace he exhibited in announcing it. Namely in resigning as depressingly ordinary rapporteur he blamed “the highly partisan atmosphere around my appointment and work,” not the real conflict of interest that made him unsuitable from the word go and the shabby initial report that made his position untenable.
The head of the RCMP says his organization has opened an investigation into allegations China attempted to target and intimidate Conservative MP Michael Chong and his family.
Commissioner Mike Duheme made the comments before the procedure and House affairs committee Tuesday morning. It has been studying an alleged 2021 Beijing plot to amass information on Chong’s family in retaliation for his efforts to recognize the persecution of Uyghurs as genocide.
It was the right decision for David Johnston to resign from whatever his job was, whoever’s decision it was.
Still, amongst the things for which there will have to be a reckoning when this is all over is why he was appointed in the first place. Mr. Johnston himself never seemed to understand what he had walked into or why he should not have walked into it – to the last, in his letter of resignation, he put the opposition down to the “highly partisan atmosphere” – but the Prime Minister and his people did. They appointed him not in spite of his unsuitability, but because of it.
There are no plans to invite Canada to a security pact between Australia, the UK, and the United States focused on defence technology cooperation, says U.S. National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby.
The trilateral security pact, AUKUS, was formed in 2021 and has been seen as a way to counter China’s growing military presence in the Indo-Pacific region.
I suspect Canada is excluded because we are riddled with ChiCom assests.
The old saw about crisis management is that the goal is to figure out where the crisis ends and get there as quickly as possible.
But when Liberal cabinet minister Dominic LeBlanc met reporters on the Saturday morning after the resignation of David Johnston to talk about next steps, he was back where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was three months ago, on March 6.
The same political forces that shredded David Johnston — forcing the former governor general’s abrupt resignation on Friday — are being challenged to find a new person to restore Canadians’ faith in their electoral system.
Well, good luck with that.
Basically, Justin Trudeau’s government is borrowing one the cardinal rules of retail to get out of the political mess that has dominated Parliament Hill for months, telling the fractious opposition parties: you broke it, you bought it.
So, David Johnston, the former governor-general, longtime Trudeau family friend and lifelong champion of deep political, institutional and economic collaboration between Canada and China has finally conceded what everybody already knew, which is that he cannot be trusted to shed any useful light on clandestine efforts to keep that catastrophic collaboration on life support.
To get a handle on what happens next in the Trudeau government’s ongoing, puck-ragging refusal to come clean about what it knew, when it knew and what it did about Beijing’s well-documented interference on the Liberals’ behalf in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections, it is necessary to remember why we’re at this clown-show juncture in the first place, exactly, and how we got here.
David Johnston mentioned it repeatedly in speeches and media interviews, a source of pride and an emblem of his family’s closeness to an important nation.
Three of the former governor general’s five daughters spent at least part of their university years studying in China, he would note, one of them learning to speak Mandarin.
“Johnston said frankly that he has also noticed some changes in his daughters after staying in China,” said a China News Service account of a 2013 speech. “They are more curious, they know how to think critically, and their thinking and vision are more broadened.”
It was all a con.
Well, that’s the end of one big useless distracting storm.
The only accomplishment of Mr. Trudeau’s sly attempt to shed his responsibility as Prime Minister and load it onto the back of someone else is to have dug more than a few extra feet to the already deep sour well of Canadians’ cynicism about crony politics.
All options are on the table for determining “next steps” following the news that former governor general David Johnston is resigning as special rapporteur, Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc said in a press conference Saturday.
The government will be consulting judicial experts and opposition leaders to decide what to do next, including who could be best to lead the rest of Johnston’s work or even who might lead a public inquiry, what the terms of reference would be and how one would respect classified information.
OTTAWA—In a major shift, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will now weigh whether to call a public inquiry into foreign elections interference after former governor general David Johnston stunned the government Friday, resigning as outside adviser after weeks of controversy over his appointment and the conclusions of his interim report.
Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc, in a statement issued within an hour of Johnston’s resignation, said the prime minister has “tasked me with consulting experts and opposition parties on next steps and to assess who is best to lead that work.”
I bet John McCallum gets the nod.
David Johnston resigning as special rapporteur on foreign interference
David Johnston — tasked by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau back in March with looking into allegations that China tried to meddle in the past two federal elections — says he has decided to step down from that role.
In a resignation letter sent to Trudeau, Johnston said his role has become too muddled in political controversy for him to continue.
“When I undertook the task of independent special rapporteur on foreign interference, my objective was to help build trust in our democratic institutions,” the former governor general wrote.
David Johnston has just quit his job as special rapporteur. pic.twitter.com/apRqIkGRHP
— Rosemary Barton (@RosieBarton) June 9, 2023
h/t Mauser
It’s difficult to read his resignation without smirking. Try as he might to come off as a noble man wrongly smeared as a Trudeau hack and ChiCom useful idiot it just doesn’t pass the smell test. Well it does if you like the aroma of rancid Egg Rolls I guess.
Johnston was hired for one reason only; To run cover for the China Class of which both he and Trudeau are members.
These puppets willingly danced to Beijing’s tune.
Even a cursory glance into their backgrounds turns up the stench of their grift.
