O’Toole says CSIS warned him he’d still be targeted by Beijing after leaving politics

Former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole says he was surprised to learn from Canada’s spy agency that the Chinese government likely would continue to target him even after he left politics.

“It was surprising to me that they do consider this to be into the future,” he told members of a parliamentary committee Thursday.

O’Toole went public after officials from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service told him last spring that Beijing had targeted him for years as part of a “sophisticated misinformation and voter suppression campaign.”

The former Ontario MP, who retired from politics in June, told MPs studying China’s intimidation campaigns in Canadian politics that the CSIS officials kept using terms like “target of interest.”

“So I had to ask, ‘You’re using the present tense, I’m not the Conservative leader anymore and I’m not going to be an MP in a few months when the session comes to an end. Does this mean I’m … an ongoing target?'” he told MPs.

“And that’s when they clarified yes, in part because of my long concerns about certain conduct of the Communist Party in China.”

O’Toole, now leader of a strategic intelligence and risk management firm, said CSIS has not followed up with him since.

Election interference system ‘a colossal failure’: O’Toole

Throughout his testimony before the standing committee on procedure and House affairs, O’Toole criticized the system the federal government uses to flag interference attempts during federal elections.

The federal government launched the Critical Election Incident Public Protocol in 2019 to monitor and alert the public to credible threats to Canada’s elections. The team is a panel of five top public servants tasked with determining whether incidents of interference meet the threshold for warning the public.

According to a review of their work, the panel concluded there were interference attempts in the last election, but not at the level “that threatened Canada’s ability to have free and fair elections.”

Since that campaign, leaks to media outlets have suggested China tried to interfere in both the 2019 and 2021 elections.

“‘Colossal failure’ might be the best description of the process,” O’Toole said, offering his assessment of the protocol.

O’Toole said his party reported during the last election campaign that misinformation was spreading on social media —particularly the Chinese-owned messaging app WeChat.

The Liberal government has faced mounting pressure to take national security more seriously following allegations of political meddling by Beijing.

It agreed to hold a public inquiry into foreign election interference and tapped Justice Marie-Josée Hogue to lead it.

The Quebec Court of Appeal judge has been tasked with looking into interference by China, Russia, other foreign states and non-state actors in the 2019 and 2021 elections.

She is also expected to look at how intelligence flowed to decision-makers during the past two elections.

O’Toole said he thinks her mandate should be expanded to allow her to look at whether the panel’s threshold for warning the public should change.