Senior bureaucrats briefed Liberal Party on foreign interference in 2019 Don Valley North contest

Top bureaucrats on a panel tasked with reviewing possible threats to the 2019 federal election warned the Liberal Party of concerns about the riding nomination contest in Don Valley North, the Foreign Interference Commission heard Monday.

Nathalie Drouin, who was deputy minister of justice and deputy attorney general during the 2019 federal election, told a commission hearing Monday that those concerns involved international students being bused to the riding to vote in the nomination contest, and financial allegations that were referred to the Commissioner of Canada Elections.

«Being able to brief a party, here it was a Liberal Party, was contributing in terms of reducing the risk and the potential impacts,» Drouin said Monday.

Drouin said that informing the commissioner was a way to mitigate possible threats. She said that the allegations and intelligence the panel received about the nomination contest did not meet the panel's threshold for issuing a public warning.

The panel is tasked with monitoring threats during elections and issuing public warnings if they feel the electoral process is under threat from foreign interference. The Don Valley North riding race normally would have fallen outside the panel's remit, but in this case it overlapped with the 2019 federal election.

The panel of five is made up of the clerk of the Privy Council, the national security and intelligence adviser to the prime minister, the deputy minister of justice and deputy attorney general, the deputy minister of foreign affairs and the deputy minister of public safety.

The five senior bureaucrats representing those offices on the panel in 2019 were briefed on intelligence suggesting several interference incidents during the campaign, according to