This article originally appeared in the National Post.
By Ryan Alford, January 20, 2025
Last week, the Liberal party detailed its new requirements for party membership and, accordingly, for voting for its new leader in March. It claimed the changes would protect “the integrity of our democratic process,” but the measures are blatantly insufficient to ensure that the next prime minister is not chosen by a foreign state.
The latest changes mean that prospective voters need only check a box on a web form indicating that they are Canadian citizens, permanent residents or status Indians.
While it is likely that people who register under the name “Xi Jingping” and list the “Embassy of China” as their address will be removed from the rolls before the vote, it is unlikely that there is time to implement measures to detect any more sophisticated attempts to register fraudulent voters.
It is clear that the Liberal party is not motivated to implement the single most effective measure to prevent systematic attempts at foreign electoral interference: a small annual membership fee. In 2016, the Liberals eliminated their $10 annual membership fee, and they have failed to re-implement it, despite it being the best means of ensuring that its voters are Canadian.
It’s not that this amount — even when multiplied by hundreds of thousands of potential memberships — presents a serious economic obstacle for determined state actors; the Chinese Communist Party devotes billions of dollars a year to foreign interference, channelled through the United Front Work Department. If it were merely a matter of money, Beijing wouldn’t be deterred.
The challenge for meddling states isn’t that they don’t have the money, it’s that they can’t easily launder it to make it appear like it is coming from genuinely eligible voters. Laundering the money required to pay for large numbers of false memberships with votes controlled by foreign states is not a simple matter, and it is even more complex when parties insist that dues be paid for with credit cards or Interac payments from accounts held in the name of the individual seeking membership.
For instance, the Conservative Party of Canada prohibits potential members from paying their fees with corporate credit cards or prepaid cards, or purchasing multiple memberships with personal cheques. Tying each membership to a payment made by an individual, as verified by institutions governed by anti-money laundering and know-your-customer rules, make attempts to subvert party leadership races easier to detect.
This was the reason the allegations that Patrick Brown’s Conservative leadership campaign had benefited from irregularities involving memberships came to light, and why the leadership election organizing committee was able to take decisive action to protect the integrity of the vote.
Requiring party membership dues and forms of payment that confirm the member’s identity is an obvious countermeasure to foreign interference and is likely to be one of the recommendations of the Foreign Interference Commission when it releases its final report at the end of the month.
The Liberals’ failure to implement such measures alongside the tightening of the party’s citizenship requirements is perplexing. It reinforces the impression given by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s testimony about the foreign students who were bussed in to vote for Han Dong in his Liberal nomination race: the Liberals simply do not care about the Chinese Communist Party’s subversion of our elections.
If the Liberals fail to insulate their party from foreign interference and then win the next election, it could be a deathblow to the confidence that Canadians have in our democracy, especially if the new prime minister has strong connections to Beijing.
In his position at Brookfield Asset Management, Mark Carney supervised considerable investment in Chinese markets at a time when capital infusions were sorely needed by Beijing. Few observers will fail to see that Carney is the handpicked successor of Justin Trudeau and his closest advisors, who themselves may be on the receiving end of searing criticism from the Hogue Commission for their unwillingness to take foreign interference seriously.
If there is any suspicion that Carney owes his leadership to votes cast from overseas, Chinese electoral interference may prove to be an even greater thorn in the Liberals’ side. The Conservatives will have a question ready that Carney will find difficult to answer: why didn’t your party eliminate all suspicion that you were the beneficiary of Beijing’s interference by reinstating membership fees? If Carney cannot answer that tricky question during the next federal election, the Liberals will come to regret not taking foreign interference far more seriously.
Ryan Alford is a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and professor at the Bora Laskin faculty of law at Lakehead University.
