After avoiding the media for several days during the India leg of his 10-day international trade trip, Prime Minister Mark Carney finally addressed the media and spoke to the controversy caused by the unnamed Privy Council Office official who erroneously claimed India was no longer involved in foreign interference or transnational repression in Canada.

During the back and forth with the press, Carney invoked the classified nature of his briefings as to why he couldn’t fully speak to the issue of Indian foreign interference. In doing so, the prime minister effectively vindicated the longstanding argument from Conservatives as to why Pierre Poilievre refuses to get his security clearance.

As Carney stated to the press, “There are aspects of those briefings that I can not share in public and I’m not going to betray them. I will tell you that there is progress on these issues and that progress is a product of — in my judgment — the resources we are putting in and the clarity of our position that we will not tolerate foreign interference, transnational repression, by anyone.” 

While it’s certainly true that there is information not fit for public consumption that only the prime minister and the seniormost people around him would be privy to, in phrasing it this way and using the nature of his classified briefings as a reason for him being unable to speak more fully on the issue, the prime minister — likely without realizing it — used the same reasoning as Pierre Poilievre does when it comes to his continued refusal to obtain a security clearance.

Poilievre has consistently claimed that if he were to be briefed on matters requiring a security clearance, it would essentially gag him, rendering him unable to speak out on issues he’d otherwise be quite vocal about. 

Let’s state the obvious: Poilievre is the only opposition leader who refuses to undergo the background checks and interviews needed to get a security clearance so he can be briefed on issues both foreign and domestic. It’s very weird that he would rather be ignorant of the threats posed to Canada, and it was dumb for the prime minister to give Poilievre and the Conservatives cover on this issue. 

Conservative partisans will argue that Poilievre not having a security clearance doesn’t matter and that it’s not at all odd that he won’t get cleared since he has had security clearance in the past. The notion that Poilievre once had a security clearance and, therefore, he doesn’t need to get a new one is generally based on the false assumption that his old one is still valid — it’s not — or that because he was able to obtain a security clearance over a decade ago, he’d automatically be able to get one again, which is also false. 

While it's true there is information only the PM and other senior officials should be privy to, his use of classified briefings to deflect questions of foreign interference only strengthens Pierre Poilievre's case against a security clearance.

Speaking from experience, the questions you get asked during a background interview for a security clearance very much depend on your current life circumstances. In my own case, the questions I got in 2021 when I was happily married in a steady dual-income household differed quite a bit from the questions I got in 2024, considering my husband had recently died and I was now a single mother. 

Questions about my (non-existent) dating life and potential debts I would have incurred from end-of-life care, funeral costs and the loss of a second household income were quite understandably featured in the 2024 interview in order to fully assess any vulnerabilities or weak spots I might have that were completely unnecessary to ask in the 2021 interview. Considering Poilievre last had a clearance before he was a married father of two, it’s safe to say that his interview questions would differ from when he last would have had to undergo the process. 

To be clear, there are no overt reasons or glaring red flags as to why Poilievre would not be able to obtain a clearance. However, we do know that there has been some reporting that suggests India interfered in the last Conservative leadership race. According to reporting in the Globe and Mail at the time, “Agents of India and their proxies allegedly meddled in the 2022 election of Pierre Poilievre as Conservative Party Leader as part of a larger effort to cozy up to politicians of all parties.” 

Again, there is nothing to suggest either in the initial reporting or in the time since that the scales were tipped in favour of Poilievre or that without India’s alleged meddling Poilievre would not have won with a whopping 68 per cent support on the first ballot. However, it is definitely weird that in light of India’s alleged interference in the Conservative leadership race, Poilievre still refuses to obtain his security clearance. If nothing else, shouldn’t Poilievre want to get his clearance to be briefed in more detail on what kind of interference occurred from India in his own party’s leadership race?

We need both the government and opposition parties to take issues pertaining to our sovereignty and the integrity of our democracy seriously. Unfortunately, however, all we’re getting from Ottawa is complete deference to the Modi government despite repeated public statements from Indian officials showing an utter lack of respect and contempt for Canadian law enforcement as well as our national security and intelligence agencies, as the Modi government continues its gaslighting campaign denying all allegations against them and maintaining that they were fabricated by the Trudeau government for political purposes. 

And all we’re getting from the Leader of the Official Opposition is him choosing to be willfully ignorant of the threats India allegedly poses to his own political party’s internal machinations as well as the threats potentially posed to the country writ large. 

What Canadians are left with is an opposition leader whose entire approach to foreign interference and transnational repression is “see no evil, hear no evil,” and a prime minister who is now cribbing from the opposition leader’s playbook to evade questions on the issue. In the end, Canadians — especially Sikh Canadians — are seeing failure on this issue from both sides of the political aisle.

© National Observer