Chris Selley: David Johnston a terrible choice for ‘special rapporteur’ on Chinese interference

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What Johnston is best at is not rocking boats. He’s like a human outrigger. What are the odds of him finding something shocking?

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Published Mar 16, 2023  •  Last updated 1 hour ago  •  4 minute read

In this file photo taken on December 04, 2015 Governor General David Johnston delivers the Speech from the Throne to start Canada’s 42nd parliament in Ottawa. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tapped the former governor general to look into allegations that China meddled in Canada’s two last elections. Photo by GEOFF ROBINS/AFP via Getty Images Article content

Heading into Wednesday afternoon, David Johnston might have been one of Canada’s least-despised public figures. That was no small achievement, considering all the hats he has worn over the years: governor general; federal election-debates commissioner; participant in almost too many inquiries and commissions to count, at the request of Liberal and Conservative governments alike. Maybe that’s why Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his advisers thought Johnston would make a fine “special rapporteur” into allegations of Chinese meddling into Canadian elections.

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Team Trudeau certainly wasn’t alone on that front. Johnston’s appointment produced some very positive notices from lots of people who aren’t on the red team. “Unimpeachable choice,” declared Andrew MacDougall, formerly prime minister Stephen Harper’s communications director. Many, including the Toronto Star’s Susan Delacourt, noted in particular Johnston’s bipartisan record of being asked to help mop up messes.

I’m sorry to say they are dead wrong. Johnston is a dreadful appointment. His decision to accept the appointment was just as terrible. Trudeau and Johnston would be equally well-advised to abandon the whole undertaking.

Let’s start with the most practical problem: Much as many Conservatives respect the heck out of David Johnston, leading lights within the party have already declared that any exculpatory findings he might report with respect to Chinese interference will be treated as dead on arrival.

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“As the Trudeau (government’s) appointed Debate Commissioner, David Johnston appointed WE Charity’s (Craig) Kielburger to the debate commission and allowed a host from CBC (Rosemary Barton), who sued the Conservative Party, to moderate the ‘fair’ leaders debate,” tweeted longtime Conservative strategist and campaign organizer Jenni Byrne — the presumed favourite to run Tory leader Pierre Poilievre’s election campaign when next we go to the polls, having managed Poilievre’s successful leadership bid.

Asked Byrne on Wednesday: “What are the odds (Johnston) concludes there doesn’t need to be a public inquiry?”

Plenty of folks online have roared to Johnston’s defence in the face of these and similar criticisms. I’m not even going to bother passing judgment on their fairness, because it just doesn’t matter. If a special rapporteur’s, uh, rapports are going to accomplish anything useful, they have to be accepted across partisan divides. Unless Johnston finds and rapports something truly shocking — and let’s not rule that out — those findings will not be so accepted.

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And while that might not exactly be fair to Johnston, it’s hardly unfair. In politics, the impression of conflict of interest is conflict of interst.

Consider:

• Johnston is a personal friend of the Trudeau family. His Wikipedia page notes that the Johnstons became good friends with the Trudeaus during the 1970s when they had “adjacent cottages in the Laurentians.”

• Johnston is a member of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation — dodgy enough on its own, but the foundation has been directly implicated in the potential scandal on which Johnston has been asked to rapport. The foundation recently vowed to return a $200,000 donation to two wealthy businessmen after The Globe and Mail reported it had come at Beijing’s behest.

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It scrambles one’s brains to imagine why Johnston would accept this appointment without at the very least resigning any affiliation with the foundation.

• What Johnston is best at is not rocking boats. He’s like a human outrigger. It’s a great skill. That’s exactly what you want in a governor general, as the Liberals belatedly discovered having replaced him with a workplace-monster astronaut. It’s also what the Liberals clearly wanted when they created the Leaders’ Debates Commission and appointed Johnston to lead it. It was blindingly obvious to all but the most credulous Canadians that the real goal of that commission was to limit debates — several very interesting ones having escaped captivity during the 2015 campaign — under the guise of official-izing them.

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Johnston oversaw the replacement of the media consortium that used to run the dreary debates with an almost-identical consortium producing the exact same dreary debates, one in each official language, to the exclusion of all others (unless they’re in French). A truly pathetic performance.

No one can credibly accuse Johnston of partisanship, if you ask me. But questionable decisions on behalf of different parties aren’t much to put on a resumé. Asked by Stephen Harper to recommend terms of an inquiry into Brian Mulroney’s dealings with Karlheinz Schreiber, Johnston very unfortunately recommended excluding the terms of the all-important Airbus deal with Air Canada from the proceedings. If universal credibility was the goal, that alone ought to have been disqualifying.

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I have seen some suggest there’s literally no one in the Canadian political universe that Trudeau might have appointed to the special rapporteur position whose findings would be accepted across the board. I think he could have done far better than Johnston, though. The appointment of retired judges to deal with these things long ago transcended cliché, but I suspect there are a good few anonymous-to-the-public but widely respected jurists who could have played the part better.

But if it’s true, then there was no point in Trudeau creating the position to begin with. The majority of Canadians almost certainly won’t lose any sleep over the China issue. The job Trudeau assigned himself was to appoint someone capable of reassuring the minority who do care, across the political spectrum. If we take him at his word that he tried his best, it nevertheless turned instantly to crap. That seems to be happening a lot these days, right?

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