Former Tory Campaign Manager Provides Party’s List
The former national campaign manager for the Conservative Party in the 2021 election has named every riding where the political party believes there was outside interference.
Fred DeLorey provided the information as he testified before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs (PROC) on April 25.
DeLorey said there were “rumblings” about foreign interference during the contest, but those were “anecdotal at best.”
“However, after the campaign was concluded, we noticed some results that felt off, and that’s when internal rumblings of foreign interference became much louder,” he said.
DeLorey said based on that information he tasked field operations teams to report to him on the matter. This resulted in a memo and DeLorey read its content during his introductory remarks before the committee.
“There was a strong case to be made that there was a degree of influence exerted by an outside actor in the Chinese community during the 44th general election,” says the memo.
The memo adds there is a belief that this influence negatively impacted Conservatives in a number of ridings.
Those ridings in B.C. are Metro Vancouver, Richmond Centre, Steveston-Richmond East, Coquitlam–Port Coquitlam, and Fleetwood–Port Kells.
In the Greater Toronto Area the ridings are Markham-Stouffville, Markham–Unionville, Richmond Hill, Willowdale, Don Valley North, Scarborough–Agincourt, Aurora–Oak Ridges–Richmond Hill, Newmarket–Aurora, and “to a certain extent” Mississauga Centre.
The memo read by DeLorey spoke of Conservative Party content on the Chinese app WeChat being targeted or suppressed.
He says party representatives provided the information to the Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections Task Force. The representatives “were informed that there were legislative gaps, and there was nothing that could be done,” said DeLorey.
Former Conservative MP Kenny Chiu says he lost his riding of Steveston-Richmond East in 2021 due to disinformation spread about him in Chinese language media.
“It’s not just WeChat, it’s not just social media, it’s multi-dimensional. It’s on the airwaves that the [Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission] is supposed to be regulating, it’s on printed media, it’s also on websites,” he told the Commons ethics committee on March 31.
Former Conservative Party leader Erin O’Toole had previously said that some ridings had been lost in 2021 due to Chinese interference. He talked of losing eight or nine seats while on the podcast of Liberal MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith in June 2022.
The info provided by DeLorey to the committee speaks of 13 to 14 ridings.
Despite bringing this info to the committee, DeLorey doesn’t believe this impacted the outcome of the election.
“I can confirm, without a shadow of a doubt, that the outcome of the election, which resulted in the Liberals forming government, was not influenced by any external meddling,” he wrote in a column published in the Toronto Star on March 5.
DeLorey said he still stood by that claim when prompted by Liberal MP Ryan Turnbull.
“There does seem to be a concern that there may have been possible foreign interference, but if you looked at the seat difference between us and the Liberals, if you change every seat that could be up in the air, Liberals are still the government,” DeLorey said.
