Andrew Coyne: Then there was the testimony of the Prime Minister…

Mr. Trudeau testified that, while he was briefed by the party’s national campaign manager, Jeremy Broadhurst (now a senior adviser in the Prime Minister’s Office) on the Han Dong affair, he did not feel “there was sufficient or sufficiently credible information that would justify this very significant step as to remove a candidate in these circumstances.” Mr. Broadhurst, for his part, testified that he “recommended that no action should be taken,” because “I thought the bar for overturning that … that bar should be extremely high.”

Oh please. This “very significant step”? If only. Political parties drop candidates all the time, and with far less justification – because they posted something untoward on their Facebook page when they were 12, let alone because they are suspected of being the protégés of a hostile foreign power. This sudden respect for the sanctity of the local nomination process would be a lot easier to credit if there were any – if the races were not often rigged by party HQ to favour one candidate or another, when they are not pre-empted altogether.

Indeed, Mr. Trudeau at another point smirked at CSIS’s naiveté about the Canadian political process: nomination meetings, he said in a prehearing interview, are stacked with busloads of supporters for one candidate or another all the time. That may be true, but they are not usually under the direction of a foreign power – told, as the inquiry also heard, that their families back home would face “consequences” if they did not show up.

So the Liberals, and Mr. Trudeau in particular, are left with many more questions to answer after their testimony than before. Their insistence, in particular, that briefing notes prepared by CSIS for the Prime Minister’s Office, stating that Beijing had “clandestinely and deceptively interfered in both the 2019 and 2021 general elections,” that “state actors are able to conduct [foreign interference] successfully in Canada because there are no consequences, either legal or political,” and that “until [foreign interference] is viewed as an existential threat to Canadian democracy and governments forcefully and actively respond, these threats will persist,” was not reflected in what CSIS director David Vigneault personally briefed them, hangs by the slenderest of threads.

Tomorrow on CBC’s At Issue: “But at least he’s not Hitler”