David Johnston’s in damage control mode — and it’s not working

Former governor general David Johnston has revealed he’s been using not one, but two reputation-management firms to do his work looking into foreign interference in Canada’s democracy. He might need a couple more.

For more than three hours on Tuesday, Johnston was plunged into the politics he’s tried to stay above during his long career in public service and academia.

His mission was to defend the work he’s done to date for Justin Trudeau’s government, looking into the white-hot issue of whether this country is vulnerable to foreign interference in its elections, notably from China.

Johnston also had to make the case that the second part of his work — public hearings on that issue — would give Canadians the assurance they need about the integrity of the nation’s electoral system.

Neither mission was accomplished, it is probably fair to say.

As a reputation-management exercise, Johnston’s appearance might have been doomed from the start. He was, after all, speaking before a Commons committee dominated by opposition MPs who formally called on him in Parliament last week to step down from his job as “special rapporteur” for the government on foreign interference.

Just how difficult that job is was confirmed when Johnston acknowledged he has been paying one crisis-management firm, Navigator Ltd., to help him in his role, and informally leaning on help from yet another firm, gt&co, for advice. This other firm is headed by long-time Liberal strategist Don Guy and veteran NDP adviser Brian Topp.

Conservatives leaped on this latter revelation as yet more evidence that Johnston has surrounded himself with Liberals and NDP allies to deliver work that is, well, Liberal-friendly.

Essentially, Johnston faced three challenges when he went before the Commons committee on Tuesday. First, he had to defend his own integrity — a subject that consumed much of the three hours of sometimes hostile questioning. Next, he had to defend his decision not to call a public inquiry into foreign interference, as all the opposition parties and many observers have been demanding. Third, he had to make the case that public hearings, to take place over the next five months, would be an adequate stand-in for a formal public inquiry.

Here’s a rough assessment on how that went, taken one by one.

First, Johnston’s integrity should not be called into question at this point in his long service to the country, but these are harsher times in the political fray and very few emerge unscathed — not even 81-year-old elder statesmen. He was braced for some of the salvos launched about his relationship with the Trudeau family, for instance, but the best Johnston was going to accomplish on this score was to add some nuance to that history, to argue he wasn’t that close.

On his decision not to call a public inquiry, Johnston’s answers may have created more doubts than he dispelled. He did not explain fully, for instance, why former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole seemed to have been given different information from CSIS than Johnston and his team were. (O’Toole made a rather impassioned and impressive speech to that effect in the last week.)

Nor did Johnston explain why his work to date didn’t include interviews with Elections Canada officials or MP Han Dong, who left the Liberal caucus over media reports of his alleged involvement in Chinese foreign interference — allegations that Johnston flatly declared as wrong in his May 23 report.

On the public hearings he plans to hold, Johnston continued to stall about the exact plans in the works, even if they are supposed to start next month. He said he would be calling on three other experts and advisers to head up these hearings, but the identities of these people are still unknown.

Johnston offered assurances the public hearings would invite participation from diaspora communities threatened by foreign interference, and emphatically said their interests and safety would be protected. How, though? That remains unclear.

Throughout the three hours of Johnston’s grilling, Liberal MPs gamely tried to help him, praising him for being above politics, then unhelpfully asking him to make pronouncements against how he and his process have been treated by the Conservatives. They only helped seal the impression that Johnston has been asked to choose a side.

The entire spectacle, if nothing else, was a demonstration of just how impossible it is to airlift this question out of the arena of nasty partisan politics, where everyone’s motives are deemed suspect.

It’s worth remembering, at this point, how Johnston got embroiled in this mess. The prime minister, with remarkable candour, said he needed to find a point person on foreign interference because “no matter what I say, people are going to wonder — if they didn’t vote for me — whether or not they can trust me.”

Sitting before that Commons committee on Tuesday, facing down questions from MPs who didn’t vote for him to stay in his job, Johnston no doubt now appreciates where Trudeau was coming from. No wonder the former governor general is looking for reputation managers.

Susan Delacourt is an Ottawa-based columnist covering national politics for the Star. Reach her via email: sdelacourt@thestar.ca or follow her on Twitter: @susandelacourt