On witness stand, PM wore two hats

Justin Trudeau arrived at the foreign interference inquiry this week wearing two hats: one of the prime minister, the other of the leader of the Liberal party.

- SUSAN DELACOURT

Over more than three hours of testimony, Trudeau exchanged those hats frequently, sometimes within one answer.

He was prime ministerial as he explained what he could and couldn’t reveal about national security. But he was also a purely partisan Liberal, especially when he used the occasion to take shots at the Conservatives — the harshest ones aimed at how they deal with foreign interference, or even whether they traffic in it.

The first shot came moments after he was sworn in as the marquee witness at the inquiry. Trudeau went all the way back to when Liberals were in opposition, and frustrated by how Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper was keeping MPs in the dark on matters of national security.

“One of the things that we had grown concerned about as a party when we were in opposition before the 2015 election was the lack of oversight by parliamentarians into what was going on in our national security universe in this country,” Trudeau said, citing the controversy over Canada’s treatment of detainees in Afghanistan.

He noted — as did his ministers and advisers from the Prime Minister’s Office during their testimony — that the current Liberal government was the first to establish a system to monitor foreign interference in elections. It was built “from scratch,” Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc said.