"The news release didn’t say that Russians “tried” or “attempted” to interfere — merely that they had done so. Why hasn’t this generated more of an outcry in Canada?" ---

It’s been more than a week since Global Affairs dropped the news that Russia interfered in our democracy and the ensuing silence — by government and citizens — is kind of stunning.

In case you missed it, here’s what the federal department of Global Affairs said in a March 26 news release announcing the expulsion of four Russian diplomats stationed in Canada: “The four have been identified as intelligence officers or individuals who have used their diplomatic status to undermine Canada’s security or interfere in our democracy.” (Emphasis is mine.)

Note that the news release didn’t say that Russians “tried” or “attempted” to interfere — merely that they had done so. Why hasn’t this generated more of an outcry in Canada?

The announced democratic interference by Russia also seemed to breeze right past the opposition parties, who were still asking last week about national security in the context of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s trip to India.

Conservatives have been pulling out all the stops to hear from the PM’s national security adviser, Daniel Jean, about how a convicted attempted murderer wrangled an invitation to a reception during the India trip. Conservative leader Andrew Scheer has now in fact accepted an offer of a private briefing from Jean, iPolitics’ Janice Dickson is reporting today.

But are the Conservatives and New Democrats not at all curious about what Russia’s expelled diplomats did to merit that breezy little mention in the news release? Wouldn’t it be good to hear from Jean on that national-security matter too?

As far as I can tell, the subject didn’t even come up during Question Period in the House of Commons last week. And when Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan was asked about it on CBC’s Power and Politics show last week, he lapsed into meaningless talking points. Sajjan said the ”statement stands on its own” and that “for national security reasons, I can’t go into details on that.”

Nor could Sajjan explain why Canada only acted last week to retaliate for this mysterious democratic interference. If we had evidence that Russia had been messing around with our democracy, why did we wait so long to retaliate — and in conjunction with a totally unrelated, (albeit serious) matter?

Canada, we’ll note, expelled the diplomats at the same time that its allies in Britain and the U.S. were kicking out envoys in retaliation for the nerve-agent attack in Salisbury, U.K.

But Russian election meddling has been sort of a big deal in the news too over the past year, with a whole investigation under way into its potential role in Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory.

A column on CBC’s website this weekend also pointed out the odd lack of details surrounding this declaration last week from Global Affairs. In that piece, Wesley Wark, a University of Ottawa security specialist, cautioned against any rash or alarmist conclusions.

“You shouldn’t read the message to indicate that the Canadian government has evidence specifically of election meddling,” Wark told CBC. He saw the announcement more as a pre-emptive strike against future interference by Russia. Or, as he put it, “On that front it is a shot across the bows.”

Still, just as we’ve wondered why Trump has been so quiet about Russian election meddling — it didn’t even come up in a recent call between Trump and Vladimir Putin — we might wonder why the same allegation is such a non-story here too. Has Prime Minister Trudeau talked to Putin about what Canada caught the Russian diplomats doing? Again, no answers and no real questions either.

As a matter of fact, it’s felt like a whole week of shrugging insouciance about potential election hackery in Canada — even with Canadian Chris Wylie stirring it up as a whistleblower on Cambridge Analytica and its misuse of data in the Brexit referendum campaign.

On CBC Radio’s The House last weekend, Treasury Board President Scott Brison also indicated that the government doesn’t seem to feel any urgency surrounding privacy issues and party databases either. Brison said the government might get around to a privacy crackdown at some point — after consultation with the other parties — and mindful of the idea that parties need that data.

“There’s a difference between foreign [cyber-]bots thwarting our domestic election results, and the legitimate use of digital for political parties to engage citizens in debates about the future of their country,” Brison told host Chris Hall.

Obviously, that little bit of news from Global Affairs last week hasn’t put any momentum behind efforts to tighten up those party databases. And besides, when this government talks about “consulting other parties” on democratic-reform matters, we’ve already seen how that ends — a lot of talk of “no consensus” and another opportunity missed.

Ever since the Trudeau government backed down on that promise to overhaul Canada’s voting system, it has turned its sights instead to the integrity of the existing system. Brison even referred to those switched political gears in his interview on CBC Radio last weekend, talking about how “the problem has changed.”

The government even commissioned a report on potential election interference from the Communications Security Establishment, which was released last year with this warning: “We judge that it is highly probable that cyber threat activity against democratic processes worldwide will increase in quantity and sophistication over the next year, and perhaps beyond that.”

If we’re correctly reading that news release last week from Global Affairs, we may be right to conclude that the threat is already here — and has happened. What’s most mysterious, though, is why it’s not creating much of an uproar here.

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