Why Mark Carney got chippy with a reporter over what an 'unnamed government official' said

OTTAWA — Prime Minister Mark Carney got a little bit chippy when asked by a National Post reporter if he agreed with an unnamed government official who downplayed India’s role in transnational repression and foreign interference in a briefing last week.

“Well, we can debate whether you had a discussion that was not for quotation,” Carney said after the reporter offered to read the transcript of the quote from the official in which they suggested India is no longer actively interfering in Canada’s democratic process.

“But if you want to read a quote from something that’s not for quotation… I would not use those words,” added Carney.

That a Canadian prime minister express annoyance at reporters’ pesky questions is nothing new, but casting doubt on whether they can refer to quotes in a not-for-attribution briefing by government officials is a break from what has been a longstanding practice.

According to Dimitri Soudas, who served as director of communications to former prime minister Stephen Harper, Carney was “out to lunch” with his comments.

Speaking in a not-for-attribution briefing before Carney’s trip to India, Australia and Japan, the official was asked by a reporter if they still believed that agents of the Indian government are currently involved in extortion and threats of violence in Canada.

“I think we can say we’re confident that that activity is not continuing,” the official said.

Later asked to clarify if the Canadian government now believes that India is not behind any transnational repression or foreign interference activity anymore, the official said Canada has “robust safeguards” in place and has been engaging with India on these issues.

“If we believed that the government of India was actively interfering in the Canadian democratic process, we probably would not be taking this trip right now,” they said.

The official even repeated themselves a third time in the briefing, saying: “We wouldn’t be taking this trip if we thought these kinds of activities were continuing.”

Those affirmations have sparked much criticism in the past week, including from Sikh groups and from Liberal MPs who claim that transnational repression is still ongoing. Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand also distanced herself from what the official said.

The federal government usually briefs reporters before the prime minister embarks on international trips to explain the expected outcome of the trip, who the prime minister will be meeting with, who will be travelling with their team and other useful details for media.

Each briefing involves a handful of senior government officials related in some way to the planning or the purpose of the trip. They are usually high-ranking federal officials, such as deputy ministers, assistant deputy ministers, or the prime minister’s own advisers.

In order to let the public servants to speak more freely about the trip, the briefing is deemed to be “not-for-attribution,” meaning that reporters cannot refer to or quote the officials by name or by title but can attribute their words to “government officials.”

That means that anything these officials say can be reported in the media — as long as they are not named — but it is rare that their remarks make headlines like in this case.

Interestingly, the transcripts produced by the Privy Council Office (PCO) — the prime minister’s department — are also anonymized, so the official who downplayed India’s role in transnational repression is known inside the public service as “government official #1.”

In the past, political representatives of the prime minister would be part of these pre-trip briefings, so they might have been able to nip any communication issues in the bud.

Andrew MacDougall and Dimitri Soudas, who both served as directors of communication for Prime Minister Stephen Harper, said they were always speaking “on the record” in these briefings alongside government officials who would remain nameless in the press.

Soudas said there were times when officials would sometimes say something that was not consistent with the government’s position, and his role was to step in and respond.

He suggested that any questions about India’s involvement in transnational repression and foreign interference, for instance, should not have been answered by a public servant and would have been better answered by a political representative of the government.

“No one was there to clean it up,” he said.

National Post calevesque@postmedia.com

• 'We will call it out': Carney touts progress with India on foreign interference, repression
• India still a main perpetrator of interference, espionage in Canada: CSIS

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