Bill Blair Dodges Question on Whether Michael Chan Warrant Named Cabinet Colleagues: Hogue Commission
"Did you recognize any of the people on the Van Weenen list as being parliamentarians?” Commission lawyer asked Blair.
OTTAWA, Canada — After relentless rounds of gritty questioning aimed at exposing inconsistencies in the testimony of former Liberal Public Safety Minister Bill Blair and his top political aide Zita Astravas—who, during CSIS's March 2021 application for a wiretap on Liberal Party powerbroker Michael Chan, took the unprecedented step of inquiring into the list of people that could be exposed to the warrant’s surveillance—a Hogue Commission lawyer got to the point.
“Did you recognize any of the people on the Van Weenen list as being parliamentarians?” the lawyer asked Blair. “Were any of your cabinet colleagues included on the Van Weenen list?”
“A clever question,” Blair responded. “I'm not going to say anything that would tend to identify any individual on that list, because it would be quite improper.”
This week, it emerged that 13 days after Astravas received the warrant, she sought a briefing from CSIS about a list of individuals potentially impacted by its proposed wiretaps targeting Chan, a former Ontario Liberal cabinet minister.
Blair’s former deputy minister, Rob Stewart, said he’d never encountered such a request before in his Public Safety Canada duties. Blair maintains that Astravas kept the Chan warrant from him, and he had no knowledge of its explosive contents until receiving the document in May—testimony that Commission lawyers have sought to undermine.
Astravas and several of Prime Minister Trudeau’s senior aides worked alongside Chan—a key fundraiser for the party in Toronto—in Ontario’s Liberal government.
The heart of the matter, judging by repeated questions from Commission lawyers, is that the Van Weenen list could have included both elected and unelected Liberal Party members. CSIS investigators suspected that Chan had attempted to influence Trudeau’s office regarding the replacement of a Liberal MP with another candidate in the 2019 election, which was the most consequential argument for the intrusive warrant, according to confidential sources cited in The Bureau’s exclusive report on Monday.
Chan has maintained in Hogue Commission testimony and in a public statement this week that he was involved in no wrongdoing.
Previewing the intense grilling Blair faced today, on Wednesday, MP Michael Chong’s lawyer confronted Astravas, stating, “I put it to you: the delay was because you saw the warrant’s focus on your party’s operations. You didn't want it to proceed, and if it had to, you intended to slow-walk it. What do you say to that?”
“Your assumptions are categorically false,” she responded.
“The warrant involved high-ranking members of your party and people you had known for years. Isn't that why you wanted to delay it?” van Ert pressed, and Astravas firmly denied the allegation.