Alleged Liberal vote-buying scandal lays bare election vulnerabilities Canada refuses to fix: Op/Ed

Probe of membership drives and cash “rewards” echo patterns flagged years ago — in the Liberal Party and beyond. The system still invites abuse.

Former prime minister Justin Trudeau and Pablo Rodriguez at a ceremony for the swearing-in of Liberal cabinet ministers, with the Governor General.

MONTREAL – An alleged vote-buying scandal in Quebec’s Liberal Party is dredging up the same vulnerabilities that two landmark inquiries – one federal, one provincial – have already warned Canadians about.

The new crisis engulfing the Quebec Liberals focuses on Justin Trudeau’s former Quebec lieutenant and long-time Liberal MP Pablo Rodriguez, a heavyweight organizer within Canada’s most successful political machine, going back to his days in the Liberal youth wing.

The latest escalation – including early “validations” by Quebec’s anti-corruption unit, UPAC – comes in the wake of a journalistic investigation by Quebecor’s Bureau d’enquête revealing that Élections Québec is in possession of text messages between two people who allegedly worked to elect Rodriguez as Liberal leader last spring. According to those reports, the messages suggest that some party members who supported Rodriguez were “rewarded with money” in connection with their votes and membership cards. A follow-up explainer says the exchanges involved campaigners discussing sums spent so people would vote for him.

On Thursday, the Quebecor outlet reported that two UPAC investigators had visited the home of Marwah Rizqy – the party’s former parliamentary leader, recently ousted from caucus after a clash with Rodriguez – to take her statement, opening an early-stage probe that could touch on corruption, breach of trust, collusion, fraud, influence-peddling and related offences. On X, Rodriguez asked the force to “shed full light” on the affair and “lay the appropriate charges” if any illegal or unethical acts are confirmed.

Rodriguez’s response has followed a now-familiar Liberal crisis pattern. The Quebec Liberals have sent a formal legal notice to Le Journal de Montréal, whose Bureau d’enquête team broke the story, demanding the names of the people involved, the phone numbers linked to the texts, and an explanation of how the newspaper verified their authenticity – a move that has drawn a sharp defence of source protection from the paper’s editor. At the same time, the party has mandated former Quebec Superior Court chief justice Jacques R. Fournier to conduct what it says will be an independent investigation into the messages.

At the federal level, the Hogue Commission on foreign interference focused on Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government, probing whether Ottawa had downplayed interference from hostile states, including China and India, for partisan reasons.

Evidence before the inquiry also showed that the Conservative Party and the NDP faced their own vulnerabilities in internal leadership and nomination races.

Justice Marie-Josée Hogue warned that party nomination contests and leadership races can be “gateways” for foreign interference – vulnerable points where hostile states can tilt our democracy out of public view. A decade earlier, the Charbonneau Commission – launched under then-premier Jean Charest’s Liberal government – concluded that illegal political financing was a key mechanism that allowed corruption and, in some cases, organized crime to penetrate Quebec’s construction sector, public contracts and party machines.

Taken together, these inquiries should have made one lesson unavoidable: the moments when parties quietly decide who gets to run, and how they are chosen, are not private-club rituals. They are national-security vulnerabilities.

Élections Québec has also confirmed something shocking, but not surprising for anyone who followed the Hogue hearings: under the current provincial Election Act, it is not explicitly illegal to pay someone in exchange for their vote in a party leadership race.

Hogue’s foreign interference inquiry also showed that Liberal Party nomination rules allowed non-citizens, including international students as young as 14, to sign up as members and vote in candidate nomination contests. Élections Québec has explained that, in the context of a leadership contest, the law does not create an offence for a person who offers money to an elector to vote a certain way – whereas in a general election or by-election, such conduct is banned and punishable by hefty fines. The same statute that rightly criminalizes vote-buying in public elections says nothing when the vote is inside a party – even when the contest is to select a potential premier.

Another strand concerns the role of federal Liberal MP Fayçal El-Khoury. As first reported in La Presse, Élections Québec is examining a conversation between El-Khoury and Marwah Rizqy at a November 14 event, because of a possible link to Rodriguez’s leadership bid. Initially, El-Khoury told La Presse he had no involvement in the race. Subsequent Quebecor reporting showed he in fact held a solicitor’s certificate – and had been authorized to collect donations for Rodriguez’s campaign, a role Rodriguez later confirmed.

Here again, the structural vulnerability matters as much as the individuals. Solicitor certificates are recorded with Élections Québec, but the lists of who holds them are not public. Only the party and the elections authority know who is empowered to raise money for leadership candidates. Without investigative reporting, the fact that a federal MP was fundraising for a provincial leadership contender – one who, like Rodriguez, is also a former federal Liberal minister – would likely never have surfaced.

Much of the evidence in the early days of the Rodriguez affair is contested, and all parties are entitled to a presumption of innocence.

But the established facts already suggest a textbook example of how poorly Canada’s laws and institutions have internalized past lessons: party nominations and leadership races remain black boxes for potential corruption, yet are still not treated like election-day voting in legal or regulatory terms.

While federal Liberals now seek to draw a hard line between themselves and their provincial cousins, the overlap of political machinery between the two parties in Quebec is hard to deny, and it points back to Rodriguez’s central role in Trudeau’s government.

Rodriguez, a former transport minister for Trudeau, was part of a government still haunted by ethical questions over Trudeau’s alleged pressure on former attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould to defer a prosecution against Quebec-based engineering giant SNC-Lavalin.

Wilson-Raybould later testified that the prime minister and senior officials repeatedly raised electoral considerations in Quebec when urging her to revisit the SNC-Lavalin file – including Trudeau’s remark, in a key September 2018 meeting, that there was an election coming up and that he was “an MP in Quebec.”

As The Hill Times put it in 2024, “Rodriguez’s potential departure would leave a huge gap in [the] Liberal electoral machine in Quebec,” and the same column described him as deeply embedded in Quebec’s political world and widely regarded as a highly effective organizer across the province.

There are no allegations, at this stage, of foreign interference or corrupt actors in the Rodriguez leadership race. But the developing facts lay bare exactly the kind of weakly regulated, low-visibility contests that Hogue singled out, and they show that, roughly a decade after Charbonneau’s final report in 2015, Quebec still tolerates a culture of what francophone media call “fling-flang” – loosely translated as backroom shenanigans – around political money that erodes public confidence and leaves the door open to serious threats.