It’s been a sticky couple of weeks for Canada’s natural governing party, as the Liberals like to call themselves. Anonymous sources from CSIS, Canada’s intelligence agency, leaked information to two major Canadian media outlets, The Globe and Mail and Global News. The reports say China interfered in Canada’s two most recent federal elections, and that CSIS alerted the government, but that despite warnings the Liberals – who won both elections with a minority government – did nothing.
The media’s attempts to expose alleged Chinese election interference has reached full throttle. Whether it continues will depend on three things: the on-going supply of leaks, how political parties react and, perhaps most crucially, how a just-released independent report on interference in the 2021 federal election is received.
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh says he is not “ruling out” making a public inquiry into foreign interference a condition for continuing the governance deal with the federal Liberals, but says that is not a decision he is making just yet.
Singh told The Roy Green Show on Saturday that he plans to bring up the issue of foreign interference with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during their meetings on the confidence-and-supply agreement signed between the New Democrats and Liberals.
At the moment, there is no other topic in our nation more important than Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s refusal to convene an unbiased public inquiry into the full extent of Chinese government meddling in Canada’s political process.
It’s not about whether the Chinese government or its surrogates “stole” the 2019 or 2021 elections on behalf of the Liberals. I would argue Andrew Scheer and Erin O’Toole were such ineffectual Conservative leaders, both elections were always going to go to the Liberals anyway.
Sen. Yuen Pau Woo’s claim that people of Chinese descent in Canada face “contemporary forms of exclusion and discrimination” is divisive and deflects from the Beijing regime’s true tactics, says a former ambassador.
“Senator say (sic) many Canadians hold stereotypical views of Chinese,” former Canadian ambassador to China David Mulroney wrote on Twitter on Feb. 16.
“The Senator is setting up a straw man argument that is dangerously divisive and that makes it harder to speak clearly about PRC [People’s Republic of China] tactics.”
The World Health Organization (WHO) concluded a meeting on March 3 to advance negotiations on the global governance of pandemic responses. While the event flew under the radar in Canada, Republican politicians in the United States have taken a position against the treaty, expressing concern about its implications on their country’s sovereignty in policy-making.
The WHO published the “Zero Draft” on Feb. 1 as the basis of the negotiations to create a future international instrument to manage pandemics.
There are far more loose ends than there are investigations.
In fact, on leaked information from Canadian Security Intelligence Service alleging Chinese money influenced two Canadian elections, the only official investigation is on the whistleblowers who exposed it.
In recent weeks, Canadian media have released a steady drip of reports, based on leaked intelligence, of detailed claims of Chinese meddling in the country’s last two federal elections in 2019 and 2021 – the latest Western nation to sound the alarm over concerns of foreign election interference.
Chinese officials have denied any interference, calling the allegations “purely baseless and defamatory” in a statement to the BBC.
The efforts are not believed to have altered the outcomes of either general election, but Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is under pressure to launch a national public inquiry looking into the allegations, which have strained already challenging diplomatic relations between the two countries.
Justin Trudeau looked smug, arrogant and embattled on Friday, when his frustration from the past week bubbled up and landed on Brittany Hobson, the sixth reporter in line at his Winnipeg news conference.
Hobson had asked how Canadians could trust our elections hadn’t been influenced by foreign actors when the information supporting those claims was shrouded in secrecy, and wasn’t an uninformed public distrustful of the democratic process a threat to society?
“I’m pretty sure everything I’ve said over the past 20 minutes answered that question, but I will do it one more time, just for The Canadian Press,” the prime minister said with a smile.
The chances Canadians are ever going to be informed of serious interference in our federal elections by bad actors such as China, Russia and Iran — or domestic supporters acting on their behalf — are somewhere between slim and none and slim just left town.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Friday again resisted calling a public inquiry into foreign election interference in the wake of multiple media reports on China’s meddling in Canadian politics, saying there are already enough examinations of the matter under way.
Opposition parties teamed up Thursday to pass a parliamentary committee motion calling for an independent probe into foreign interference. Liberal MPs on the procedure and House affairs committee opposed the motion but were outvoted by the Conservatives, New Democrats and the Bloc Québécois. The motion is non-binding.
There were similarities to the departures of New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern and Scotland’s Nicola Sturgeon — both stressed the toll of leadership, the time away from family and the human cost.
What they didn’t say was that they were both up against it politically. Polls suggested Ardern would lose the next election and the U.K.’s Supreme Court had ruled that Sturgeon’s Scottish Nationalist Party did not have the power to hold another independence vote unilaterally.
Could Justin Trudeau turn a coincidence into a trend?
A new poll shows that about two-thirds of Canadians think China’s communist government “definitely” or “probably” interfered in Canada’s 2019 and 2021 federal elections.
The findings come from a new Angus Reid Institute (ARI) poll released on March 1, which shows that 32 percent of Canadian voters “definitely” believe there was Chinese interference, with 33 percent saying China “probably” interfered in Canada’s elections.
Justin Trudeau wants Canadians to know they can have confidence in our democracy and institutions despite claims of election interference by China.
Trudeau turned down a call for public inquiry again Friday, the day after a Commons committee voted in favour of an inquiry.
“I would put the threat level at about eight out of 10. That’s mainly because the Chinese authorities are absolutely determined to achieve their goals, no matter what people think. I’m particularly concerned about their willingness to use almost any method to succeed.”
It was May 3, 2021, at a meeting of the House of Commons special committee on Canada-China relations, and Richard Fadden, former director of CSIS, had been asked by Conservative MP Pierre Paul-Hus how he would rate the threat posed by China to Canada’s economy, national security and defence.
