Trudeau Downplays Chinese Efforts to Elect Canadian Liberals
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Following news reports last Friday that the Chinese government intervened in the 2021 Canadian federal election in favor of Justin Trudeau, the prime minister is seeking to divert attention away from Beijing’s partisan preference.
“It’s not about one party versus another,” Trudeau said amid accusations that the Conservative Party was attempting to politicize claims of Chinese election meddling.
A Trudeau ally joined in citing an American parallel to lingering questions about election integrity.
“This is the same Trump-type tactics to question election results moving forward,” Jennifer O’Connell, the parliamentary secretary to the minister of intergovernmental affairs, stated.
Canadian intelligence agencies have determined that Chinese diplomats made undeclared donations to Canadian political campaigns and recruited local business owners to hire international students to “assign them to volunteer in electoral campaigns on a full-time basis,” the Globe & Mail reported last week.
“Most important, the intelligence reports show that Beijing was determined that the Conservatives did not win. China employed disinformation campaigns and proxies connected to Chinese-Canadian organizations in Vancouver and the GTA [Greater Toronto Area], which have large mainland Chinese immigrant communities, to voice opposition to the Conservatives and favour the Trudeau Liberals,”journalists Robert Fife and Steven Chase wrote.
The foreign government disseminated messages through Chinese-language media such as: “The Liberal Party of Canada is becoming the only party that the PRC [People’s Republic of China] can support.”
Documents obtained by the duo from the Canadians Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), the country’s equivalent to the CIA, revealed that the Chinese Community Party was “pressuring its consulates to create strategies to leverage politically [active] Chinese community members and associations within Canadian society.”
The objective of China’s election meddling was to build support for China’s plans to annex Taiwan as well as downplay ongoing human-rights abuses in Xinjiang and Hong Kong.
CSIS sources also found that Vancouver’s previous consul-general Tong Xiaoling and successor, Wang Jin, made explicit attempts to sway Chinese-Canadian organizations to vote for the Liberal Party.
Last Friday, another Canadian outlet also revealed three anonymous CSIS sources found that Han Dong, a new Liberal member of parliament (MP), was likely a member of a broader Chinese “foreign interference network.” Dong was chosen to succeed the incumbent, MP Geng Tan, who had reportedly disappointed the Chinese consulate in Toronto.
Despite being alerted in September 2022 to the allegations, Trudeau did nothing about the matter.
Former associates of Trudeau are now demanding the leader create a public inquiry to settle the matter.
“The radical changes in geopolitics and technological advancements of the past several years mean we’re in a different, more dangerous world where many foreign actors have an interest in harming democratic institutions and the capacity to do it,” Trudeau’s former principal secretary told the Globe & Mail on Sunday.
However, Trudeau appears content with the current investigation led by the House of Commons Committee on Procedure and House Affairs, shooting down calls for a public inquiry.
On a potentially-related note, the Trudeau administration announced that TikTok, the Chinese social-media application, would be removed from all federal government devices on Tuesday.
