Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, his late father a huge fan of China’s brand of communism, believes MPs who rattle on about foreign election interference are playing right into China’s hands.
The result, he says, is the undermining of Canadians’ overall confidence in our democracy. This troubles the younger Trudeau.
After all, he too is a fan of Chairman Xi Jinping’s dictatorial grasp on communist China, and he has admitted to it. So what’s bothering him?
What’s bothering a prime minister who took forever and a day to kick the huge Chinese megafirm, Huawei, to the curb and therefore out of the running to assist in Canada’s next generation of the 5G Internet network?
If Canadians happen to think Trudeau has an unwise soft spot for China it was this incredible long delay in following the Five Eyes’ advice and giving Huawei the old heave-ho before it has the opportunity to breach Canada’s technological security infrastructure.
But, for a long while, it appeared as if Trudeau might be in subliminal cahoots with Beijing commies.
And now he wants political critics of China’s alleged interference in our 2021 election to be all hush-hush so Russia and China do not get the chance to destabilize our democracy, and for all parties to work together to make sure Canadians trust the electoral process.
This all came after one of his Liberal MPs, Jennifer O’Connell, accused Conservatives during a committee studying election interference of using “Trump-like tactics” when questioning past election results.
Then there was the Globe and Mail’s recent revelation that Beijing had religiously worked the 2021 election to secure the Liberals’ minority government and the defeat of a number of Conservative hopefuls.
This beefed up the concerns of the MPs on the Commons Procedure and House Affairs committee who were already looking into allegations of Chinese interference in the 2019 election to support 11 mostly Liberal candidates in the Greater Toronto Area.
Conservative MP Michael Cooper was the most vocal committee member, accusing the Trudeau Liberals of downplaying Chinese election fiddling and for taking no “meaningful action.”
He then said Trudeau appeared “content to turn a blind eye to this interference” because it suited him and the Liberals.
This is what wound up Jennifer O’Connell.
“I think that it’s dangerous for Canadians to go down this road,” she said. “We’ve seen our neighbors to the south and what happens when you start demonizing democratic institutions and undermining their legitimacy.”
The CSIS documents, on which the Globe based its exclusive and which only the Globe has seen, apparently revealed that Chinese diplomats and their proxies were instructed to discredit the Conservative Party, seen as too critical of Beijing, and detailed how they made cash donations to political campaigns, plus how they hired foreign Chinese students to volunteer full time in election campaigns.
Trudeau then tried to ho-hum it, saying that China’s attempted interference is “not a new phenomenon” and is ”something that countries around the world have been grappling with, and Canada is no exception.”
Cooper is asking for the gamut —emails, briefing notes, plus records of all conversations on foreign actors interfering in the 2019 and 2021 elections, including the documents the Globe obtained to base its story on.
O’Connell called the Conservatives’ tactics a “fishing expedition.” And accused them of “being reckless.”
Bardish Chagger, the Liberal committee chair, almost let the committee run out of control when Conservative MP Michael Barrett accused her of “playing dirty tricks”.
An exasperated Chagger said she refused to be talked to that way, and suspended the meeting until cooler heads prevailed. And eventually they did.
(In unrelated news, a Chinese buoy used for spying was recently found in the Canadian Arctic.)
