Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said China has been attempting to interfere in his country’s democracy for years, but Canadians can have “total confidence” in the integrity of its election results.
Trudeau was responding to a Globe and Mail report that said Canada’s intelligence agency has evidence that China employed “a sophisticated strategy” to try to disrupt the country’s federal election in 2021.
The newspaper reported that Chinese diplomats worked through proxies to persuade Chinese Canadians to vote against certain Conservative Party candidates.
Photo: Reuters
Chinese officials expressed a preference to see Trudeau’s Liberal Party win a minority government, the newspaper cited intelligence reports as saying.
The party did form a minority government after the election, which Trudeau had called hoping to turn the success of the country’s COVID-19 vaccination campaign into a parliamentary majority.
The Liberals won 160 legislative seats, 10 short of majority rule.
Speaking to reporters on Friday afternoon in Ottawa, Trudeau said he has acknowledged before that “China is trying to interfere in our democracy, in the processes in our country, including during our elections.”
“This is not a new phenomenon, and this is something that countries around the world have been grappling with for a long time, and Canada is no exception,” he said.
Canada had a nonpartisan panel of civil servants that was regularly briefed by security services during the 2019 and 2021 elections and was tasked with ensuring that foreign actors did not affect the outcomes, the prime minister said.
“Canadians can have total confidence that the outcomes of the 2019 and the 2021 elections were determined by Canadians, and Canadians alone, at the voting booth,” he said.
Included in the classified reports is the revelation that China’s former consul-general in Vancouver in 2021 boasted about how she helped defeat two Conservative lawmakers, the Globe and Mail said.
Even if the government panel found no reason to be concerned at the time, the new information should be fully investigated, said University of Ottawa Graduate School of Public and International Affairs senior fellow Margaret McCuiag-Johnston, a former civil servant.
She said there are numerous ways to investigate the allegations, such as having tax authorities check for potential election financing fraud in districts where interference is suspected.
Trudeau should ensure this happens — not just to get to the bottom of it, but also “to demonstrate to Canadians that they’re acting, and to send a very clear message to China that they will not get away with this in the future,” she said.
The Globe and Mail report said Chinese tactics can include undeclared cash donations to political campaigns, as well as reimbursing donors who make legal donations to preferred candidates, but it did not say if this happened in the 2021 campaign.
In response to previous media reports that alleged China funneled money to Canadian political candidates, Trudeau said he has never been briefed on that.
The opposition Conservative Party has long been convinced that China interfered in the 2021 election against some of its candidates by spreading misinformation through social media and media outlets focusing on Chinese Canadians.
Conservative candidates were defeated in at least three electoral districts with large ethnic Chinese populations in the suburbs of Vancouver and Toronto.
One of them, Richmond Centre, was especially shocking to the party, as it was deemed to be a safe seat.
“Normal voting patterns don’t explain what happened in these ridings,” former Conservative Party advertising director Dan Robertson said.
Former Conservative campaign official Walied Soliman said he raised concerns about this to Canadian intelligence and government officials during the election.
“Our party was seeing clear signs of tampering in ridings with substantial Chinese diasporas,” Soliman wrote on Twitter. “Our concerns were never taken seriously.”
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