Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said China has been attempting to interfere in Canada’s democracy for years, but Canadians can have “total confidence” in the integrity of its election results.
Mr Trudeau was responding to a Globe and Mail report that said Canada’s intelligence agency has evidence 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. Chinese officials expressed a preference to see Mr Trudeau’s Liberal Party win a minority government, according to the intelligence reports.
That’s exactly what happened in the September 2021 election, which Mr Trudeau called hoping to turn the success of the country’s Covid-19 vaccination campaign into a parliamentary majority. The Liberals won 160 seats, 10 short of majority rule.
Mr Trudeau, speaking to reporters on Friday afternoon in Ottawa, 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 non-partisan panel of civil servants that was regularly briefed by security services during the 2019 and 2021 elections and was tasked with ensuring foreign actors didn’t affect the outcome, the prime minister said.
“Canadians can have total confidence that the outcomes of the 2019 and the ’21 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 boasted in 2021 about how she helped defeat two Conservative MPs, the Globe said.
‘Clear message’
Even if the government panel found no reason to be concerned at the time, the new information should be fully investigated, said Ms Margaret McCuiag-Johnston, a former civil servant who now works in international affairs and public policy at the University of Ottawa.
She said there are numerous ways to investigate the allegations, such as having tax authorities check for potential election financing fraud in the districts where interference is alleged to have taken place.
Mr Trudeau should ensure this happens, Ms McCuiag-Johnston said – 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.”
The Globe 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 didn’t say if this happened in the 2021 campaign. In response to previous media reports that alleged China funnelled money to Canadian political candidates, Mr Trudeau said he’s never been briefed on that.
Conservatives, who form the main opposition party, have long been convinced that China interfered in the 2021 election against some of their candidates by spreading misinformation through social media and ethnic media outlets.
Conservative candidates were defeated in at least three districts with large ethnic Chinese populations in the suburbs of Vancouver and Toronto. One of them, known as 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,” Mr Dan Robertson, who ran election strategy for the Conservatives, said in a text message to Bloomberg News.
Another former Conservative campaign official 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,” Mr Walied Soliman, who was the party’s campaign chair, said on Twitter. “Our concerns were never taken seriously.” BLOOMBERG