Canada To Investigate If China Interfered In Its 2021 Elections

On Monday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that he will be appointing a special investigator to determine whether there should be a public inquiry into reports of communist China interfering in Canada’s election.

The radical leftist prime minister is also instructing a Parliament national security committee to examine classified information on the matter.

Despite now being concerned over Chinese interference in elections, Trudeau previously expressed admiration for China’s dictatorship.

When asked during a “Ladies’ Night” Liberal fundraiser what country he admired most other than Canada, Trudeau responded: “There’s a level of admiration I actually have for China. Their basic dictatorship is actually allowing them to turn their economy around on a dime and say, ‘We need to go green, we want to start investing in solar.’”

Citing unidentified intelligence sources, the Globe and Mail reported in February that China had preferred to see Trudeau’s Liberal Party reelected in Canada’s 2021 election. The report also alleged that China had worked to defeat Conservative politicians that were considered unfriendly to the communist country.

Opposition parties have demanded the Canadian government conduct a full public inquiry into the matter.

However, Trudeau has declined to initiate a public inquiry at the moment — instead naming an independent special rapporteur to investigate whether the inquiry is necessary. The prime minister has claimed that he will abide by the recommendation made by the independent investigator.

“We will ask the independent special rapporteur, as one of the first tasks of their mandate, to provide the government with a recommendation as to what the appropriate next step be — whether it be an inquiry, an investigation or a judicial review — and what the scope of that work may be,” Trudeau stated.

Essentially, the authoritarian prime minister has decided to investigate whether to investigate the problem.

Daniel Béland, a political science professor at McGill University in Montreal, spoke out about the news — asserting that Trudeau’s appointment of a special investigator was just a blatant attempt to buy time.

“The fact that he didn’t rule out a potential special public inquiry suggests this is now a real possibility, even if such an inquiry would appear as a politically risky Pandora’s box for Trudeau‘s Liberals,” the professor said.

“It really depends on what will be discovered in the following weeks and months but the entire situation is turning into a major political challenge for the Liberals that’s unlikely to go away anytime soon,” Béland added.

Opposition Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre also condemned Trudeau’s actions — criticizing the involvement of a Parliament committee in the process.

He argued that the actual result of this would be that officials present opposition lawmakers with “some information and then swear them to secrecy so they could never speak about it again.”

“So effectively, that would be a trick to try and prevent anyone debating the subject,” Poilievre added.

Trudeau also claimed that “all political leaders agree that the election outcomes in 2019, and in 2021, were not impacted by foreign interference. But even if it didn’t change the results of our elections, any interference attempt, by any foreign actor, is troubling and serious.”

According to Trudeau, a panel of civil servants concluded in a recent report that there were foreign attempts to interfere in Canadian elections — though they asserted that none of these attempts had affected the outcome of the election.

“We have long known, as an independent report confirmed again last week, that the Chinese government, and other regimes like Iran and Russia, have attempted to interfere not just in our democracy, but in our country in general, whether it’s our institutions, our businesses, our research facilities, or in the daily lives of our citizens,” the prime minister said.

Maxime Bernier, founder and leader of the People’s Party of Canada and former member of the Conservative Party, also condemned Trudeau’s decision and questioned the impartiality of the special investigator — pointing out that Trudeau had previously named “a former head of the Trudeau Foundation to conduct a previous inquiry, and a former Liberal staffer to investigate the Emergencies Act.”

Meanwhile, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police revealed on Monday that they were investigating potential violations of the Security of Information Act in response to recent media reports about foreign interference in Canada’s last two federal elections.