At the ASEAN Summit in Cambodia this weekend, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was asked by Global News reporter Mackenzie Gray if he plans to bring up allegations of China’s interference in Canadian elections with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the upcoming G20 summit.
Mr. Trudeau demurred.
“We created a special independent commission made up of top officials and security experts to ensure that our elections continue to be free and fair in Canada,” he said. “And in both the 2019 and 2021 elections, they reported that our elections unfolded with integrity.”
The Prime Minister’s response did not acknowledge that a week earlier, a top official at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) told a House of Commons committee that China was a “foremost aggressor” on foreign interference, while acknowledging that Canada lacks the tools to properly assess and respond to the threat posed by Beijing. Years of reports – from Rapid Response Mechanism Canada (a research unit based out of Global Affairs), from the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, from Canadian disinformation monitoring group DisinfoWatch, and from Canada’s own intelligence agency, as recently reported by Global News – have all suggested that Beijing or pro-Beijing actors meddled in recent Canadian elections.
So Mr. Trudeau was asked again: “Are you going to raise this specific issue with [Mr. Xi]?”
“As always I will raise issues of human rights, issues of matters that preoccupy Canadians, with any and all leaders that I engage,” he said.
It was a curious response to a straightforward question, a hedge that echoed the sort of defiance Americans would often hear from former president Donald Trump when he was asked about Russian meddling in American elections. Indeed, even when presented with evidence from his own intelligence agencies, Mr. Trump would often equivocate: “It could have been other people in other countries,” he said in 2017.
Mr. Trudeau’s sidestepping of the question wouldn’t have been unusual from this Prime Minister months or even weeks ago. Ottawa has maintained a sort of timid ambivalence toward Beijing for years, even in the face of human rights atrocities allegedly being carried out by the Xi regime, retaliatory trade bans, and of course, the more than 1,000 days during which two Canadian citizens were effectively held hostage in response to the RCMP’s arrest of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou to extradite her to the United States.
But just last week, Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly signalled that the days of Ottawa tiptoeing around the sleeping giant are over.
In a speech ahead of the release of the government’s new Indo-Pacific strategy expected later this month, Ms. Joly laid out a new approach to China that represents a significant departure from that of even the recent past. While pragmatic about the need to continue trade with the world’s second-largest economy, Ms. Joly called China an “increasingly disruptive global power” and indicated that Canada will increase investment in stationing diplomats abroad to better understand how China “thinks, operates and plans.” When asked specifically about the Global News report stating that CSIS had briefed Mr. Trudeau on Chinese interference in the 2019 election, Ms. Joly replied: “We won’t let any foreign actor meddle in our democracy, period.”
The Conservative Party has long insisted that Canada needs to get tougher on China, and it maintains that Beijing was behind the spread of misinformation on platforms like WeChat about Conservative candidates during the last election. One particular target was former B.C. MP Kenny Chiu, who put forward a private member’s bill in 2021 to create a foreign-agent registry in Canada, modelled after legislation enacted in Australia in 2018, which would have required individuals acting on behalf of a foreign power to be publicly registered. But the effort was misrepresented in diaspora communities as an effort to “suppress” all Chinese-Canadians, and Mr. Chiu’s bill died when the last election was called; similar legislation brought forward by Senator Leo Housakos has been hung up in the Senate for months.
That needs to change, now. Indeed, if Ottawa is really serious about taking a new, tougher approach to Beijing, it offers the Liberals and Conservatives an opportunity to work together on an issue that is of nonpartisan importance. The integrity of Canadian elections affects everyone – what good is democracy if citizens don’t believe we come by it honestly, after all? – and it should be a matter for which there is no equivocation. Mr. Trudeau should pledge to bring up election interference with Mr. Xi at the G20 not because it will deter Beijing’s clandestine operations to any means, but as a signal to all Canadians – not to mention to our allies – that on the matter of election interference, we are determined and united.