The slowly emerging proportions of the interference by the People’s Republic of China in Canadian elections does not justify concern that illicit interference materially changed the result of the two general elections in 2019 and 2021 in which China is alleged to have intervened on behalf of a number of Liberal and Conservative candidates.
Obviously this form of meddling is intolerable and must be discouraged, no matter how aggrieved the notoriously testy Chinese communist regime might become. Larger questions are raised over the level of cooperation between the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and the legal enforcement apparatus of the federal government. There is also a legitimate question of the extent of Chinese relations with the federal government and some of the personalities in it, and a cloud—though not necessarily an impenetrably thick cloud—continues to hover over the rather cavalier manner in which the prime minister, with the assistance of his close family friend, the former governor general David Johnston, proposed to keep the public substantially in the dark about the findings of the official investigation into the Chinese activities.
The repertoire of activity by which the Chinese attempt to influence and/or intimidate Canadians is not unusual for countries that engage in that kind of activity, but it is unusual for Canadians to be subjected to such unacceptable levels of intimidation or incentivization by a foreign power.
Actively intervening in elections of mature democracies with stable institutions is a relatively rare and ambitious undertaking for the sort of states that would be tempted to do it. Of course, there were communist parties in many democratic countries including Canada, and in Italy and France for decades they received more than 20 percent of the ballots cast in the general elections of those countries. As late as 1969, the French communist candidate for president, Jacques Duclos, gained 21 percent of the vote in the general election, and in 1976 the Italian communist leader, Enrico Berlinguer, led his party to 33 percent of the votes cast, only four points behind the governing Christian Democrats. In 1948, the Italian communists won over 31 percent of the vote, despite the American threat to terminate Marshall Plan aid in the event the communists formed part of the government, and the insinuation by Pope Pius XII that a communist vote was an act of self-excommunication. It was widely alleged that among more impressionable communicants in the Italian Roman Catholic Church, the clergy reminded the faithful that when they voted, “God sees you, but Stalin doesn’t.”
It will be recalled that the initial proposal of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was that a non-public inquest be conducted into these matters involving two monitoring parliamentary committees, but that the amount of information released to the public would be determined by a special rapporteur, David Johnston. The full idea of setting anyone up as a judge of what was appropriate for the delicate ears of the public to hear was one that jangled in the minds of most people. Johnston’s close relations with the Trudeau family and the second Trudeau government did little to allay those concerns.
CSIS Director David Vigneault pointed out that intelligence is not evidence, by which he presumably meant that intelligence is not necessarily conclusive evidence. This pattern of going to conspicuous lengths to avoid embarrassing the prime minister and his colleagues is probably appropriate, and it is certainly not David Johnston’s role to facilitate the amplification of unjustified criticism of the government. But experienced public officials know that if they give the media the impression that they are tiptoeing around controversial public issues to spare the leaders of the regime embarrassment, it only incites greater skepticism among the media and in the country.
I doubt that anyone in a position of authority in Canada has behaved with impropriety in these matters, but the country has a right to know how far the Chinese have gone in threatening the relatives of Canadians and particularly relatives of Canadian MPs in the People’s Republic, as well as the full extent of all of its other unacceptable activities in this country, including in matters of disease control and research, the so-called Chinese police forces operating out of consulates, and the full scope of the extraordinary activity of Chinese students in Canadian universities.
There is also the vague feeling that this is all taking too long. No one wants to provoke compromised relations with any foreign country, and particularly not so important a country as China. (The prime minister might have thought of that before his ill-considered outburst against the government of India some months ago, or even his call to his partisans to prepare for a “Team Canada” response to a possible return of former U.S. President Trump.”)
In general, we seek cordial relations with all powers and particularly the United States. Canada does not claim nor wish to assert any rights greater than what is universally considered to be the full independence of a sovereign state. We seek nothing more and should accept nothing less, but the application of that policy to the question of Chinese meddling in Canadian elections has been amateurish, which makes it unconvincing and leaves the country uneasy. Presumably we will get better at this as we become more experienced at it.
This government’s prolonged effort at national self-casting of Canada as the Pure Snow-Maiden of the North never convinced anyone except a few Justinian yokels drinking their own bath-water.
