China Accused of Meddling in Canada’s Federal Election Last Year

OTTAWA (LifeSiteNews) — Witnesses have testified to Canada’s House affairs committee last week that agents of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tried to sway votes away from the Conservative Party of Canada during the 2021 federal election. 

Per Blacklock’s Reporter, Lyall King, director of the federal Communications Security Establishment, testified to the committee last week that during the 2021 federal election – which led to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau being re-elected for a third term – there were “activities observed certainly during the election” which indicated Communist Chinese interference. 

Tara Denham, who works as the director general of human rights at the Department of Foreign Affairs, backed up the claim, but stated the department was “not able to verify the behaviour was directed by a state or whether it was organic or whether it was an intermingling of the two.” 

Marcus Kolga of DisinfoWatch also testified there was Chinese interference, saying that in the weeks before the 2021 federal election, “we were alerted to Chinese state media narratives that directly targeted the Conservative Party and its leader Erin O’Toole.”  

“Simultaneously members of the Chinese-Canadian community brought to our attention similar narratives appearing on local Canadian Chinese-language media platforms and a Chinese local media channel WeChat,” stated Kolga, adding that “WeChat is commonly regarded as the tool used by the Chinese government for surveillance and repression.” 

Kolga continued by saying that in September of 2021, only days before the election, the CCP-owned newspaper the Global Times ran articles “attacking the Conservative Party foreign policy platform.” 

“The Global Times article threatened Canadians that if they elected a Conservative government, Canadians should expect ‘a strong counterstrike and Canada will be the one to suffer’,” he explained, noting that “At the same time an anonymous article was posted to WeChat targeting an incumbent MP Kenny Chiu.” (ER: Chiu is a former Conservative MP for a riding just outside of Vancouver)

Kolga, when asked how much this affected the election, said it was “hard to measure the impact of these sorts of operations on election outcomes.” 

Chiu, who is a former Conservative MP, has also alleged that there were indeed CCP operatives working to undermine his campaign.

In the 2021 federal election, Chiu lost by only 3,477 votes to Liberal candidate Parm Bains in the Steveston-Richmond East riding in British Columbia.  

As noted by Blacklock’s Reporter, McGill University researchers found Chiu’s allegations to be true, concluding that there was indeed a disinformation campaign put in place against him amongst the local Chinese-speaking community.  

This is not the first allegation of Chinese interference in Canada’s democratic process.

As recently reported by LifeSiteNews and other media outlets, Trudeau was given a warning earlier this year that agents of the Chinese Communist regime had been allegedly funding federal candidates in the 2019 federal election.  

 While O’Toole was overall unpopular with social conservatives, as he took a pro-LGBT and pro-abortion stance, he did take a hard stance against the CCP, with one of the party’s 2021 platform prescriptions including a plan to confront the CCP’s human rights abuses. 

In early 2021, O’Toole said that China should not be allowed to host the 2022 Winter Olympics due to their “genocide” of the Uyghurs. 

The Trudeau government, on the other hand, has been unwilling to declare the CCP’s treatment of its Uyghur population a “genocide,” despite credible evidence. 

Trudeau has also openly praised China’s “basic dictatorship,” while also allowing troops from China’s Liberation Army (PLA) to train in Canadian military bases, according to military documents. 

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