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    Claims of Chinese Election Meddling Put Trudeau on Defensive

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    Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada is battling critics and leaked intelligence reports that opponents say show he ignored warnings of Chinese interference in past elections.OTTAWA — The leaked intelligence reports have set off a political firestorm. They describe plans by the government of China and its diplomats in Canada to ensure that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party took power in the last two elections, raising troubling questions about the integrity of Canada’s democracy.But as two prominent Canadian news organizations have published a series of leaks over the past month, Mr. Trudeau has refused calls to launch a public inquiry into the matter, angering political opponents and leading to accusations that he is covering up foreign attempts to undermine his country’s elections.The news reports do not present any evidence that the Chinese carried out any of their plans for meddling or changing election outcomes. And an independent review released this month as part of Canada’s routine monitoring of election interference upheld the integrity of the 2019 and 2021 votes.Even so, the leaks pose a risk for Mr. Trudeau of appearing weak in the face of potential Chinese aggression and indecisive as a leader acting to preserve election integrity. His political opponents have accused him of being disloyal to Canada.As the intelligence leaks have flowed, Mr. Trudeau has shifted from trying to dismiss them and refusing to discuss them because of secrecy laws, to announcing a series of closed-door reviews related to election integrity.Still, he continues to rebuff repeated calls for a public inquiry — which would include not just an independent investigation, but public hearings — arguing that other inquiries are more appropriate. He said he would only establish a public inquiry if one of his other reviews concludes it’s necessary.“Canada has some of the best and most robust elections in the world,” Mr. Trudeau told reporters. “All Canadians can have total confidence that the outcomes of the 2019 and 2021 elections were determined by Canadians, and Canadians alone, at the voting booth.”The Liberals have accused Conservatives of undermining the public’s confidence in Canada’s electoral system by falsely claiming that the government ignored warnings of potential Chinese interference. Liberals have also accused Conservatives of using the leaks to fan fear and suspicion of Chinese-Canadian elected officials, in an effort to discredit them and undermine their participation in electoral politics.The political attacks on Mr. Trudeau have been spearheaded by the leader of the Conservative Party, which says it is raising legitimate threats to Canadian democracy. “He’s covered it up, even encouraged it to continue,” said the leader, Pierre Poilievre, who suggested that “the prime minister is acting against Canada’s interest and in favor of a foreign dictatorship’s interests.”Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the Conservative Party, suggested that Mr. Trudeau was “acting against Canada’s interest.”Blair Gable/ReutersCurrent and past inquiries about recent elections are not transparent and, in some cases, they lack independence from the Liberals, Mr. Poilievre said. “He wants closed and controlled and we want an open and independent inquiry to make sure it never happens again,” Mr. Poilievre said in the House of Commons.Heightened scrutiny of China’s efforts to subvert Canada’s political process — and corresponding pressure on Mr. Trudeau — started in mid-February after the publication of an article in the Globe and Mail, a Toronto newspaper.According to the newspaper, its reporters had seen unspecified secret and top secret reports from the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service, commonly called CSIS, that described the intentions of Chinese officials to manipulate the last two elections. The goal, according to the paper’s description of the leaks, was to prevent a win by the Conservative Party, which the Chinese viewed as excessively hard line toward China.A Chinese consular official boasted to her superiors that she had engineered the defeat of two Conservative candidates in 2021, the Globe and Mail reported, though the newspaper provided no evidence to support her claim.The Globe and Mail’s articles and reports on Global News, a broadcaster based-in Canada, said the leaks described orders given to Chinese diplomats based in Canada and, according to the news reports, involved 11 of Canada’s 338 electoral districts.The leaks to both news organizations described illegal cash payments to Liberals and illegal hiring by Chinese officials or their agents in Canada of international students from China, who were reportedly then presented to Liberal campaigns as volunteers. Mr. Trudeau and other Liberals have characterized the reports as “inaccurate.”Some of the supposed plans would have been difficult to execute within Canada’s electoral system, analysts said, because Canada limits and tightly controls campaign spending and fund-raising.“It does come across as a highly unsophisticated understanding of Canadian politics,” said Lori Turnbull, an associate professor of political science at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.An independent review released this month upheld the integrity of the votes in 2019 and 2021.Cole Burston/BloombergAside from originating with the intelligence service, little has been revealed about the exact nature of most of the documents leaked to the two news outlets and it is unclear if the reporters saw them in their entirety. The sources for the information contained in the intelligence reports haves also not been revealed.“It’s not necessarily evidence that a crime took place,” said Stephanie Carvin, a professor of national security studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, and a former Canadian government intelligence analyst. “We frankly don’t know. The way I feel about this issue is that it’s a puzzle. There’s a thousand pieces that the service has and we’re seeing 10 of them.”Even so, Conservatives have been able to push Mr. Trudeau into a corner, while casting doubt on the allegiance of certain Chinese-Canadian elected officials in the Liberal Party, such as Michael Chan, a former Liberal cabinet minister in Ontario’s provincial government.Global News reported last month that CSIS said that at Beijing’s request, Mr. Chan arranged to replace a Liberal member of Parliament from Toronto with a different candidate.Mr. Chan called that report nonsense because he’s never had the authority to orchestrate such a thing. “I don’t know where the heck CSIS gets this information,” he said. Mr. Chan and other Chinese-Canadian officials have been subject to increased scrutiny and what he says are false, racially motivated accusations that he was under the influence of officials in the Chinese consulate in Toronto.He has asked Mr. Trudeau to open an inquiry into “racial profiling” of the Chinese community by the intelligence service. “The informant who informed them just got it wrong, completely wrong,” he said.Michael Chan, a former Liberal cabinet minister in Ontario’s provincial government, has asked Mr. Trudeau to investigate “racial profiling” by CSIS.Galit Rodan/The Canadian Press via, The Associated PressMr. Trudeau initially responded to allegations of Chinese interference in elections by urging the public to wait for the release of a routine review that Canada uses to monitor foreign interference in elections.That report, made public on March 2, concluded that while China, Russia and Iran tried to interfere in the 2019 and 2021 elections, they had no effect on their results. But that did not quell the calls from opposition parties for a public inquiry.Mr. Trudeau recently announced several moves to examine foreign interference. And he committed to holding a public inquiry if it is recommended by a special reviewer who will make recommendations on preventing election subversion.“We all agree that upholding confidence in our democratic process in our elections in our institutions, is of utmost importance,” Mr. Trudeau said. “This is not and should never be a partisan issue.”On Friday, the Globe and Mail published an essay it said was written by its source, who was only described as “a national security official.” The newspaper’s source said that he or she acted because after years of what he or she saw as serious escalation of the threat from foreign interference in votes, “it had become increasingly clear that no serious action was being considered.”The writer lamented that the political debate sparked by the leaks has been “marked by ugliness and division,” and added that he or she does not believe that any foreign power has “dictated the present composition of our federal government.”David J. Bercuson, the director emeritus of the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary in Alberta, said he believes that Mr. Trudeau will eventually have to allow a public inquiry.Mr. Trudeau, Professor Bercuson, has yet to “do anything to resolve the growing mistrust.”Mr. Trudeau has committed to holding a public inquiry if it is recommended by a special reviewer.Carlos Osorio/Reuters More

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      in Elections

      Canada Knows China Tried to Meddle in Its Elections, but What Should Come Next?

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      Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has rejected calls by the opposition for a full public inquiry.Prime Minister Justin Trudeau may have hoped that this week’s independent review of China’s meddling in the last two Canadian federal elections would tamp down debate on the subject in Parliament. Instead, the report seemed to revitalize the opposition parties.Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has rejected calls for an inquiry into election subversion.Carlos Osorio/ReutersHere’s a short version of that report, which I wrote about when a redacted version was made public late Tuesday: There is evidence that China, Russia and Iran tried to subvert the 2019 and 2021 elections, but there is no evidence that their efforts “impacted” the results.[Read: Foreign Efforts to Subvert Canada’s Last 2 Elections Failed, Report Says]The federal government has long accepted that the Chinese government tried to sway those elections. And since November, a House of Commons committee has been looking into attempts by foreign governments to meddle in elections.But the issue flared up on Feb. 17 when The Globe and Mail published an article it said was based on secret and top-secret reports prepared by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the agency most English-speaking Canadians know as CSIS.According to the article, the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party did not want a Conservative government to win the 2021 election because it feared it would take a hard-line approach to China. The Chinese leadership, however, wasn’t entirely happy with the Liberals, either, and wanted to hold them to a minority government. While that ultimately was the result, it’s difficult to see how any outside government could engineer such an outcome.The documents, as reported by The Globe, laid out a variety of strategies, not all of them obviously feasible. China asked its diplomats in Canada to swing the vote in favor of the Liberal candidates in constituencies with large Chinese populations. And the documents the newspaper cited included boasts some of those diplomats conveyed back to Beijing that they had successfully defeated Conservative candidates, although there is nothing to back their claims.More on ChinaA Surge in Activity: After being battered by the pandemic in 2022, Chinese factories bounced back with vigor in February: Manufacturing activity rose to its highest level in more than a decade.Erasing Vestiges of ‘Zero Covid’: The ruling Communist Party is waging a propaganda campaign to rewrite the public’s memory of its handling of the pandemic, which included some of the harshest restrictions in the world.Desperate for Babies: For generations, Chinese parents chafed under the country’s one-child policy. Now, facing a declining birthrate, China wants lots of children — but many families don’t.Courting Europe: Beijing, in urgent need of reviving its economy, wants to mend ties with Europe but is struggling to create distance between itself and Moscow.Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, citing secrecy laws, has not addressed any of the specific allegations, but he has criticized the article and other reports for containing inaccuracies, without elaborating.The Conservatives, who of course were the target, swiftly demanded a public inquiry, and Pierre Poilievre, their leader, charged that Mr. Trudeau was covering up China’s actions.“He’s perfectly happy to let a foreign, authoritarian government interfere in our elections as long as they’re helping him,” Mr. Poilievre said at a news conference.The New Democrats also joined the call for the inquiry, and on Thursday, the committee looking into election interference passed a motion, not binding on the government, from one of its members. It called for a public inquiry into foreign interference in Canada’s democratic institutions and during Canadian elections.Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative leader, has charged the prime minister with trying to cover up Chinese meddling.Blair Gable/ReutersOn Friday, Mr. Trudeau again told reporters in Winnipeg that such a step would be unnecessary. He noted that a panel of senior public servants, who work with law enforcement and intelligence agencies during elections, found that no foreign government had managed to subvert the vote. In addition to the public hearings of the House of Commons committee, Mr. Trudeau said, a special committee of members of Parliament who meet in secret and have access to confidential intelligence was reviewing the issue.Wesley Wark, a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation and a former intelligence adviser to the federal government, told me that while more needed to be done about election subversion by foreign governments, an inquiry was not the way to go. It would, he said, most likely be conducted by a judge with little or no background in intelligence, would have little or no access to secret intelligence and would not issue its findings until after the next election.Instead, Mr. Wark said, he wants both the government and CSIS to follow Australia’s lead when it comes to interference by China in Canada.“The Australians are willing to to really talk about the threats very bluntly and provide, without getting into the very sensitive information, case-by-case examples of how these dangers are unfolding,” Mr. Wark told me.By contrast, he said, it has been over a year since David Vigneault, the director of CSIS, has made a public speech, and the latest report on foreign interference in Canada from the intelligence agency is from 2021.“It’s just not fulfilling what I think of as its responsibility as an authority on threats to the security of Canada to help educate Canadians about that,” Mr. Wark said.More broadly, Mr. Wark faulted the government for, in his view, being “super reluctant” to expel diplomats who are interfering in Canada’s affairs, whether through disinformation campaigns, illegal campaign activities or threatening and intimidating nationals of their countries who now live in Canada.That reluctance, he said, appears to come from a fear of retaliation. But he disagrees with allowing such concerns to hold back the response.“Expulsions are a way of sending a message to the governments engaging in that kind of behavior, and also sending a message to Canadians that we’re on this and we’re not going to turn a blind eye,” Mr. Wark said. “Expulsions and more naming and shaming are very appropriate.”Trans CanadaMigrants arriving in Quebec after illegally crossing the border from the United States.Nasuna Stuart-UlinNorimitsu Onishi, my Montreal-based colleague, has looked into the rise in the number of people who are illegally crossing into Canada from the United States: “Shielded by geography, strict immigration policies favoring the educated and skilled, and its single border with the United States, Canada is now being forced to deal with an issue that has long bedeviled other wealthy Western nations: mass illegal border crossings by land,” he writes.The New York Times Magazine this week includes a in-depth look at a truly revolutionary stroke treatment that promises to save millions of lives. Eva Holland, a writer based in Whitehorse, examined it in action in Calgary for her article.This week, the government of Canada joined those in other nations and banned the TikTok app from government devices out of security concerns.The Canadian actor Eugene Levy is, to put it mildly, not keen on travel. He discussed with Anna Peele what it had taken to persuade him to star in a travel television series.In her review of “Old Babes in the Woods,” a collection of stories by Margaret Atwood, Rebecca Makkai writes: “If you consider yourself an Atwood fan and have only read her novels: Get your act together. You’ve been missing out.”Brendan Fraser, the Canadian American actor who has been nominated for an Oscar for his performance in “The Whale,” spoke about his comeback with Kyle Buchanan, the awards season columnist for The New York Times.A native of Windsor, Ontario, Ian Austen was educated in Toronto, lives in Ottawa and has reported about Canada for The New York Times for the past 16 years. Follow him on Twitter at @ianrausten.How are we doing?We’re eager to have your thoughts about this newsletter and events in Canada in general. Please send them to nytcanada@nytimes.com.Like this email?Forward it to your friends, and let them know they can sign up here. More