(Bloomberg) — China made some attempts to interfere in the last two Canadian elections but did not influence the overall outcome or undermine the integrity of the elections, a public inquiry found.
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“It is generally impossible to draw a direct line between a specific incident and the outcome of an election,” Commissioner Marie-Josée Hogue, a Quebec judge, said in an initial report released Friday.
“However, I can confidently conclude that the Liberal Party would have been in government in 2019 and 2021 with or without foreign interference.”
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ordered the investigation last year after a series of media reports cited classified intelligence memos that Chinese interference may have helped certain Liberal Party candidates get elected.
Trudeau initially refused to open an investigation because of the difficulty of publicly debating national security evidence, but eventually relented under pressure from opposition parties.
Several weeks of public hearings took place in the first months of 2024, including testimony from senior government officials, party campaign workers, representatives of diaspora communities and Trudeau himself.
Trudeau told the inquiry that Canada has a robust process for detecting and deterring foreign interference. He also said he doubted China would have preferred his re-election, given the severe diplomatic tensions between the two countries following Canada’s arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou and China’s subsequent detention of two Canadian citizens.
In her report, Hogue said that while several countries may have attempted to interfere, China “stands out as a major perpetrator of foreign interference in Canada,” according to Canadian security officials.
These officials assume that China “does not support any particular party, but rather supports policies and positions” that they believe are favorable to the government in Beijing, Hogue said.
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Much of the report focuses on a handful of local breeds that have allegedly been the subject of Chinese interference.
These include a nomination race in Toronto where China may have arranged for students to be bused in to cast their votes for a favored Liberal candidate, and an election race in suburban Vancouver that was covered in Chinese-language media and social media Misinformation was spread about a conservative candidate.
“I cannot rule out the possibility that the outcome of some individual races was influenced by foreign interference,” Hogue said. “However, in my view, the number of trips in question is relatively small and the ultimate impact of foreign interference remains uncertain.”
She also said foreign interference, once made public, would likely undermine Canadians’ confidence in the electoral system. “This is perhaps the greatest harm Canada has suffered from foreign interference,” she said.
Hogue said diaspora communities are particularly affected by foreign interference, which sometimes results in them being excluded from the political process.
The inquiry is now entering a second phase, examining how the public can be informed about the risk of foreign interference “without unnecessarily undermining public trust in a fundamentally sound system”. A final report is due December 31st.
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