Don Martin: Trudeau can't ignore the dangers of Chinese meddling in Canada's elections

Oh no you don’t, Prime Minister.

Bombshell revelations that suggest Chinese agents actively, fraudulently and successfully manipulated Canada’s electoral integrity in the last two federal elections cannot be dismissed with the standard Justin Trudeau nothing-to-see-here shrug.

The allegations, based on top-secret Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) reports viewed by the Globe, are too insidious, too detailed and too important to ignore.

The Globe and Mail report suggests the ultimate goal was to help China’s preferred Liberals win just enough seats to secure another minority mandate, the better to keep Canada’s government beholden to opposition parties for survival while paralyzing Parliament with in-fighting and electoral uncertainty.

Added up, it’s jaw-dropping stuff that should be impossible for a sitting prime minister to ignore, even though the news dropped on the Friday before a long weekend with media largely fixated on the release of the Rouleau Report into the use of the Emergencies Act.

And yet, incredibly, Trudeau seemed far less concerned about the story than a CSIS leak he wants found and plugged.

• House committee to discuss expanding foreign election interference study

True, the government argued, its integrity panel gave both the 2019 and 2021 elections a clean bill of health. But it cannot confirm if the members of that panel actually saw the CSIS reports, which might have changed their conclusion.

And while Prime Minister Trudeau is correct in arguing a handful of riding changes from alleged Chinese manipulation would not be enough to change the general election outcome, wouldn’t any successfully foreign-manipulated riding results be far too many?

It defies belief that Trudeau would soft-peddle this story because China’s goal was to help elect his Liberal government, but there’s little else by way of an alternative explanation for this prime minister’s passive blindness to spy agency concerns while lasering in on finding the source of the leak.

There should be double-barrel cannon blasts of Liberal outrage. China’s ambassador should be summoned for a carpet crawl and possible expulsion. Some sort of independent probe into these explosive allegations should be launched as the prime minister’s bare-minimum response.

Yet the prime ministerial pattern seems pretty clear – if you see no evil, speak no evil and study no evil then no evil will be found.

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At very least Trudeau should do exactly what China was trying to prevent – follow the U.S. lead and create a registry of foreign agents in Canada. It’s a no-brainer, particularly in light of these revelations, but the Trudeau government is still stuck in musing mode about the concept.

China will obviously be emboldened by its election-manipulation missions in 2019 and 2021 and no doubt extend its helping hand to more agenda-friendly politicians in the next vote.

Keeping in mind this is a country where 50 swing ridings usually crown the victorious party leader as prime minister, so it wouldn’t take a dramatic escalation of Chinese interference to sway the outcome of a very close election, which already seems to be in the forecast for the next federal vote.

If this government refuses to exorcise foreign influence from Canadian democracy quickly and decisively, the outcome of a future federal election could well be made in China.

That’s the bottom line…