After months of resisting the idea, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has announced a major public inquiry tasked with investigating how China has meddled in Canadian politics.
The reversal, amid
miserable domestic polling numbers and intense pressure from the opposition parties and media, comes after more than a year of revelations about Beijing’s efforts to interfere in Canada—largely to the advantage of Trudeau’s Liberal Party.
en.wikipedia.org
The forthcoming report promises to be deeply uncomfortable for the Canadian government in Ottawa. Since he first came into office, Trudeau—like his predecessors—has attempted a tricky balancing act with the Chinese regime, promoting trade and diplomacy with Beijing whilst trying to find some recourse for human rights abuses, illiberal trade practices, and foreign meddling.
en.wikipedia.org
Trudeau has styled himself as a global crusader against foreign meddling—at least when it carried Russian President Vladimir Putin’s fingerprints. Now, like
Australia and the
United States before it, Canada is grappling with tough questions. How was such a brazen interference campaign allowed to continue uninterrupted for so long? Why was the public kept in the dark about it? And did Trudeau’s own policies encourage these covert operations?
Just as it was beginning to tackle these questions in earnest, Ottawa made the stunning accusation that New Delhi was also meddling in its affairs in a far more severe manner — by, allegedly, murdering a prominent activist.
Now it must figure out how to assert its sovereignty again. And the best place is to start is by understanding how it got here.
A new inquiry may expose Beijing’s reach in Ottawa.
foreignpolicy.com
Amid the India-Canada diplomatic row, a senior journalist from Canada has said that there is a big spectre of foreign interference from China in the country.
Daniel Bordman's comments come as tensions continue to flare between India and Canada after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's explosive allegations of a "potential" involvement of Indian agents in the killing of Sikh separatist leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar on his country's soil on June 18 in British Columbia. India had designated Nijjar as a terrorist in 2020.
India angrily rejected the allegations as "absurd" and "motivated" and expelled a senior Canadian diplomat in a tit-for-tat move to Ottawa's expulsion of an Indian official over the case.
The journalist, in an interview with
ANI, said there is an enormous threat of Chinese meddling in Canada as Justin Trudeau's Liberal party has, during several election cycles sought support from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), regarding which there is a story in Canada to move the spectrum away from Chinese foreign involvement.
"If you want to have some Canadian context about what's going on and why he may have done this, here's what I think is maybe the leading theory we can say as to why Trudeau has started to fight with India.
In Canada, we have this big, big spectre of foreign interference from China. That's a major scandal right now. It's Justin Trudeau's Liberal party, was getting help from the CCP at different points in elections... It's a whole big thing that we need an investigation into," he told the news agency.
So in order to shift the spectrum from Chinese foreign interference, we have a story in Canada, which is essentially a story about Pakistani foreign interference, being framed as a story of Indian foreign interference to cover up the real story, which is Chinese interference," he said.
Amid the India-Canada diplomatic row, a senior journalist from Canada has said that there is a big spectre of foreign interference from China in the country.
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