We may as well shut down the Foreign Interference Commission right now. No need to investigate further, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has spoken. Despite the fact that Trudeau isn’t scheduled to appear before the committee until next week, he’s already declared there was never any impact on the election due to outside interference.
Each party models what they expect the vote result to look like based on polling, information gathered by candidates and campaign workers via door-knocking and as a result of historical voting patterns. O’Toole said it was clear that many voters they expected to support them simply stayed home.
The inquiry also heard Wednesday from Conservative MP Michael Chong, NDP MP Jenny Kwan and former Conservative MP Kenny Chui. While Chong and Kwan won their seats, despite the actions of the Chinese government, Chiu is one of the Conservative seats that was lost to the Liberals after Chiu was targeted over his strong statements against human rights abuses by Beijing.
“It’s almost like I was drowning, and they were watching it,” Chiu said of his experience in the 2021 election. So, Trudeau gets to say that the integrity of the elections, in every riding, held. As long as you ignore all the problems.
Dismisses legitimate concerns raised by the inquiry as Conservatives looking for excuses for losing.
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Speaking at the Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference, O’Toole said his team knew they were going to lose on election night but were convinced that the Conservatives would still win up to 128 seats, but when the results came in, several ridings showed anomalies that could not be explained. They were the same ridings where China’s foreign interference had been anticipated.
“That night, there was already clear indication that a number of ridings were vastly outside of our modelling window, and the ridings were the same ridings that we had been complaining about with respect to foreign interference,” he said.
His team was hearing reports of misinformation in the Chinese community, such as how a future Conservative government would cancel the use of the popular Chinese social media platform WeChat or how they would require Chinese Canadians to limit their travels.
O’Toole noted there were “many horrific reports” about former Conservative MP Kenny Chiu, in particular, to the point where Chiu was “fearful” for his own well-being and his family’s. Chiu lost his seat in the 2021 election after being a target of criticism on WeChat.
O’Toole said that no immediate action was taken by the party during the campaign because his team was reassured that any potential threats were being monitored by the Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections (SITE) task force.
But a top-secret briefing note from the task force dated less than one week before the election reported there was a co-ordinated operation aimed at discouraging voters from voting Conservative.
The briefing note detailed media accounts on Chinese social media platforms sharing a narrative that O’Toole wanted to “break diplomatic ties with China.”
O’Toole said that this information was never raised to his party’s attention and that any concerns of foreign interference were “always downplayed” by the SITE Task Force.
'I thought I would be protected by my country. And I was deeply troubled and disappointed that I was exposed, and the government didn't seem to care,' Kenny Chiu said
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