CANADA: On Monday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau would initiate a special investigation to probe a public inquiry into reports of Canada’s elections being interfered with by China. Classified information on the matter would be taken up by the Parliament’s national security committee.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police said on Monday that they are looking into whether the Security of Information Act was broken. This is because there have been new reports in the media about foreign interference in the last two federal elections.
A newspaper source cited non-transparent intelligent sources, reported in February that China waited in anticipation to see Trudeau’s liberals getting elected again in the 2021 elections and their attempts at defeating Conservative politicians that seemed unprofessional to Beijing.
A political science professor at McGill University in Montreal, Daniel Beland, mentioned that the government is buying time by appointing a special investigator. He said, “The fact that he didn’t rule out a potential special public inquiry suggests this is now a real possibility, even if such an inquiry would appear as a politically risky Pandora’s box for Trudeau’s Liberals.”
Opposition parties have deemed an explicit public inquiry necessary, which Trudeau has declined as of now but will name a special rapporteur who will fabricate decisions on the requirement of the public inquiry.
The Canadian PM stated, “We will ask the independent special rapporteur, as one of the first tasks of their mandate, to provide the government with a recommendation as to what the appropriate next step be, whether it be an inquiry, an investigation, or a judicial review, and what the scope of that work may be.”
Trudeau also mentioned that “all political leaders agree that the election outcomes in 2019, and 2021, were not impacted by foreign interference. But even if it didn’t change the results of our elections, any interference attempt, by any foreign actor, is troubling and serious.”
Canadian Conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre, mentioned on Monday that the idea of a Parliamentary committee being involved was unethical, whereas a group of civil servants has issued a report inferring that foreign endeavours were indeed present, but they did not affect the ultimate result of the election.
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