Conrad Black: Canadians Have a Right to Know the Scope of Chinese Interference in Our Affairs

Commentary The slowly emerging proportions of the interference by the People’s Republic of China in Canadian elections does not justify concern that illicit interference materially changed the result of the two general elections in 2019 and 2021 in which China is alleged to have intervened on behalf of a number of Liberal and Conservative candidates. Obviously this form of meddling is intolerable and must be discouraged, no matter how aggrieved the notoriously testy Chinese communist regime might become. Larger questions are raised over the level of cooperation between the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and the legal enforcement apparatus of the federal government. There is also a legitimate question of the extent of Chinese relations with the federal government and some of the personalities in it, and a cloud—though not necessarily an impenetrably thick cloud—continues to hover over the rather cavalier manner in which the prime minister, with the assistance of his close family friend, the former governor general David Johnston, proposed to keep the public substantially in the dark about the findings of the official investigation into the Chinese activities....