A top-secret report drafted a week before the 2021 Canadian general election warned of ongoing attempts by the Chinese government to meddle with specific races, saying Beijing had “identified Canadian politicians deemed” opponents of China.
Those politicians had become the targets of a shadowy media campaign, with suspected ties to the Chinese government, that spread “false narratives” about them and encouraged Canadians to vote against them.
Information about possible interference in Canada’s latest general election was included in documents released Wednesday at a public hearing before a commission investigating foreign interference. Their release followed Canadian press reports last year that outlined the Chinese government’s actions and raised concerns about the vulnerability of Canada’s democratic institutions.
Canadian politicians believed to be targeted by Beijing also testified at Wednesday’s hearing, saying they had drawn the ire of the Chinese government by criticizing its human rights record, among other issues.
Kenny Chiu, a former Vancouver-area member of Parliament whose 2021 loss has been at the center of investigations into Chinese election interference, he said he was dismayed to learn Wednesday that intelligence officials were aware of China’s actions at the time of the election but had not told him.
“It’s almost like I’m drowning and they’re watching,” said Chiu, a Conservative Party member who was a fierce critic of Beijing’s security crackdown in Hong Kong. He was also the main supporter of a bill to create a registry of foreign agents in Canada to try to curb foreign interference.
The public hearings in Ottawa are part of a federal investigation into interference in Canada’s political system by China and other nations, particularly in the last two general elections. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau agreed to launch the inquiry in September after facing growing criticism from the media and opposition politicians.
The Chinese embassy in Canada has denied interfering in Canadian or any other country’s elections.
The Chinese government is believed to have supported candidates considered friends of Beijing, most of whom belonged to Trudeau’s Liberal Party, Canadian media reported.
In contrast, the Chinese government is believed to have stood up to Conservative Party candidates, who have taken a harder line on human rights and a range of other China-related issues. The intelligence report drawn up a week before the 2021 election said the media campaign aimed “to discourage voters from voting for the Conservative Party”.
Since President Xi Jinping’s rise to power, China has stepped up efforts to influence elections in Canada and other countries, according to intelligence officials, academics and members of the diaspora.
The Chinese government has typically expanded its influence through diaspora community organizations, Chinese-language media, and social media around the world. Community organizations have become more and more they fear offending the Chinese government, according to Chinese-Canadian activists in Vancouver and Toronto.
Jenny Kwan — a veteran Vancouver member of Parliament who Canadian intelligence said had been a target of Chinese interference — testified Wednesday that Vancouver’s once-friendly Chinese-Canadian community organizations had distanced themselves from her since 2019.
“At first, it was a little more subtle, then it became more and more obvious,” said Ms. Kwan, a member of the New Democratic Party who has been a vocal critic of China’s human rights record.
An intelligence report released Wednesday says that in Vancouver, in the 2019 election, Chinese government proxy agents “coordinated the exclusion of particular political candidates, perceived as “anti-Chinese,” from participating in local community events related in the elections.”
In the 2021 election, Chiu had been leading in polls but lost his race after facing what he called a “tsunami” of untraceable attacks on the Chinese-owned networking app, WeChat. The attacks portrayed Mr. Chiu, who is Chinese Canadian, as a traitor to his community and his alien registry bill as a racist attack on all people of Chinese descent.
The attacks, which occurred toward the end of the campaign in 2021, had an immediate impact, Chiu testified. When he went knocking on doors, he found that his one-time supporters had turned against him. He said he remembered the face of a woman who, upon seeing him, showed “a deep sense of pain.”
“He says he won’t vote for us because we hate China, because we hate it,” Chiu said.
Testifying Wednesday, Erin O’Toole, the Conservatives’ 2021 leader, said she believes the Conservatives lost five to nine districts to foreign interference, including Chiu’s.
“Certainly nowhere enough to change the election results,” O’Toole said, referring to the overall outcome. “But for the people who held those seats, if they faced intimidation or repression, their democratic rights were trampled on by foreign actors.”
In the 2021 election, the Conservatives won the popular vote, but Trudeau’s party won the most seats and remained in office as a minority government.
