Justin Trudeau is facing his own version of “Russiagate” — but will there be a Mueller Report?

The prime minister seems to be slow-walking efforts to investigate Chinese electoral interference in Canada

Up till now, charges that Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau was some Communist double-agent felt like the hackiest flavour of right-wing paranoia — the kind of accusations levelled by a sort of conservative boomer whose personal Cold War will never end. The type who believes the PM is the literal bastard-spawn of Fidel Castro.

Recent leaks from Canadian intelligence that China’s Communist government actively sought Trudeau’s reelection in 2019 and 2021, however, have thrust the topic of the prime minister’s loyalties into the political mainstream. In a recent press conference, Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre held tight to what’s become his preferred line of attack in the aftermath of the revelations, blasting Trudeau for “working against the interests of his own country and his own people… in favor of a foreign dictatorship’s interests.” 

Based on what’s been revealed to date, the support Trudeau’s Liberal Party received from the Chinese regime appears to have not been substantive enough to have affected either election’s ultimate outcome and was initiated by China. Nevertheless, summaries of leaked documents from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service published in the Globe and Mail and Global News paint a vivid picture of the extent Chinese diplomats were enthusiastically organizing all manner of overt and covert pro-Liberal activism during the last two Canadian elections. This included fundraising for Liberal parliamentary candidates and propagandizing on their behalf, all animated by the conclusion that “the Liberal Party of Canada is becoming the only party that the PRC [People’s Republic of China] can support,” given the increasingly strident anti-Beijing position of Trudeau’s Conservative rivals.

Such fresh reporting fleshes out earlier, vaguer stories about Chinese political interference in Canada, confirming Beijing has been operating a longer-running, more elaborate, and more explicitly pro-Liberal plot than was previously known.

Canada’s current state of affairs thus resembles the early days of “Russiagate” in the United States: the period after it had become clear that the Russian government had worked to swing the 2016 election in favor of Donald Trump, but before it was fully known to what degree Team Trump collaborated with the project. That question was ultimately adjudicated by the 22-month Mueller Investigation, whose extensive report documented the extent to which Trump campaign operatives knew and wanted the Russian help they were receiving, as well as the degree they sought to obstruct information about those Russian contacts from the public, Congress, and the Mueller team itself.

It does not appear, however, that a Mueller-style investigation will be coming to Canada any time soon. The Trudeau government has so far resisted calls to convene a public inquiry into the matter of Chinese  electoral interference, preferring instead to simply appoint former Governor General David Johnston as “rapporteur” — a punt that delegates the responsibility for any future investigations to a Liberal-friendly member of the Ottawa establishment with no national security experience.

In the interim, parliament’s committee on procedure and House affairs has launched a public investigation of its own, but Liberal members of that committee have repeatedly filibustered the summoning of high-ranking witnesses from within the Liberal Party and prime minister’s office. 

Given there have been conflicting reports regarding to what extent Trudeau knew about the scope and extent of Chinese electoral interference — up to and including the possibility he may have been warned about one of his parliamentary candidates being a Beijing proxy — the Liberals are certainly behaving like a party with “something to hide” in the words of New Democratic Party head Jagmeet Singh. 

Conservatives, meanwhile, are feeling increasingly vindicated in their darkest suspicions about the hidden ideological agenda of a prime minister who — as they never cease to remind — once named China’s “basic dictatorship” as his second-favourite country.  Trudeau’s party has spent much of the last two decades with stars in its eyes over the supposedly opportunities of closer Chinese-Canadian ties, while some of their legislative initiatives, like tighter regulation of the internet, certainly feel not dissimilar from the sort of things Beijing would dream up. 

Here too we find echos of Mueller. Gathering evidence that Putin favored Trump helped validate progressive allegations that Trump’s vision for America was a right-wing government in Moscow’s authoritarian model, and a foreign policy backing Russian interests. The Mueller Report, though never as much of a “smoking gun” as some hoped, undeniably helped shorten the president’s political life. 

Coverups may be worse than crimes when it comes to scandals, but coverups are only troubling to the degree it’s reasonable to suspect they’re hiding something damning. That a high-placed someone (or someones) in Trudeau’s party may have consciously sought, solicited, accepted, or allowed the Chinese support they received is hardly beyond the realm of believability, and in that sense demands more closure than the government has shown interest in providing. 

In stalling, the prime minister has made a risky gamble. As much damage as an open-ended, Mueller-style investigation could do, the rapacious imaginations of his critics will always be worse.