Justin Trudeau questions the accuracy of recently leaked “top secret” CSIS documents alleging China meddled in the 2021 election. His father’s dealings with China have already caught the attention of the RCMP and FBI. I’ll come back to that below.
The Globe and Mail reported last week that classified documents held by Canadian security intelligence showed Beijing actively intervened to ensure the election of the Trudeau government and the defeat of several Conservative candidates.
The Global News network, also a beneficiary of an intelligence leak, revealed Justin Trudeau had been warned that China had secured Liberal candidate Han Dong’s election in a Toronto ride in 2019. The Liberals refused to revoke Dong’s appointment because CSIS wanted it. according to Global.
Kisses from Beijing
A Commons committee will hear Foreign and Intergovernmental Affairs Ministers Mélanie Joly and Dominic LeBlanc, as well as representatives from the RCMP and CSIS, on the matter this week. The parliamentary committee is already examining allegations of Chinese interference in the 2019 election.
China’s interest in the Liberals and the Trudeaus goes back a long way. The Canadian press revealed in 2019 that CSIS destroyed its files on Pierre Trudeau in 1989 instead of handing them over to the national archives.
What could it contain? Certainly information on Trudeau Sr.’s relations with Communist China. The RCMP Security Service – the predecessor of CSIS – and the FBI have been monitoring PET for more than 30 years.
Trudeau: The FBI file
The 151-page dossier, including several fully censored and others with redacted paragraphs, indicates that the Bureau considered Trudeau Sr. a sympathizer of Communist China. There it is reported that Trudeau visited China twice. Beijing saw him as a partner in certain important files. Trudeau recognized the Mao regime before the United States.
We also note in the file his extremist background before joining the Liberal Party of Canada: a sympathizer of the far right during the war, he became a sympathizer of the far left after the war, eventually becoming a liberal.
The FBI file was released under the US Freedom of Information Act a few months after Trudeau’s death in September 2000. The criteria are clearly not the same on both sides of the border.
A former CSIS executive confided in me about thirty years ago that the Trudeau dossier mentioned, among other things, his friendship with a “Chinese from McGill” (student or teacher?) who was believed to be an agent from Beijing. According to him, the Trudeau file was destroyed without due process. It would be interesting if a parliamentary commission investigated the destruction of these documents.