Prime minister was made aware of Liberal nomination meeting incident by CSIS, foreign interference inquiry hears

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Among this week’s many disturbing revelations about the Trudeau government’s official indifference to Beijing’s interference operations during the 2019 and 2021 federal elections, what might come as the biggest shock to most Canadians is just how easy it was for Chinese high school students to be bused in to vote for Beijing’s favoured candidate in a Liberal party nomination race in the Ontario riding of Don Valley North.

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The candidate was Han Dong, whose last-minute admission to Justice Marie-Josée Hogue’s public inquiry into election interference — that he’d personally recruited the students — was a shocker, too. So was the Canadian Security Intelligence Service brief to the effect that the students appeared to have been coerced by a proxy of China’s Toronto consulate, and warned that they’d face reprisals if they refused to go along.

The Liberal party saw nothing amiss about foreign students showing up to vote en masse for Dong, who subsequently stepped away from the Liberal caucus to sit as an independent while a melodrama derived from leaked CSIS reports about his conduct sorted itself out. The party’s rules say that anyone over the age of 14 who is “ordinarily resident in Canada” can vote in party nominations and leadership races. CSIS also says the students not resident in the Don Valley riding were provided with falsified documents by the Chinese consulate.

But none of this will come as a surprise to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, because he’s known about all of this from the beginning. CSIS alerted him to the Don Valley North goings on four years ago. Trudeau said nothing about it, and he did nothing about it.

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