'Interference claim' makes Trudeau a joke: China Daily editorial

The headline of a video published on the official YouTube channel of Canada-based Global News on Sept 28 last year declared: "2 out of 3 Canadians believe Trudeau doesn't deserve to be re-elected."

Five months have passed but the awkward situation Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau finds himself in does not seem to have improved much. The Globe and Mail, citing unidentified intelligence sources, reported last month that Trudeau's Liberals were only reelected in the 2021 election as China worked to defeat Conservative politicians considered unfriendly to Beijing.

Since Trudeau said that "all political leaders agree that the election outcomes in 2019, and in 2021, were not impacted by foreign interference", it appears that Trudeau is hanging hope on the old trick of "blame China" to fix his image problems and boost his popularity.

On March 6, he announced that he would appoint an independent special rapporteur to investigate "alleged Chinese interference in Canadian elections". At the same time, he announced separate new probes into "suspected foreign interference" in the country.

It seems whenever things are going in a direction that is not in their favor, Western politicians always resort to summoning an imaginary threat out of thin air to divert people's anger from their failings.

Trudeau is not the first Western politician to make such a claim about China. Who knows how China, which they otherwise insist is about to collapse, has so much power to interfere in the elections of so many Western nations. And who knows why the public in these countries that Western politicians otherwise find so hard to convince they are the right person for the job are so gullible whenever it comes to their scaremongering about China.

The "China interference" claims are absurd and should be hard for anybody to take seriously. By resorting to this farce, Trudeau is only turning himself into a joke.

Trudeau didn't offer any support for his allegations, of course, but it is easy to know where he got his inspiration from. As Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin pointed out, it is known that the United States has interfered in at least 30 countries' elections since the end of World War II. That includes the 2018 presidential election in Venezuela, as revealed by former secretary of state Mike Pompeo in his new book Never Give an Inch.

As for Trudeau, if he wants to stay in power, he'll need to do better than making himself a laughingstock again by dusting off hoary old "China meddling" claims.