“Interference” in Canadian elections is a vague description of what happened in the 2021 federal election. It would better be described as “China Chose the Winner”. The Canadian intelligence agency CSIS reported that the Chinese government wanted the Liberals to win with a minority government and worked to achieve that result. China arranged to target the election campaigns of only one Liberal Member of Parliament, but several Conservatives, including then-Party leader, Erin O’Toole. And that is only what has been disclosed to the public so far. There may have been more pro-Liberal, anti-Conservative efforts by China. Changing the outcome in several ridings might have been enough to give the Liberals a minority government.

According to Wikipedia, the Liberals set a record in the 2021 election for the lowest vote share of a party that would go on to form government, winning just 32.6 per cent of the popular vote, while losing the popular vote to the Conservatives, as they did in 2019. Yet the Liberals won 46 percent of the seats in Parliament, and, with the support of the New Democratic Party, became the government.

The winning Liberal party benefited from the Chinese government’s help. To expect the Prime Minister to create an impartial judicial inquiry to investigate why he won is to expect him to bite the hand that fed his election victory. Why would his self-interest tell him to do that?

Not surprisingly, facing calls for a judicial inquiry, Mr. Trudeau attempted a diversion. He appointed David Johnston a retired Governor General, as a “special rapporteur”. But Johnston appeared to be a bit too special to Mr. Trudeau. Now the opposition parties and the media are calling for a full public inquiry, conducted by a judge with no connections to the Prime Minister or the Liberal party.

However, there is some merit in David Johnston’s argument, in his public report, that judicial inquiries are often disappointing. I have participated in a few of them as a lawyer representing one of the parties. These inquiries can take years, and cost many millions. Then they may produce a report that is either so late that no one cares anymore or so lengthy and detailed that almost no one bothers to read it. But many public inquiries, though slow and costly, do provide useful evidence and make recommendations that governments implement.

It is often said that sunlight is the best disinfectant. A judicial inquiry that sheds a little sunlight on the process of the Chinese Communist Party working to elect a Liberal government can do that. Hopefully it can do more than that: show us how to prevent this from happening again.