China's enduring, manipulative love affair with the Liberals and the missing W in Canadian journalism

Plus! CTV and CBC set their hair on fire in battle with Conservatives while The Rewrite inspires Globe and Mail editorial on Carney’s suspect respect for convention

By now we all know that China works to influence Canadian elections in favour of the Liberal Party, but we still don’t know why or if anyone plans on doing anything about it.

We know the masters of the Middle Kingdom favoured the man they called “little potato” - former prime minister Justin Trudeau - and have acted again to help the man who ousted and replaced him, Mark Carney. But we don’t know why or if anyone complained.

We know that Carney, inexplicably, stood by one of his Toronto candidates, Paul Chiang, after the latter suggested constituents turn his Conservative opponent and democracy activist, Joe Tay, over to Chinese officials to collect a $1 million bounty. But we don’t know why.

Chiang resigned, apparently of his own accord, after police announced they were looking into the matter. His replacement, Peter Yuen, was also then tied to agents of the Chinese Communist Party and Carney again dug in to defend him and, as it turns out, himself. Following revelations by Canada’s election interference watchdog that Chinese agents were pumping Carney’s tires, the Liberal leader declared he had no idea why this would be occurring. He was further called upon to defend himself when the Globe and Mail reported that “during the Liberal leadership race Mr. Carney met with the (pro-Beijing) executives of the Jiangsu Commerce Council of Canada (JCCC), according to its website, which described his entry into politics as “an important turning point in the upgrading of China-Canada relations.”

Carney, reminiscent of Trudeau’s Trumpian accusations of “false” reporting in the 2019 SNC Lavalin/Jody Wilson-Rabould affair, declared the Globe report to be fake news. (This was before the Liberal war room was caught planting fake buttons in an attempt to trick journalists into labeling Conservatives as Trump supporters.)

The Globe then produced photographs, at which point Carney, who over his career has not been unfriendly to the Red Dragon, further explained that as a politician he has his picture taken with lots of people and the JCCC overstated the encounter.

I have some sympathy for this explanation but very little for many of those who embraced it.

That’s because all you have to do is Google (Conservative leader) “Pierre Poilievre meets far right extremist” and you’ll see a lengthy string of outraged media reports and statements from Liberal MPs and cabinet ministers posted after Poilievre pulled over last year to chat with some highway protesters at the New Brunswick-Nova Scotia border. Some of those folks, it turned out, were pretty out there, although there’s little chance their influence on political society matches that of the good old boys from the JCCC.

There is a clear pattern of Chinese attempts to influence our elections in favour of the Liberals and we still don’t know why and neither Carney nor his predecessor seem inclined to stop it. All we know is that no one knows “nuthin’ ‘bout “nuthin’.”

The Globe and others such as Terry Glavin and Sam Cooper have done a lot of digging into this to help us understand the first four W’s - who, what, when and where.

But, as is too often the case, most of us still don’t know the why. The fifth of journalism’s Five W’s is missing. There have to be reasons why the Chinese Communist Party prefers - as apparently does US President Donald Trump and most of downtown Toronto - the Liberals over the Conservatives. But until the nation’s newsrooms remember there are not just four but five W’s, an underserved public can only speculate.

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Politicians most certainly have an obligation to take questions. Reporters, in turn, need to remember that they, too, serve the public and should shape their questions and conduct accordingly.

The behaviour displayed by a couple of reporters last week was embarrassing.

First, Judy Trinh of CTV News all but chained herself to a fence protesting Poilievre’s disinterest in her questions. I get that from the journalists’ points of view, the Conservative leader is being far too coy. From the Conservatives’ POV, however, Trinh has made clear through her posts on Twitter over a period of time that she is unlikely to treat them fairly. Why, they wonder, should they bother taking questions from Trinh when they are likely to consist of nothing other than tiresome demands to know why Poilievre chose not to apply for security clearance (which was what she was shouting about).

(If I may digress, journalists and security officials have had a great many months to scrub Poilievre for reasons why he might fail such a test. While several have written stories (Maclean’s, National Observer) and even books (Mark Bourrie) clearly painting Poilievre in a negative light, no such evidence has been uncovered. The question has been asked and answered and asking it more loudly and frequently is not going to change the answer.)

Raffy Boudjikanian of the CBC startled even CBCNN host Natasha Fateh when she teed him up for a report on Poilievre’s campaign stop in Milton, ON. The latest announcement from the Conservatives was of less interest to the reporter than the fact they weren’t taking questions from the CBC, which has long had an adversarial relationship with Conservatives. This is unfortunate, but Boudjikanian could have ended his report with a side note on the fact Poilievre won’t take his questions. Leading with his distress was a bad call, particularly given the conflict of interest the CBC is involved in with Carney promising to shower it with money and Poilievre vowing the opposite.

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As first revealed in The Rewrite a week ago, Carney has been taking advantage of new rules he apparently made up that allow him to leverage his incumbency and reinvent convention.

If you missed it, you can read all about it here. When I first raised the issue on Twitter/X, I was chided by Sean O’Shea, according to Global one of the nation’s “most tenacious” reporters. The Globe and Mail took a more serious approach that resulted in an editorial stating “there is no justification for Mr. Carney stepping back into the role of prime minister for calls with the leaders of Mexico, Germany and the United Kingdom on three separate days. The readout of the call with German Chancellor Olaf Schulz, which in part “highlighted the successes of Hannover Messe [a trade show],” is a particularly striking example of just how non-urgent those calls were.”

On Friday, after a rough week, Carney again suspended his campaign and fled to Ottawa to meet cabinet “as part of our ongoing response to President Trump’s tariffs.”

The only thing that happened on Trump’s tariffs was that he suspended the latest ones for 90 days. This abuse of the caretaker convention - he did it again Saturday by calling NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte - and thumbing of his nose at the Globe and Mail was noted by a couple of pundits. They, three weeks too late, appear to have twigged to the fact Carney’s Liberals are playing fast and loose with rules designed to respect a free and fair election. After his Friday meeting, Carney did not take questions. And although one reporter shouted “So you're just campaigning now, are you?" CTV’s Trinh did not complain.

(Peter Menzies is a commentator and consultant on media, Macdonald-Laurier Institute Senior Fellow, a past publisher of the Calgary Herald, a former vice chair of the CRTC and a National Newspaper Award winner.)