Canada’s Liberal Party won a relatively close 2021 election, ending up with more seats in Parliament than the opposition Conservatives, despite getting fewer popular votes (Conservatives got 33.74% of the popular vote versus 32.62% for the Liberals).
It is now apparent that China interfered in the election to reelect Canada’s Liberal government. As Becker News notes:
Chinese diplomats quietly issued warnings to “friendly” influential Canadians in early 2022, advising them to “reduce their contact with federal politicians to avoid being caught up in foreign-interference investigations by Canada’s spy agency,” the Globe and Mail reported in a bombshell story that is rapidly circulating among the Canadian population.
According to the report, “secret and top-secret Canadian Security Intelligence Service documents viewed by The Globe and Mail reveal how China sought to protect its network of ‘Canadian friends,’ a euphemism for Chinese Communist Party (CCP) assets. The Globe and Mail described the CCP ‘Friends’ circle as “a community it relies on to build relations, influence and covertly gather information from MPs and senators.”
Apparently, one of the CCP’s ‘Friends’ is none other than Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
The Globe reported on Friday how China employed “a sophisticated strategy to seek the return of a minority Liberal government and to defeat Conservative politicians considered to be unfriendly to Beijing in the 2021 federal election.”
The tactics, outlined in secret CSIS reports, included “disinformation campaigns, undeclared cash donations and the use of international Chinese students, studying in Canada, as campaign volunteers to support preferred Liberal candidates.”
The classified documents show that “Chinese influence operations went beyond election interference, employing tactics to target Canadian legislators and sway public opinion through proxies in the business and academic communities,” the Globe added.
In response to The Globe story, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told reporters at a Friday news conference that he “expects CSIS to find out who is leaking the secret reports, and stuck to his long-held view that Chinese interference operations did not affect the overall results of the 2019 and 2021 elections,” the report noted.
“It’s certainly a sign that security within CSIS needs to be reviewed. And I’m expecting CSIS to take the issue very seriously,” Trudeau said.
But Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre accused Justin Trudeau on Friday of “ignoring Chinese interference in the most recent federal election because Beijing’s efforts were aimed at helping the Liberals — but Trudeau said his government is taking the threat seriously,” the report added.
“Justin Trudeau knew about this interference, and he covered it up because he benefited from it,” Poilievre told a news conference. He did not cite evidence beyond the Globe story.
“He’s perfectly happy to let a foreign, authoritarian government interfere in our elections as long as they’re helping him.”
The Globe and Mail reported Friday that secret and top-secret documents from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) said Beijing sought to ensure a Liberal minority government and the defeat of several Conservative candidates in the 2021 federal election. A former Chinese consul-general in Vancouver bragged about her efforts in helping to defeat two Conservative MPs, according to the reports detailed in the Globe story.
Poilievre said Friday he finds it hard to believe Trudeau wasn’t aware of CSIS’s findings.
Meanwhile, Canadians have taken to the streets with slogans such as “China elected Trudeau” to express their alarm at the reports.
Liberal Prime Minister Trudeau isn’t just soft on communist China. He also has a soft spot for some other Communist rulers.
He called longtime Cuban dictator Fidel Castro “a legendary revolutionary and orator” who “made significant improvements to the education and healthcare of his island nation.”
But this praise for Castro was misplaced. As Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler noted, “As for health care and education, Cuba was already near the top of the heap before” the communist “revolution. Cuba’s low infant mortality rate is often lauded, but it already led the region on this key measure in 1953-1958, according to data collected by Carmelo Mesa-Lago, a Cuba specialist and professor emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh.” But in more recent years, “Cuban hospitals” were “ill-equipped,” and by 2004, Cuban pharmacies stocked “very little and antibiotics” were “available only on the black market.”
Cuba’s dismally-bad health system virtually collapsed amid the coronavirus epidemic, even though Cuba, an island, was far less impacted by the epidemic than countries like Brazil, Argentina, and Peru. One Cuban wrote that the “healthcare system has crumbled and they are unequipped to contain the covid outbreak,” with people languishing in dirty hospitals. “For years now the Cuban health care system has been suffering due to a lack proper infrastructure, medicine, equipment, and personnel. The government simply doesn’t fund the healthcare system.”
The Cuban healthcare system has been bad for years. A 2014 news report noted that “hospitals in the island’s capital are literally falling apart.” Sometimes, patients ”have to bring everything with them, because the hospital provides nothing. Pillows, sheets, medicine: everything.”
The longstanding badness of Cuba’s healthcare system debunks claims made by Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders in the past. As president, Obama lauded the “enormous achievements” in “health care” made by Cuba’s communist regime. Senator Sanders claimed that communist dictator Fidel Castro “gave” Cubans “health care.”
In reality, Cubans had health care before communists took over the country, and Cuba has made less progress in health care and life expectancy than most of Latin America in recent years, thanks to communism.
Before the communist takeover, Cubans lived longer than people in virtually all other Latin American nations. But that changed under the communist regime that took over in 1959. By 2012, Chileans and Costa Ricans lived slightly longer than Cubans. Back in 1960, Chileans had a life span seven years shorter than Cubans, and Costa Ricans lived more than two years less than Cubans on average. In 1960, Mexicans lived seven years shorter than Cubans; by 2012, the gap had shrunk to just two years.
(Today, people live almost as long in Cuba as more prosperous Chile and Costa Rica — if you accept the rosy official statistics put out by Cuba’s communist government, which many people do not. Cuba has been credibly accused of hiding infant deaths, and exaggerating the life spans of its citizens. If these accusations are true, Cubans die years sooner on average than Chileans or Costa Ricans).
Under communism, Cuba has fallen behind in basic living conditions. As the progressive economist Brad DeLong pointed out:
[Before communism, Cuba] was a developed country. Cuba in 1957 had lower infant mortality than France, Belgium, West Germany, Israel, Japan, Austria, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Cuba in 1957 had doctors and nurses: as many doctors and nurses per capita as the Netherlands, and more than Britain or Finland. Cuba in 1957 had as many vehicles per capita as Uruguay, Italy, or Portugal. Cuba in 1957 had 45 TVs per 1000 people — fifth highest in the world. …Today? Today the UN puts Cuba’s HDI [Human Development indicators] in the range of … Mexico.
As Michael Giere notes, Cuba was prosperous before Castro’s communists seized power:
A United Nations (UNESCO) report in 1957 noted that the Cuban economy included proportionally more workers who were unionized than in the U.S. The report also stated that average wages for an eight hour day were higher in Cuba than in ‘Belgium, Denmark, France, and Germany.’… PBS explained in a 2004 retrospective, that …
Havana [prior to Castro] was a glittering and dynamic city. Cuba ranked fifth in the hemisphere in per capita income, third in life expectancy, second in per capita ownership of automobiles and telephones, first in the number of television sets per inhabitant. The literacy rate, 76%, was the fourth highest in Latin America. Cuba ranked 11th in the world in the number of doctors per capita. Many private clinics and hospitals provided services for the poor. Cuba’s income distribution compared favorably with that of other Latin American societies. A thriving middle class held the promise of prosperity and social mobility.’
But after communist dictator Castro took over, the prosperity came to an end:
Castro’s destruction of Cuba cannot be over dramatized. He looted, murdered, and destroyed the nation from the ground up. Just one factoid explains it all; Cubans once enjoyed one of the highest consumption of proteins in the Americas, yet in 1962 Castro had to introduce ration cards (meat, 2 ounces daily), as food consumption per person crashed to levels not seen since the 1800s.
Hunger became so widespread that a visiting Swedish doctor, Hans Rosling, had to warn Cuba’s communist dictator in 1992 about widespread protein deficiency among Cubans. Dr. Rosling visited Cuba in 1992. Roughly 40,000 Cubans had been reported to have been experiencing “visual blurring and severe numbness in their legs.”Rosling traveled to the heart of the outbreak, in the western province of Pinar del Río. It turned out that those stricken with the disorder all suffered from protein deficiency, because the government was rationing meat.
