Things are not Going as the Conservatives had hoped

The Conservatives in this country were hoping that the allegations of Chinese interference in the 2019 election would do to the Trudeau Liberals what the Sponsorship Scandal did to the Martin Liberals.

Of course they were always dreaming because the Sponsorship Scandal was actual, provable wrongdoing by people working for the Liberal Party of Canada, while the stories we have been seeing in the news about Chinese interference have been based on unproven allegations and innuendo. I have stated many times that in the 40+ years I have been observing Canadian politics there have only been two instances of true corruption at the Federal level. One of those instances was the fiasco of the Sponsorship Program. Although it was a good idea it was hijacked by unscrupulous people who helped themselves and the Liberal Party to some of the funds of that Program. The Liberals deserved their fate for that event.

The Chinese interference in our political system is not the same. No one party has benefited from their interference. All parties, at both the Federal and Provincial level, have probably benefited from it and I would wager a fair amount of money that none of them knew they were benefiting from it. I refuse to believe any politician in this country would knowingly take support from a sometimes hostile foreign government.

However, the Conservatives were hoping that they could infer just that by focusing on one such instance in 2019. That is why they want a Public Inquiry that focuses on only that one instance. Anything beyond that would only prove that they have also been compromised by Chinese interference in our politics, which would waste a scandal that would finally bring down the Liberals. It was never going to happen but the current iteration of Conservatives in this country have never let reality get in the way of a good story.

So any action by the government that did not give them that one focused public inquiry was always going to be met with outrage. That and the fact that the Conservatives have decided their best hopes of winning an election is to stoke that outrage in their followers. Hence the reaction to the announcement that David Johnston has been appointed the Special Rapporteur.

At the risk of prejudging his recommendations I think it is safe to say that he will not recommend just focusing on that one instance in 2019 if he decides that some sort of public inquiry is necessary to get to the bottom of foreign interference in our elections. 

In the end the idea that a public inquiry into foreign interference in our elections would bring down the Liberals was always something of a pipe dream.