Trudeau to Testify After Opposing Election Interference Inquiry

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada has long dismissed allegations that China interfered in his country’s past two general elections. Not a single electoral district was affected in 2021, he said last week, even though evidence of China’s meddling has kept growing in an ongoing foreign interference inquiry.

Mr. Trudeau is expected to testify in Ottawa on Wednesday at a public hearing of the inquiry, which he was pressured to call after an extraordinary series of leaks last year to Canadian news outlets of intelligence reports on Chinese interference.

At the hearing, Mr. Trudeau is likely to face sharp accusations that he did not take the threat of foreign interference seriously enough because his Liberal Party is believed to have benefited from China’s actions in the general elections of 2021 and 2019.

Mr. Trudeau’s much-anticipated testimony is expected to cap this round of public hearings, which over the past three weeks have featured his closest aides, intelligence officials and political party leaders, as well as politicians believed to have been the target or the beneficiary of Chinese state interference.

Intelligence officials have long warned about the threat of foreign interference to Canadian democracy.

But the public hearings — through the release of intelligence reports and the sworn testimonies of witnesses — have painted a fuller picture of how rising foreign powers like China and India have tried to advance their interests by increasingly tapping into diaspora communities and exploiting Canada’s democratic institutions.