Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he would appoint a special rapporteur to review reports of Chinese interference in the country's elections to decide whether a broad public inquiry is needed.. AP reports..

Trudeau also instructed a parliamentary committee on national security to look into classified information on the matter..

Last month, The Globe and Mail, citing intelligence sources, reported that China wanted Trudeau's liberals to be re-elected in the 2021 elections and was trying to help conservative politicians deemed unfriendly to Beijing lose..

Opposition parties in Canada demand full public inquiry. Trudeau declined to do so now, but said he would appoint an independent special rapporteur to decide if a public inquiry was needed.. Trudeau vowed to heed the recommendation.

“We will ask for an independent special rapporteur, and as one of the first tasks of his mandate, will provide the government with a recommendation on what the next step should be – whether it be an analysis, an investigation or a trial – and what the scope of this work could be,”.

He added that all political leaders agree that the results of the elections in 2019 and 2021 were not affected by foreign interference..

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Conservative opposition leader Pierre Poitier has previously criticized the idea of \u200b\u200binvolving a parliamentary committee. According to him, this will only lead to the fact that officials will provide opposition MPs with certain information, and then swear to keep it secret so that they can never talk about it again.. In his opinion, in fact, this would be a trick aimed at preventing anyone from discussing this topic..

A group of Canadian civil servants recently released a report concluding that there were attempts at foreign interference, but none of them affected the outcome of the election..

“We have known for a long time, and an independent report confirmed this last week, that the Chinese government and other regimes such as Iran and Russia have tried to interfere not only in our democracy, but in our country as a whole, whether in our institutions or in.

Meanwhile, Canadian police said they are investigating possible violations of the Security of Information Act over recent media reports of possible foreign interference in the election..

Daniel Beland, professor of political science at McGill University in Montreal, said the appointment of a special rapporteur is an attempt to buy time..

“The fact that he hasn’t ruled out a potential special public inquiry shows that there is now a real possibility, even if such an inquiry turns out to be a politically risky Pandora’s box for Trudeau’s liberals.”.

It really depends on what is revealed in the coming weeks and months, but the whole situation is turning into a serious political challenge for the liberals, which is unlikely to disappear anytime soon,” said Beland..

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Ottawa's open allegations of covert Chinese meddling schemes add another layer of complexity to tense diplomatic ties between the two countries..

Tensions between China and Canada escalated in late 2018 when Canadian police detained the chief financial officer of China's Huawei Technologies Co., after which Beijing arrested two Canadians on charges of espionage.. All three were released in 2021.