The government is still evaluating the consequences of expelling a Chinese diplomat reportedly involved in targeting a Conservative MP, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on May 5.
“This is a big step, not a small step to expel diplomats. It’s one that has to be taken with due consideration on all the potential impacts and all the very clear messages that it will send,” Trudeau said while attending the Liberal Party convention in Ottawa.
“This is something that the minister is looking at very carefully, looking at all the information around it and she will make a decision in due course.”
Joly warned that Beijing would probably retaliate if the diplomat is expelled and said she was drawing from the experience of the arbitrary detention of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor.
Kovrig and Spavor were kept in captivity by Beijing for over 1,000 days in retaliation for Canada honouring its legal obligations towards the United States by keeping under house arrest Huawei executive Meng Wangzhou, who was accused of fraud.
Chinese Ambassador to Canada Cong Peiwu was summoned by Global Affairs Canada on May 4 over the revelations that a Chinese spy service and Zhao Wei had targeted MPs after the 2021 House of Commons declared the treatment of Uyghurs in China a genocide.
MP Chong has decried the fact that he wasn’t warned two years ago about the threat and that the diplomat is still in Canada.
“Once it becomes public that a diplomat is engaged in coercive and intimidating activities targeting Parliament, targeting elected Members of Parliament, then the government has no choice but to have this individual removed from Canada,” he told reporters on May 4.
“To do otherwise is to put a giant billboard up to the world advertising that Canada is open for authoritarian states to send agents here to conduct threat activities against Canadian citizens and that’s unacceptable.”
Trudeau said on May 5 that the CSIS information about threats to MPs had never made it to him or his chief of staff, after saying two days earlier it hadn’t left CSIS.