A Chinese-Canadian lawmaker testified at a foreign interference hearing on Tuesday that a busload of high schoolers from China showed up to vote for his nomination in a Liberal Party race in 2019.
Han Dong, a member of the Parliament of Canada from Toronto, said that he had met with these students and encouraged them to support him, but that he hadn’t contracted the bus that brought them to his district on nomination day.
He said he wasn’t sure “whether all those students voted for him but believes that it is likely most did,” according to a written submission given to the public inquiry ahead of the hearing.
In the submission, he acknowledged for the first time that he’d neglected to mention the bus when speaking to federal inquiry officials in February, according to The New York Times.
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Dong said his wife had only “reminded” him of it a day before he was due to testify.
Dong, who left the Liberal caucus to sit as an independent last year after his relationship to the Chinese government was first challenged, denied receiving help from Beijing during the election.
Asked if he believed that China had gotten involved in Canadian politics, Dong said he’d never seen “any evidence” of interference. But when pressed on the matter, reports said, he admitted it was “possible.”
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Source Agencies
