Terry Glavin;

It was one of Parliament’s only open windows into the Trudeau government’s secretive dealings with Xi Jinping’s regime in Beijing. It was one of the few vantage points available for Canadians to get a glimpse of the Chinese regime’s influence operations in Canada.

Now it’s gone, at least for now, and while the Liberals’ aversion to any scrutiny of its China diplomacy is well known, it’s falling to the Conservative Party to shake off suspicions that its own internal calculus is the reason why the House of Commons Special Committee on Canada-China Relations is no more.

“Conservatives are not going soft on China,” Michael Chong, the Conservatives’ shadow minister for foreign affairs, told me Tuesday. “It’s not true. It’s just not true. I want to scream it from the rooftops. The Conservative Party’s position on China remains unchanged, full stop.”

And it is true enough, as far as it goes, but it’s going to be hard for the Conservatives to argue that they’re not getting squeamish about their party’s focus on the Xi regime’s malignant conduct in China, in Canada and abroad — no matter how broadly the party’s policy accords with overwhelming Canadian public opinion.

[…]

The Conservatives managed to establish the Special Committee over the Liberals’ objections in December 2019, but Conservative leader Erin O’Toole won’t be seeing to its restoration when Parliament resumes January 31. Chong makes a persuasive case that the reason is largely a matter of logistics.

Even so, it’s not a good look. David Mulroney, a senior fellow with the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy and a former ambassador to China, described the Special Committee’s demise as a “kneecapping,” describing the event this way: “A committee where we learned about Chinese influence operations is shot down by a Chinese influence operation.”