November 16 (EUROPA PRESS) –
Chinese President Xi Jinping has accused Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of behaving inappropriately and leaking to the media the content of a previous meeting between the two leaders during the G20 summit in Bali.
“Everything we discussed was leaked to a newspaper; that’s not appropriate,” Xi told Trudeau through an interpreter during an informal meeting at the G20 summit in Bali, adding that the previous conversation did not take place “in that way”, according to the Canadian channel CBC.
For his part, Trudeau replied that from Ottawa they believed in “free, open and frank dialogue.” “We will continue to seek to work together constructively, but there will be things we disagree on,” he said.
Xi blurted out that “the conditions” for such a dialogue had to be created first, after which he shook his hand and walked away. The interaction was recorded by journalists and posted on Twitter by a CTV National News reporter, Bloomberg has reported.
After that, Trudeau assured at a press conference that the talks with Beijing were not going to be easy. “We know that China is a major global player in the economy and has a very big impact on events around the world,” the premier said.
In this sense, he explained that Ottawa would be in the international arena “to question Human Rights and the values that are important to Canadians”, as reported by the newspaper ‘The Globe and Mail’.
In the leaked meeting in question, prior to this tense exchange between the two leaders, Canadian media reported that the Canadian prime minister had raised “serious concerns” with the Chinese president about interference by Beijing in Canada’s internal affairs. .
Specifically, according to the CBC, Trudeau expressed his disagreement with the arrest and detention of two Canadians, as well as with the reports published on the Global News television network about the clandestine financing of at least a dozen candidates in the presidential elections of 2019.
Ottawa, which has been reluctant to criticize Beijing for the sake of promoting economic and trade ties, has toughened its anti-China rhetoric after accusing Beijing of “aggressively interfering” in Canadian politics.
