Whatever happened in 2019 and 2021, China has succeeded in starting a political frenzy

"These are serious allegations that need to be treated seriously," NDP House leader Peter Julian said during an appearance on CBC's Power & Politics on Monday.

Given that Julian said so while relaying his party's call for a public inquiry into allegations of Chinese foreign interference in Canadian elections, it seems fair to assume he doesn't see Parliament as a place where serious allegations can be handled seriously.

And maybe he's right about that — even if it's a particularly disappointing admission in the midst of what is supposed to be a discussion about maintaining public trust in Canada's democratic institutions.

There is certainly a need for seriousness at this moment. Because whatever China tried to do, it has succeeded in triggering a political and media feeding frenzy that threatens to do some real damage to Canadian democracy, regardless of what the truth might be.

It's important to note that an independent panel of five senior public servants, working with Canada's national security agencies, did not find interference that affected Canada's ability to hold free and fair elections in 2019 and 2021.

No serious voice is saying that those elections were decisively affected by foreign malfeasance. Asked by reporters on Wednesday whether he accepted the results of the last federal election, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said he did.

The current furor is instead based on two separate, but related, questions. To what extent was China able to covertly interfere in the Canadian democratic process before and during the 2019 and 2021 elections? And did the Trudeau government fail to respond appropriately to any attempts to interfere?

It's the second question, of course, that generates the most excitement. The Conservatives have gone so far as to allege a "cover-up." But it remains unclear — sometimes maddeningly so — whether such a scandal is actually present here.

A report authored by a former senior public servant — commissioned by the Trudeau government late last year and released yesterday — states plainly that "CSIS is concerned about foreign interference, including by the Communist Party of China" and "CSIS expressed concerns that China notably tried to target elected officials to promote their national interests and encouraged individuals to act as proxies on their behalf." (The Conservatives preemptively decided that the author, who was CEO of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation after leaving the public service, lacks credibility.)

That report adds to the findings released by a committee of parliamentarians in early 2020.

But government officials simply have not accounted fully for the claims outlined in a recent series of media reports. The allegations and accounts that have been leaked to reporters are certainly part of some kind of story, but the rest of story is still unknown.

The prime minister and his government have explicitly denied two reported claims: that the prime minister was briefed about allegations that China provided funding to candidates, and that CSIS urged the Prime Minister's Office to rescind a Liberal candidate's nomination. They also have alluded broadly to other unspecified "inaccuracies" in the reports.

WATCH: National security adviser Jody Thomas answers questions about election interference

Jody Thomas, a public servant who acts as national security adviser to the prime minister, was similarly cryptic. In her opening statement Wednesday to a committee of MPs studying foreign election inference, she said that "individual reports, when taken out of context, may be incomplete and misrepresentative of the full story." When discussing interference, she seemed to stress the word "attempts," as if to imply that what is tried is not always successful.