OTTAWA (LifeSiteNews) – People’s Party of Canada (PPC) leader Maxime Bernier fought back against what he said was “fake news” after Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) leader Pierre Poilievre blasted him for past comments on trade with China and for attending a World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in 2008.

In a video message posted last Wednesday, Bernier said, “is Pierre Poilievre seriously trying to imply that I’m a globalist for a trip to Davos I did 15 years ago while serving his corrupt party. Really?”

“How about you come clean about the globalist policies you are promoting right now?”

In a recent interview with True North’s Andrew Lawton, Poilievre took issue with Bernier’s past comments regarding China and the fact he once attended a WEF meeting while a minister.

“Maxime really has to come clean on why he attended the World Economic Forum, why he was involved in that, why he proposed free trade with communist China, why he said he admires the freedoms that exist in communist China, and I would denounce him for making those comments as well,” Poilievre said.

In response, Bernier said Poilievre “must be getting desperate” in attacking him in his interview with Lawton.

“Pierre needs to explain why he promotes globalist policies like unrestricted mass immigration, and why he supports the Paris Climate Accord,” Bernier said.

“Both of these policies are crucial pieces of the United Nations globalist agenda.”

Bernier noted that his past comments about “communist China” were from his 2016 Conservative leadership campaign.

He said that he “discarded that policy long ago.”

“Since he founded the PPC, we have always taken a hardline stance against China,” he said.

Bernier then said that if Poilievre and other Canadian “establishment” politicians were not so focused on fighting “unnecessary foreign wars in Ukraine,” they could take “real threats like Communist China seriously.”

As for his attending the Davos summit in 2008, he clarified in a video that he was there “as Foreign Affairs Minister.”

“My only goal, and only job when I was there was to meet other Foreign Affairs Ministers, to have a discussion about Canada and our role in Afghanistan.”

He added that the “did not” attend debates and left after his meetings, adding that he would never “go there (to WEF meetings in Davos) in the future.”

China accusation ‘false,’ says Bernier’s spokesman

PPC spokesman Martin Masse told LifeSiteNews that the accusation Bernier “admires the freedoms in China” is completely “ridiculous and absolute fake news.”

“It was first made in an article in Press Freedom years ago that used an out of context clip to make it sound as if Maxime is saying China has more freedoms than Canada,” Masse said.

“In the complete speech, Maxime explains that China, India and other dirt poor socialist and communist countries adopted some free-market policies in the past couple of decades, which explains why their economies grew faster and they became richer. This is a completely uncontroversial statement for anyone who understands economics.”

Masse added that Canada appears to be going in the “other direction.”

“Our government never stops growing, and our economic freedoms are shrinking. This is not exactly news either,” he said.

“Maxime never said China has more freedoms, economic of others, than Canada (which is obviously still far from being the case, he added), he said that while China has more economic freedoms than when it was a hardcore communist country before Deng Xiaoping’s reforms 50 years ago, Canada has less.”

Masse said that Poilievre seems to be “getting nervous after the blunders and left-wing U-turns he’s done these past couple of weeks and now he is attacking Maxime with fake news.”

Bernier was also the target of a “hit piece” by journalist Spencer Fernando, who recently wrote a report titled Bernier & Trudeau: Similar views on China and shared political interests.

Masse pointed out to LifeSiteNews that Fernando in 2020 “reported on our actual policies on China three years ago.”

Fernando’s 2020 article titled Bernier unveils new PPC policy, says Canada must ‘stand up to the Chinese bully’ indeed goes over eight policy ideas from the PPC “for how Canada should deal with the threat posed by China.”

The PPC did not win any seats in the 2021 federal election but managed to pick up a larger percentage of the popular vote at 5 percent. The party platform blasts COVID-19 lockdowns, vaccine passports, and mask mandates.

Bernier, who chose not to get the COVID jabs, for the past three years has also come out strongly against all forms of COVID mandates.

Recently, Bernier said that Canada should not be involved in “proxy war between the US and Russia.”

He was a Conservative Party of Canada MP and a minister under former Prime Minister Stephen Harper until Bernier left the party in 2018 to form the PPC.

In 2017, Bernier lost by a slim margin to Andrew Scheer to become the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada.