There were strong indications and those raised grave concerns for Canada and our like-minded partners about whether or not those elections could be free and fair. Indeed, we didn't have observers from the OSCE who were able to be part of that, which would give some reassurance.
There were the reports that we received in terms of the behaviour of the government officials and their permission to allow people to vote freely and fairly without any sense of pressure, the outcome, which was completely out of sync with everyone's estimations of the support that was enjoyed by opposition party leaders, and then, of course, there was the immediate repression and clamp-down on media reporting. All those together made it so there could be no other conclusion than that this was a fraudulent election process.