The Chinese soldiers story was ostensibly about helping China learn to apply human right standards instead of the usual Chinese brutality against its citizenry.
Trudeau had a reputation of being a pro-Chinese and enamoured with their “efficient” governmental style, long before this COVID emergency hit (probably from before he became leader of the Liberal Party and certainly from before his election to PM). Even among his own party there is some disquiet with this attitude and a common attitude of tolerating it simply because actual power in the government is seen to reside somewhere else, he’s an Obama like figurehead useful for marketing political positions to gullible voters.
Now that we have this faux emergency situation, he’s been quite visible but a lot of the power in Canada resides with the provinces and their responses have varied quite widely as have U.S. states.
We’ve had visits from Chinese soldiers to isolated military bases ostensibly for them to learn winter survival and operational techniques, something I can’t see them using in a good way anywhere, but the public never heard much about that nor did they seem to care all that much (attitudes towards China here are fairly ill-informed and may be more relevant to a softer version of China that may or may not have existed before Xi took over).
There is an element of hostility to Trudeau on both the political right and the far left in Canada, but his party is widely seen as the default government party, and it takes a better than average sales job from the conservatives to change that. Right now they don’t have much to sell, and the populist alternative can’t seem to break out of single digits, our country is sort of like what America would be if there were 40 blue states, 5 purple and 5 red. (Mexico with winters)