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Chinese Military,Political and Social Superthread

Quite frankly I remember Charles DeGaulle meddling as well. No doubt in my mind the USA has too.
Typical bait and switch. Let's divert attention away from the main issue and allow the main issue to fade out like a polaroid picture. Answer the questions: when did you know? What did you do about it? What have you done to ensure it won't happen again? There has been no indication that money has flown into Canada to buy the Indian vote. The U.S. is obviously applying pressure, if they weren't, Max would be flying a re-built sabre so that is an old issue and can be dealt with later. IMHO anyway
 
Well it looks like the Liberals caved - Telford will finally testify:

Trudeau's top aide Telford to testify, amid Hill drama over foreign interference

Updated March 21, 2023 6:32 p.m. EDT
Published March 21, 2023 9:16 a.m. ED

After weeks of resistance, and ahead of a vote that could have compelled it to happen, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s office announced Tuesday that his chief of staff Katie Telford will testify about foreign election interference, before a committee that has been studying the issue for months.

“While there are serious constraints on what can be said in public about sensitive intelligence matters, in an effort to make Parliament work, Ms. Telford has agreed to appear at the Procedure and House Affairs Committee as part of their study,” Trudeau's office said in a statement.

“Foreign interference is not a partisan issue," Trudeau's office said, while pointing to the suite of measures the prime minister has announced, including appointing David Johnston as a new special rapporteur, and tapping federal national security review bodies to dig into concerns around election interference. Johnston's mandate and scope of his role was revealed on Tuesday.

This move was an apparent effort to find a compromise with the NDP, who had threatened to help the Conservatives pass a motion on Tuesday that would have seen Telford and numerous other federal officials testify as part of an entirely new committee study.

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh told reporters that his party was prepared to vote in favour of the motion, unless the Liberals stopped their filibuster at the Procedure and House Affairs Committee (PROC) on an outstanding call to hear from Trudeau’s top aide.

Shortly after Telford's agreement to testify was reported, the approximately 24 hours of impasse at PROC broke, with the committee of MPs agreeing to ask Telford to appear before mid-April for at least two hours, under oath and on her own.

"It's important that we're able to get to the heart of this matter, find out what Ms. Telford knew, when she knew it," said Conservative MP Michael Barrett at committee. Though, given the “constraints” the PMO has flagged, it remains to be seen what kind of detail she’ll be able to offer the committee during what will be a public hearing.

"The Conservatives are trying to gin up the toxicity and partisanship by making a political theatre out of it and by catching Ms. Telford or others in not being able to answer direct questions," Trudeau told reporters on his way into question period.

Trudeau said the key questions around the allegations of what he did or didn't do, knew or didn't know, will be answered in "responsible ways" through the processes his government has advanced.

"That's where the answers are going to come," Trudeau said.
This will not be the first time Telford has testified before a parliamentary committee. She’s appeared previously to speak about the WE Charity controversy as well as the issue of sexual misconduct in the Canadian Armed Forces. Most recently, she testified under oath as part of the Public Order Emergency Commission into the government’s use of the Emergencies Act.
The committee has also agreed to invite the national Liberal and Conservative campaign directors from the 2019 and 2021 elections to appear, as well as former top Conservative PMO official Jenni Byrne and then-Conservative leader Erin O’Toole’s chief of staff Tauscha Michaud.

This development came after Trudeau confirmed that the vote that took place after question period on the Conservative motion would not be a matter of confidence, because it went to "how important the issue of foreign interference is."

Taking risking an election call over an election interference controversy—which could have been the result of a failed confidence vote given the Liberals' minority standing—off the table, Trudeau said he wanted to handle the issue differently and with less partisanship than the Official Opposition.

There had been some question whether the Liberals would make the Conservative motion a confidence vote, to potentially force the NDP to side with the government to squash the Bloc Quebecois-backed push for a new probe.
However, Singh—without his hands tied by desire to keep the supply-and-confidence deal alive—outlined a clear line in the sand, that the Liberals met.

"If the Liberal government, if Justin Trudeau doesn't stop the obstruction that's going on in committee, if Justin Trudeau doesn't allow his chief of staff to testify, we will force him to do so, by voting with the opposition,” Singh said earlier Tuesday, pointing still to a public inquiry rather than a parliamentary study as the more apt venue for further investigation into this topic.

"Right now there's a lot of serious questions about what the Prime Minister's Office knew, when they knew it, and what they did about that. We would prefer that there was a public inquiry that was investigating this and finding out those answers. In the meantime, these questions are very important and so we want to make sure that Canadians have an opportunity to hear what was known, and when it was known, and what was done with that information," Singh said.

Trudeau has committed that, should Johnston recommend a public inquiry, the federal government would abide by that advice, which is now slated to be received by the end of May. The NDP had tried on Tuesday to have the House vote on calling a public inquiry but accused the Conservatives of blocking that attempt.

Directing a question at Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre during question period—as Poilievre did to him on Monday in an effort to pressure the NDP to side with them —Singh asked him what he had to hide.

"We forced this government to end the obstruction at committee…. Rendering the Conservative motion useless, which is not surprising because they just want to play games," Singh said.

After question period, Poilievre's motion that MPs spent most of Monday debating failed to pass. The proposal sought to have the House instruct the opposition-dominated Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics Committee (ETHI) to strike a fresh study into Chinese interference in the last two federal elections.

That motion contained clear instructions that the committee call Telford to testify under oath, followed by numerous other federal officials and party players believed to have insight into allegations of meddling during the 2019 and 2021 campaigns. The Conservatives also wanted ETHI to have priority access to House resources to facilitate what would have been more than a dozen additional hours of testimony.

Also on the Conservatives' proposed witness list: authors of the Critical Election Incident Public Protocol reports for the 2019 and 2021 elections James Judd and Morris Rosenberg, respectively, former Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation officials, and current and former ambassadors to China.

During his time as democratic reform minister under former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper, Poilievre was opposed to having staff testify at committees. Now, Poilievre’s position has been that because Telford was involved with Trudeau's campaigns, from his leadership bid through the last two federal elections, she would be aware of all of the intelligence briefings he'd been provided.

"It took weeks of pressure for the prime minister to back down and flip flop, but allow only one of his top advisors, one of the key people who was involved in the campaigns that Beijing helped the liberal party win in multiple elections, but what we really need is the full truth," he said during question period Tuesday.
Even with the Conservatives, Bloc Quebecois, Green Party and independent MPs voting in support of the motion, it was defeated by a vote of 147 to 177 with the Liberals and NDP voting against, to the backdrop of boos from inside the House chamber.

"This is evidence in my opinion, of Parliament working," Government House Leader Mark Holland told reporters of the Telford testimony compromise despite Liberal MPs spending days of committee time talking out the clock in order to avoid this outcome.

"We've attempted to put forward the people that we thought best had information, but we also want Parliament to work and so we listen to the opposition parties and attempt to work with them. That is by necessity, a process of negotiation and back and forth… There's disagreements along the way, but I think that's a natural part of this process," Holland said.

Framing this apparent compromise as an effort to make Parliament "work," Holland was echoing wording used by both the NDP and Liberals in the launch of their agreement that's coming up on its one-year anniversary on Wednesday.
All of this was sparked by The Globe and Mail and Global News reports, citing largely unnamed intelligence sources, alleging specific attempts by Beijing to alter election outcomes, and what the opposition thinks is an insufficient response by the Liberal government. PROC has been studying the issue of foreign interference since November.

Officials have repeatedly asserted the integrity of both elections held, despite China's interference efforts.

Link
 
So they bought enough time to brief her up and come up with a plan then.
 
A view from across the Pond:

How Justin Trudeau’s government was compromised by the CCP​

Justin Trudeau’s government has been compromised by the Chinese Communist Party and Canada’s democracy is in jeopardy. This is a startling claim, all the more so for the fact that Canadian intelligence officials are the ones making it.

Over the past month, a series of leaks from within CSIS, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, has stirred up an astonishing storm. In November, it was leaked that a clandestine CCP network had funded and infiltrated the campaigns of 11 candidates in 2019’s federal election.

The story may roll on and faulty intelligence may be mixed up in it, but public trust has already been battered Trudeau reacted to November’s leak by having his staff tell the press that he had confronted Xi Jinping about the claims at a meeting during the G20 conference in Bali. Extraordinary footage then emerged of Xi accosting Trudeau about the leaks before walking off muttering that the Prime Minister was ‘very naïve’.
Details of the interference were then murky, but further leaks early last month claimed that the Trudeau was in fact briefed about the CCP network – which allegedly involved more than a dozen aides, a standing provincial politician, unelected officials and donors – before the 2019 election and not just after. Intel suggested that large sums changed hands, election law was breached (though there is no police investigation), and Trudeau’s Liberal party were the beneficiaries.

More CSIS leaks followed through the middle of February. There was CCP interference in 2021’s election, it was claimed, aimed at achieving a Liberal minority government, which was indeed the outcome. Efforts to influence results at a local level included coercing Chinese international students into campaigning in seats with large Chinese-Canadian populations. A surveilled conversation with a Chinese consulate official was quoted directly in documents shown to the Canadian press: ‘The Liberal Party of Canada is becoming the only party that the PRC [People’s Republic of China] can support.’

Michael Chan, a Liberal kingmaker and fundraising coordinator, was named as a long-running CSIS target. Chan was already known for his public remarks condemning democracy protests in Hong Kong and for his close links to Chinese diplomats. Spooks told the press they had a dossier on Chan and that he had been meeting with suspected Chinese intelligence agents. Chan stated that CSIS had never tried to interview him, but had ‘conducted intimidating interviews’ with his associates. He accused CSIS of ‘systemic racism’ and of fostering ‘division, hate, and the destabilization of a peaceful, harmonious, vibrantly diverse society’.

Trudeau stood by his administration’s decision to keep it all secret. ‘It’s certainly a sign,’ he announced, ‘that security within CSIS needs to be reviewed. And I’m expecting CSIS to take the issue very seriously.’

The CSIS leakers, citing ‘surveillance and wiretap evidence’, struck back by naming a serving Liberal MP whom they claimed was a knowing beneficiary of covert CCP interference. This was Han Dong MP, first elected in 2019 and then re-elected in 2021. Michael Chan, it was alleged, had deposed another candidate, also Chinese Canadian, to secure Dong’s nomination. The two supposedly knew what they were doing but top Liberals allowed Dong to stand in spite of CSIS warnings (both Dong and Chan strongly deny they had any role in CCP interference).

The denial issued by Dong, who missed a parliamentary vote on a motion declaring a genocide in Xinjiang, found space to point out that he represents ‘racialised and cultural communities’. Trudeau was asked directly in a press conference whether he received the intelligence and, if so, why Dong was allowed to stand in 2019. The PM flailed, speaking instead about the ‘rise in anti-Asian racism linked to the pandemic’.

Canadians need not worry, Trudeau went on, because a panel of specially appointed civil servants had reviewed interference election attempts in real time and decided there was nothing worth telling. A report on the interference panel’s work would be published imminently. Then came the counterpunch: it was CSIS officials, the PM argued, who were interfering in Canada’s democracy. It was not up to them to decide who could stand as MP.

Incensed, Trudeau’s Conservative opponents took their first serious crack at the scandal. The party released a statement implying that the report on the interference panel was a whitewash. The report was authored by Morris Rosenberg, who served for four years as CEO of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, named for Trudeau’s father, the former prime minister. During his tenure, Rosenberg had facilitated the Foundation’s receipt of a $200,000 donation from a CCP official. The same official was also involved in a 2016 cash-for-access scandal whereby Justin Trudeau held a fundraising event for CCP-friendly businesspeople.

The Conservatives cried conflict of interest and claimed the Rosenberg report could not be taken seriously. They were irked too by Trudeau’s use of racism concerns to deflect criticism. It was Chinese Canadian candidates campaigning under their party’s banner who were thought to be the main victims of CCP incursions.

One of them, Kenny Chiu, is particularly important. In 2019, Chiu was elected Conservative MP of a British Columbian constituency in which roughly half of residents are of Chinese origin, defeating a Liberal incumbent whose former law firm had been under investigation by police for links to money laundering by Chinese organised crime groups.

Before losing his seat in 2021, Chiu was known – and sanctioned by China – for his criticism of the CCP. Earlier that year, he had introduced a bill proposing a registry of foreign agents in order to combat election interference and influence peddling.

During Chiu’s 2021 re-election effort, there were many posts published on WeChat – the international version of a Chinese social media app – claiming the bill would lead to the oppression of Chinese Canadians. The posts spread among Chiu’s constituents and were replicated by Chinese state media. Erin O’Toole, Conservative leader during the 2021 campaign, claimed last summer that Chiu was one of as many as nine Conservative MPs he believed had lost their seats because of CCP interference.

The new leaks this month show that some at CSIS agreed with Chiu, but his experience was brushed over by the Rosenberg report, where it was afforded a few lines of basic description at the top of a redacted list of other notes. Chiu has now publicly called on Trudeau to ‘spare me the racist line and other BS’ and provide answers. His former colleague, shadow foreign affairs minister Michael Chong, says the PM cannot be trusted to do so.

Theirs are sentiments echoed by a growing number of community leaders, emboldening a wider fightback. Testimony of intimidation is coming to light, including that of a former candidate who claims a Chinese Canadian he spoke to on the doorstep was afraid that his family in China would suffer if he voted the wrong way.

The leader of one group of Canadian Hongkongers has even raised doubts about donations made by several dozen Chinese Canadians to Trudeau’s own constituency race in Papineau, Quebec, in 2015, the year the Liberals entered government. Canadian election filings analysed by The Spectator show that this group’s contributions amounted to 86 per cent of the $236,000 received by the Papineau Liberal association that year.

The pace of the crisis quickened with the Conservative announcement criticising the Rosenberg report. Conservatives questioned the ‘threshold’ used by the interference panel to measure whether interference has had a concrete effect on the election and therefore whether the public should have been informed. The Liberal minister responsible described the threshold as ‘very high’ when announcing the system. The Rosenberg report itself obsesses over the thing, calling it ‘somewhat confusing’ and mentioning it 73 times. The leaks, meanwhile, made clear that the interference panel had been briefed at the time about CCP attempts to undermine Chiu’s 2021 campaign, but that his constituents were kept in the dark because the threshold had not been met.

Leakers then shared information indicating that CSIS had direct evidence that the $200,000 donation to the Trudeau Foundation (then led by Rosenberg), a $50,000 donation for a statue of Trudeau senior, and a $750,000 donation to his alma mater, were together part of a CCP operation targeting Trudeau junior. Chinese diplomats had requested the gifts be made and even offered to directly reimburse the donors. The minority Liberal government’s insistence that a public inquiry was not necessary began to look untenable, as Canada’s third- and fourth-largest parties joined the calls for one. The Trudeau Foundation, in which the PM no longer has a formal role, returned the $200,000.

Last Monday, Trudeau responded to calls for a public inquiry by empowering a cross-party panel of MPs to look into election interference, and promising to appoint a ‘special rapporteur’ to decide whether a public inquiry is necessary. Liberal MPs, meanwhile, spent last week filibustering a vote to demand Trudeau’s chief of staff testify on the timeline of her boss’s security briefings, as opponents try to pick holes in his remarkable claim never to have been told about clandestine funding.

The leaks and press investigations have since continued. On Friday, CSIS staff alleged that Vincent Ke, a serving MP in Ontatio’s provincial government, received covert funding from Toronto’s Chinese consulate. Ke said it was false and defamatory and resigned. There is ongoing interest in donations to Trudeau’s Papineau Liberal Association, after one paper highlighted a donation by a former People’s Liberation Army soldier investigated for money laundering (the individual denies any link to money laundering and says he is not aware of any police investigation into his actions). It may yet emerge that Trudeau’s own race was the subject of substantial financial interference in 2016.

The story may roll on and faulty intelligence may be mixed up in it, but public trust has already been battered. Polls conducted before the Dong revelations suggested that most Canadians had then already decided not enough was being done to stop interference. Nearly half of Liberal voters think Trudeau is afraid to stand up to China.

There are those who bemoan declining trust in our leaders. Here we see the damage that can be done by a leader who does not trust the public. Trudeau did not trust Canadians to know that the CCP may have forked out $1million in an effort to gain his affection; that Canadian security officials believe a serving MP is a tool of Beijing; or that Canadian voters of Chinese descent feel intimidated by the CCP in their own country; or that visiting Chinese students were allegedly told by the Chinese embassy to go out and campaign for his party or be sent home for punishment.

If you believe that public information is the best guard against an interference campaign that extends to the grassroots, then this distrust is nothing but inexcusable. The same habit runs through Trudeau’s proposed solutions. From the panel of civil servants, to the Rosenberg fiasco, to the ‘rapporteur’, to the filibustering – the Prime Minister’s instinct is to exclude outside scrutiny. No wonder: it is increasingly apparent that his government has worked to conceal the fact that the Liberals have received covert CCP support during the last two elections. Exposed, the excuse has been to cry racism and to say this interference was inconsequential.

‘Whistleblowers in Canadian intelligence have risked prosecution,’ says Sam Cooper, who broke many of the stories, ‘because they believe Canada’s democracy faces severe and increasing threats, but the public has been kept in the dark and Ottawa isn’t acting. It’s fair to say Canada has never seen revelations of foreign interference like this before, or in this way.’

How Justin Trudeau’s government was compromised by the CCP
 
A view from across the Pond:

How Justin Trudeau’s government was compromised by the CCP​

Justin Trudeau’s government has been compromised by the Chinese Communist Party and Canada’s democracy is in jeopardy. This is a startling claim, all the more so for the fact that Canadian intelligence officials are the ones making it.

Over the past month, a series of leaks from within CSIS, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, has stirred up an astonishing storm. In November, it was leaked that a clandestine CCP network had funded and infiltrated the campaigns of 11 candidates in 2019’s federal election.

The story may roll on and faulty intelligence may be mixed up in it, but public trust has already been battered Trudeau reacted to November’s leak by having his staff tell the press that he had confronted Xi Jinping about the claims at a meeting during the G20 conference in Bali. Extraordinary footage then emerged of Xi accosting Trudeau about the leaks before walking off muttering that the Prime Minister was ‘very naïve’.
Details of the interference were then murky, but further leaks early last month claimed that the Trudeau was in fact briefed about the CCP network – which allegedly involved more than a dozen aides, a standing provincial politician, unelected officials and donors – before the 2019 election and not just after. Intel suggested that large sums changed hands, election law was breached (though there is no police investigation), and Trudeau’s Liberal party were the beneficiaries.

More CSIS leaks followed through the middle of February. There was CCP interference in 2021’s election, it was claimed, aimed at achieving a Liberal minority government, which was indeed the outcome. Efforts to influence results at a local level included coercing Chinese international students into campaigning in seats with large Chinese-Canadian populations. A surveilled conversation with a Chinese consulate official was quoted directly in documents shown to the Canadian press: ‘The Liberal Party of Canada is becoming the only party that the PRC [People’s Republic of China] can support.’

Michael Chan, a Liberal kingmaker and fundraising coordinator, was named as a long-running CSIS target. Chan was already known for his public remarks condemning democracy protests in Hong Kong and for his close links to Chinese diplomats. Spooks told the press they had a dossier on Chan and that he had been meeting with suspected Chinese intelligence agents. Chan stated that CSIS had never tried to interview him, but had ‘conducted intimidating interviews’ with his associates. He accused CSIS of ‘systemic racism’ and of fostering ‘division, hate, and the destabilization of a peaceful, harmonious, vibrantly diverse society’.

Trudeau stood by his administration’s decision to keep it all secret. ‘It’s certainly a sign,’ he announced, ‘that security within CSIS needs to be reviewed. And I’m expecting CSIS to take the issue very seriously.’

The CSIS leakers, citing ‘surveillance and wiretap evidence’, struck back by naming a serving Liberal MP whom they claimed was a knowing beneficiary of covert CCP interference. This was Han Dong MP, first elected in 2019 and then re-elected in 2021. Michael Chan, it was alleged, had deposed another candidate, also Chinese Canadian, to secure Dong’s nomination. The two supposedly knew what they were doing but top Liberals allowed Dong to stand in spite of CSIS warnings (both Dong and Chan strongly deny they had any role in CCP interference).

The denial issued by Dong, who missed a parliamentary vote on a motion declaring a genocide in Xinjiang, found space to point out that he represents ‘racialised and cultural communities’. Trudeau was asked directly in a press conference whether he received the intelligence and, if so, why Dong was allowed to stand in 2019. The PM flailed, speaking instead about the ‘rise in anti-Asian racism linked to the pandemic’.

Canadians need not worry, Trudeau went on, because a panel of specially appointed civil servants had reviewed interference election attempts in real time and decided there was nothing worth telling. A report on the interference panel’s work would be published imminently. Then came the counterpunch: it was CSIS officials, the PM argued, who were interfering in Canada’s democracy. It was not up to them to decide who could stand as MP.

Incensed, Trudeau’s Conservative opponents took their first serious crack at the scandal. The party released a statement implying that the report on the interference panel was a whitewash. The report was authored by Morris Rosenberg, who served for four years as CEO of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, named for Trudeau’s father, the former prime minister. During his tenure, Rosenberg had facilitated the Foundation’s receipt of a $200,000 donation from a CCP official. The same official was also involved in a 2016 cash-for-access scandal whereby Justin Trudeau held a fundraising event for CCP-friendly businesspeople.

The Conservatives cried conflict of interest and claimed the Rosenberg report could not be taken seriously. They were irked too by Trudeau’s use of racism concerns to deflect criticism. It was Chinese Canadian candidates campaigning under their party’s banner who were thought to be the main victims of CCP incursions.

One of them, Kenny Chiu, is particularly important. In 2019, Chiu was elected Conservative MP of a British Columbian constituency in which roughly half of residents are of Chinese origin, defeating a Liberal incumbent whose former law firm had been under investigation by police for links to money laundering by Chinese organised crime groups.

Before losing his seat in 2021, Chiu was known – and sanctioned by China – for his criticism of the CCP. Earlier that year, he had introduced a bill proposing a registry of foreign agents in order to combat election interference and influence peddling.

During Chiu’s 2021 re-election effort, there were many posts published on WeChat – the international version of a Chinese social media app – claiming the bill would lead to the oppression of Chinese Canadians. The posts spread among Chiu’s constituents and were replicated by Chinese state media. Erin O’Toole, Conservative leader during the 2021 campaign, claimed last summer that Chiu was one of as many as nine Conservative MPs he believed had lost their seats because of CCP interference.

The new leaks this month show that some at CSIS agreed with Chiu, but his experience was brushed over by the Rosenberg report, where it was afforded a few lines of basic description at the top of a redacted list of other notes. Chiu has now publicly called on Trudeau to ‘spare me the racist line and other BS’ and provide answers. His former colleague, shadow foreign affairs minister Michael Chong, says the PM cannot be trusted to do so.

Theirs are sentiments echoed by a growing number of community leaders, emboldening a wider fightback. Testimony of intimidation is coming to light, including that of a former candidate who claims a Chinese Canadian he spoke to on the doorstep was afraid that his family in China would suffer if he voted the wrong way.

The leader of one group of Canadian Hongkongers has even raised doubts about donations made by several dozen Chinese Canadians to Trudeau’s own constituency race in Papineau, Quebec, in 2015, the year the Liberals entered government. Canadian election filings analysed by The Spectator show that this group’s contributions amounted to 86 per cent of the $236,000 received by the Papineau Liberal association that year.

The pace of the crisis quickened with the Conservative announcement criticising the Rosenberg report. Conservatives questioned the ‘threshold’ used by the interference panel to measure whether interference has had a concrete effect on the election and therefore whether the public should have been informed. The Liberal minister responsible described the threshold as ‘very high’ when announcing the system. The Rosenberg report itself obsesses over the thing, calling it ‘somewhat confusing’ and mentioning it 73 times. The leaks, meanwhile, made clear that the interference panel had been briefed at the time about CCP attempts to undermine Chiu’s 2021 campaign, but that his constituents were kept in the dark because the threshold had not been met.

Leakers then shared information indicating that CSIS had direct evidence that the $200,000 donation to the Trudeau Foundation (then led by Rosenberg), a $50,000 donation for a statue of Trudeau senior, and a $750,000 donation to his alma mater, were together part of a CCP operation targeting Trudeau junior. Chinese diplomats had requested the gifts be made and even offered to directly reimburse the donors. The minority Liberal government’s insistence that a public inquiry was not necessary began to look untenable, as Canada’s third- and fourth-largest parties joined the calls for one. The Trudeau Foundation, in which the PM no longer has a formal role, returned the $200,000.

Last Monday, Trudeau responded to calls for a public inquiry by empowering a cross-party panel of MPs to look into election interference, and promising to appoint a ‘special rapporteur’ to decide whether a public inquiry is necessary. Liberal MPs, meanwhile, spent last week filibustering a vote to demand Trudeau’s chief of staff testify on the timeline of her boss’s security briefings, as opponents try to pick holes in his remarkable claim never to have been told about clandestine funding.

The leaks and press investigations have since continued. On Friday, CSIS staff alleged that Vincent Ke, a serving MP in Ontatio’s provincial government, received covert funding from Toronto’s Chinese consulate. Ke said it was false and defamatory and resigned. There is ongoing interest in donations to Trudeau’s Papineau Liberal Association, after one paper highlighted a donation by a former People’s Liberation Army soldier investigated for money laundering (the individual denies any link to money laundering and says he is not aware of any police investigation into his actions). It may yet emerge that Trudeau’s own race was the subject of substantial financial interference in 2016.

The story may roll on and faulty intelligence may be mixed up in it, but public trust has already been battered. Polls conducted before the Dong revelations suggested that most Canadians had then already decided not enough was being done to stop interference. Nearly half of Liberal voters think Trudeau is afraid to stand up to China.

There are those who bemoan declining trust in our leaders. Here we see the damage that can be done by a leader who does not trust the public. Trudeau did not trust Canadians to know that the CCP may have forked out $1million in an effort to gain his affection; that Canadian security officials believe a serving MP is a tool of Beijing; or that Canadian voters of Chinese descent feel intimidated by the CCP in their own country; or that visiting Chinese students were allegedly told by the Chinese embassy to go out and campaign for his party or be sent home for punishment.

If you believe that public information is the best guard against an interference campaign that extends to the grassroots, then this distrust is nothing but inexcusable. The same habit runs through Trudeau’s proposed solutions. From the panel of civil servants, to the Rosenberg fiasco, to the ‘rapporteur’, to the filibustering – the Prime Minister’s instinct is to exclude outside scrutiny. No wonder: it is increasingly apparent that his government has worked to conceal the fact that the Liberals have received covert CCP support during the last two elections. Exposed, the excuse has been to cry racism and to say this interference was inconsequential.

‘Whistleblowers in Canadian intelligence have risked prosecution,’ says Sam Cooper, who broke many of the stories, ‘because they believe Canada’s democracy faces severe and increasing threats, but the public has been kept in the dark and Ottawa isn’t acting. It’s fair to say Canada has never seen revelations of foreign interference like this before, or in this way.’

How Justin Trudeau’s government was compromised by the CCP
Which newspaper was this from?
 
This is absolutely ridiculous: Liberal MP Han Dong secretly advised Chinese diplomat in 2021 to delay freeing Two Michaels: sources | Globalnews.ca

This has to be a criminal offense, unbelievable but not surprising the Liberals are dragging their heels on investigating this.
If it is true, it is absolutely criminal and seditious.

Which reminds me…this came out the other day regarding Texas Governor John Connally going to the Mideast during the Iran hostage crisis in 1980. According to his aide, Connally sent word to the Iranians that if they were willing to help Reagen get elected (over Carter) by not releasing the hostages until after the election, then Reagen as the president elect would treat the Iranians better. Absolutely seditious by putting party over country and the hostages.

 
This is absolutely ridiculous: Liberal MP Han Dong secretly advised Chinese diplomat in 2021 to delay freeing Two Michaels: sources | Globalnews.ca

This has to be a criminal offense, unbelievable but not surprising the Liberals are dragging their heels on investigating this.

Sure that sounds bad... But Poilievre did a <<insert thing>> today, and he's definitely going to drop in the polls because if it! I'm still going to have to block my nose and vote Liberal because I just can't get over Poilievre.
 
Sure that sounds bad... But Poilievre did a <<insert thing>> today, and he's definitely going to drop in the polls because if it! I'm still going to have to block my nose and vote Liberal because I just can't get over Poilievre.
When the next election comes, I just hope that whichever party gets the most seats will be the one with the fewest seats possible to form a minority government. The more fragile their minority the more likely they’ll be to not do anything too stupid.
 
Like accepting money from Chinese donors and recommending political prisoners be kept in prison longer?

I don't believe the Liberals don't lose much sleep over their minority status.
You may be right but I’d sure as hell prefer seeing them with a weak minority over a solid majority.
 
This is absolutely ridiculous: Liberal MP Han Dong secretly advised Chinese diplomat in 2021 to delay freeing Two Michaels: sources | Globalnews.ca

This has to be a criminal offense, unbelievable but not surprising the Liberals are dragging their heels on investigating this.

1. Holy shit.

2. Speaking super hypothetically and reading between the lines: I can think of few ways this information could be gleaned. This smacks of private communications being intercepted. One potentially informative bit of open court record is R. v. Huang, 2018 OSC 831. This is a criminal case (it eventually fell apart) in which it was revealed that CSIS had wiretaps on the Chinese embassy for at least some time. https://www.canlii.org/en/on/onsc/doc/2018/2018onsc831/2018onsc831.html

There's been interesting scholarship about Canada's struggles to turn intelligence to evidence. We don't do it well. If we imagine that our intelligence infrastructure - probably CSIS? - came upon information of this sort through a national security investigations, it could be super hard to turn that into a criminal investigation.
 
If it is true, it is absolutely criminal and seditious.

Which reminds me…this came out the other day regarding Texas Governor John Connally going to the Mideast during the Iran hostage crisis in 1980. According to his aide, Connally sent word to the Iranians that if they were willing to help Reagen get elected (over Carter) by not releasing the hostages until after the election, then Reagen as the president elect would treat the Iranians better. Absolutely seditious by putting party over country and the hostages.

The thing is, as we have learned the last few years here and in the US, there are a lot of things that are unethical and unpatriotic that aren’t illegal.
 
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