GK .Dundas
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It's not like like Beijing gives a geribil's backside about the local Chinese entities and people except as propaganda tools both internally and externally .
Chinese Military,Political and Social Superthread
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OldSolduer
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I believe the term is "useful fools" -traitors - for those that willingly cooperate with a Communist regime then are taken aback when they are abandoned.
"But we didn't sign up for this" the fools will say.
RangerRay
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Local Chinese communities are often the biggest victims of Beijing’s influence, interference and intimidation campaigns. Ethnic Chinese, whether they are Chinese citizens or not, face intense intimidation from the Chinese state to shut up and fo their bidding.
GK .Dundas
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Willing traitors ?
Lovely family you have back in the old Motherland ...be a real shame if they ended up in ..."legal difficulties".....a real shame.
Lovely family you have back in the old Motherland ...be a real shame if they ended up in ..."legal difficulties".....a real shame.
OldSolduer
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Or those re education camps where your cousins will be "rehabilitated" nudge nudge wink wink.
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But it's not just the Liberal Party. Power Corp, epecially, has its claws in almost everything.
That is exactly it! China can exert immense pressure on the overseas-Chinese to toe-the-line or risk 'consequences' for family members still in China. They can do it and I guarantee with 100% certainty that they do it.
RangerRay
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I posted this in the Russia thread, but this applies to the PRC as well.
www.theglobeandmail.com
Opinion: Russia and China are rebranding themselves as ‘anti-colonial’ powers – and countries are falling for it
Like populists in the U.S. and Europe, Russian and China want to upend things, reject the liberal international order, invalidate multilateral institutions
www.theglobeandmail.com
TacticalTea
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The infuriating irony of this. They're strong on projection, as always.I posted this in the Russia thread, but this applies to the PRC as well.
Opinion: Russia and China are rebranding themselves as ‘anti-colonial’ powers – and countries are falling for it
Like populists in the U.S. and Europe, Russian and China want to upend things, reject the liberal international order, invalidate multilateral institutions
I can't even think of neo-colonial powers other than those two.
Maybe Israel, some would argue. And that's it.
RangerRay
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Someone should check on Terry and make sure he’s ok.
therealstory.substack.com
Kowtowing: A Necessary Evil in Canada Now?
On the lateness of the hour. Third in a series.
therealstory.substack.com
Kowtowing: A Necessary Evil in Canada Now?
On the lateness of the hour. Third in a series.
MAY 20, 2023
30
7
Culling and disassembling and reassembling a library that’s still a barely manageable 700 books along with sorting files into bankers’ boxes requires more heartbreak and bother than I’d counted on. This is just one of several reasons why I’ve been having a hard time keeping the Real Story lights on while I’m away from my observation tower at the National Post and the Ottawa Citizen.
Do forgive. I’ll be back to newspapering any day now.
Hell of a time for me to be away from the action, right?
I really don’t like throwing shade at the Ottawa Press Gallery but unless I’ve missed something, everybody seems to have ignored (I might be wrong, I just can’t find a thing) Wednesday’s interim report from the House of Commons Committee on Canada-China relations.
I’ll be having a close look at the report in upcoming Real Story newsletters but for now, I’ll just tip my hat to Liberal committee chair Ken Hardie for his comment on Facebook: “Finally, the warnings from Jonathan Manthorpe and Terry Glavin have sunk in.” I’d like to think so, but I’m not so sure.
Titled “A Threat to Canadian Sovereignty: National Security Dimensions of the Canada-People’s Republic of China Relationship,” the report offers 34 recommendations. My cursory reading leaves me impressed that the recommendations are mostly rock solid. Which is probably a sign that the report will be ignored, as such things usually are.
The always reliable Bob Mackin, my pal over at Business in Vancouver, has a snapshot of the report here, with a first glance from Kenny Chiu, the Conservative MP for Steveston-Richmond East who Beijing’s proxies in Canada targeted for defeat in the 2021 federal election. Chiu says he’s pleasantly surprised.
So many stories, so little time
This edition of the Real Story began with Diplomat, Socialite, Spy. It’s focus was mostly on the many well-connected acquaintances of Chinese Ministry of State Security operative Wei Zhao, whose reassignment out of Canada was the polite resolution to his involvement in the plot to put the squeeze on the Conservatives’ shadow foreign affairs minister Michael Chong.
That newsletter was followed by last Saturday’s Weekend Special: The Michael Chong Uproar: What’s Changed? Spoiler: Nothing of consequence has changed in any way at all. Immediately relevant in light of the Globe and Mail’s scoop yesterday, that last newsletter contained a good deal of inside story on Ontario Liberal kingmaker Michael Chan, whose codename at the the Chinese embassy is “the minister.” You’ll want to take particular note of that newsletter’s contents, and Chan’s connections to Zhao Wei, the diplomat, socialite and spy that headlined the first in this series, in the context of the Globe story yesterday:
Canada’s spy service sought an electronic and entry warrant to monitor former Ontario cabinet minister Michael Chan in the lead-up to the 2021 federal election, but it took several months for then-public safety minister Bill Blair to sign off on the clandestine surveillance of the influential Liberal Party powerbroker, according to a national-security source.
Owing to “recent developments,” there’ll be a fourth installment in this series where I’ll get into the awful consequences of standing up to Xi Jinping, Beijing’s willing accomplices across party lines in Canada, and the question: Who to trust?
No paywall today. But you know you should take up a paid sub, right?
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If there’s an overall point I’m making in this series - and I didn’t set out to make this point or any other - it’s this. In the matter of Beijing’s friends in high places in this country, and the long reach of Xi Jinping’s strongarm and influence-peddling infrastructure in Canada, it’s way later than we think. It may be too late.
As I’ve done previously, I’ll leave that question to Real Story subscribers. There’ll be resources below to help you make up your minds. It just happens to be a question that unavoidably arises with increasing frequency, as it did this week in the disclosures about NDP fixture and front-running Toronto mayoral candidate Olivia Chow’s vote-harvesting dalliance with an arm of the United Front Work Department, Beijing’s vast overseas influence-mongering superstructure.
A necessary evil or a cynical & convenient capitulation?
That’s the question making the rounds among the prominent Chinese-Canadians I trust and respect, and the emerging standpoint, though not universally shared, goes like this: Chow is kowtowing to Beijing’s active agents of influence in Canada, and doing so is both evil and unnecessary.
The National Post has mustered the temerity to notice this and Tom Blackwell has a good piece here this week that outlines the discontent and dismay among Chow’s supporters, along with some hairsplitting in play about whether the United Front grouping in Toronto has outright endorsed Chow and some fussiness about the circumstances of her meetings with the outfit.
Going along to get along. That is the excuse (or rationale, or pretext) available to Toronto mayoral front-runner Olivia Chow, who knows very well what she’s doing.
(A brief lament: Tom has decided to take the Postmedia buyout that’s making the rounds, leaving us China watchers in the journalism racket with one less set of eyes. Tom’s a gem. A solid reporter. He freelanced the Chow story back to the Post, and with luck he’ll still keep his hand in, one way or another, but there aren’t many of us around.)
Anyway. . .
The Chow unpleasantness is an instructive case study of the question about the lateness of the hour in the matter of Canada’s capacity to resist Beijing’s massive, multi-year, multi-billion-dollar effort to influence, undermine, manipulate and monkey around with the political sovereignty of the world’s liberal democracies.
It’s a snapshot of a disorder that is especially pronounced in Canada, eight years into the rule of a federal government that set out to welcome Beijing’s overtures with such enthusiasm that Beijing’s influence operations have been at times indistinguishable from official federal policy.
It’s the sort of thing one is disinclined to discuss in polite company, owing to several awkward circumstances.
First, the usual disingenuous claims of “racism” that get chucked around whenever the subject comes up. Secondly, the presence of a wholly new Mandarin-bloc overclass that wealth-migration schemes have allowed to entrench itself in Canada in recent years, especially in Metro Vancouver, Montreal and the Greater Toronto Area. And not least, the unseemly collaborations and compromises Canada’s political establishment has made with Xi Jinping’s massive corporate presence in this country.
Not what it says on the tin
The “Council of Newcomer Organizations” that has been cuddling with Chow is not what it says it is. Its name in Chinese translates accurately as “the Federation of Canadian Chinese Associations” and its charter requires that its affiliates purport to represent Chinese-Canadians.
Founded by former Beijing-aligned Liberal MP Geng Tan, the FCCA is a notorious megaphone for Beijing propaganda that circulates lies about the reality of the brutally persecuted Uyghurs of Xinjiang and the crushing of democracy in Hong Kong. The organization is intimately and openly associated with the United Front Work Department, Beijing’s overseas strongarming and influence-peddling superagency.
None of this has dissuaded the federal government from showering the FCCA with roughly $180,000 in grants since 2016, in the same way Ottawa has paid out roughly $200,000 over the past three years to the Montreal front that has been identified as a site of one of those overseas “police stations” the RCMP is hovering around. Since at least 2016, the Montreal agency has been a designated unit of the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office, which was swallowed up by the United Front in its massive 2018 consolidation.
But that’s just how Team Trudeau rolls. It’s how Ottawa has normalized the activities of Beijing’s proxies in Canada. Following on my point from the last Real Story newsletter, it’s because they don’t see anything wrong with it. But the overwhelming majority of Canadians, and Chinese-Canadians, see quite a lot wrong with it. Hence the current imbroglio.
What Olivia Chow’s supporters find astonishing and worrisome is that until recently at least, Chow has not been shy about standing in solidarity at Tiananmen Massacre commemorations and so on. So what’s changed?
The respected academic and former diplomat Charles Burton expresses some alarm, but also worth noticing is that Gloria Fung, a reliably honest interlocutor from the group Canada Hong Kong Link, suggests a caution: “Proxies of CCP [the Chinese Communist Party] like to endorse any candidate with winnability. That does not necessarily imply the candidate they endorse has been compromised.”
Fair enough, but I also find myself pursuaded by my old pal Ivy Li, founder and spokesperson for the Canadian Friends of Hong Kong group: “There’s always a choice! There’s a thing called the ‘bottom line’. For a politician it’s the well being of Canada and its democratic system. Knowingly subjecting oneself to foreign influence to get votes is crossing that line.”
The thing is, however you might fall on this sort of thing, Olivia Chow knows full well what she’s doing. She is a lifelong Toronto politician, having started out in municipal offices and then MP for Trinity-Spadina from 2006 to 2014. She’s also the widow of beatified and by now pretty much fully canonized former NDP leader Jack Layton.
So, an open question to subscribers - Is kowtowing to Beijing’s agents of influence now a necessary evil in Canada? Is it too late to stand up to these forces?
Some Real Story resources:
From a few weeks ago, Beijing's Best Canadian Friends, Part Etcetera:
In great swathes of Greater Montreal, Metro Vancouver and the GTA, it’s got so that you can’t get elected to school board without the blessing of the United Front consiglieri up there in the top floors of the office towers.
In 2018, the United Front absorbed the Chinese state’s Overseas Chinese Affairs Office, and its budget now exceeds the entire budget of China’s Foreign Affairs Ministry. Also by 2018 the Liberal Party’s activist, fundraising and electioneering base in Canada’s “Chinese” community had become fully embedded in the super-wealthy and populous Mandarin bloc, a fairly new phenomenon owing to dramatic surges in wealth migration in recent years from the People’s Republic of China.
The United Front is embedded at the pinnacle of the GTA’s Mandarin bloc hierarchy, which is overseen by the tycoon Wei Chengyi, the United Front’s GTA generalissimo. Real Story subscribers got a fairly clear view of that crowd and its friends in high Liberal places here: National Security In A "Post-National" State. . .
Justin Trudeau was their golden boy, and 2015 was the dawn of their “Golden Decade,” and Trudeau’s Liberals have flourished in this ecosystem, which is brimming with questionable white people. Elections are like league sports events. Conservatives who play along are contentedly tolerated, and some have done very well for themselves. Quite a few New Democrats, too, have done just fine.
. . . All you have to do, really, is conduct your affairs in such a way as to not be displeasing to the United Front. Ultimately, all United Front orders come from the top, from Xi Jinping, who presides over the seven-member Standing Committee of the 25-member Politburo of the 370-member Central Committee of the 100-million-member Chinese Communist Party.
And what Xi Jinping wants is to rule the world. So you just do what you’re told, and nobody gets hurt.
From last October, Police-state compradors and corporate collaborators have had the run of this country for years. Is Canada already too far gone?
This was mainly about the thousands of Iranians who have fled to Canada from the Khomeinist regime, only to find the regime has its own friends in high places in Canada, and the police state’s rich and powerful come and go as they please. But it was also about the Chinese princeling caste and its influences in Canada across party lines:
Although he got whooped last month by Pierre Poilievre, Jean Charest was a serious contender for the Conservative Party leadership. Quite a few Conservatives were perfectly prepared to overlook Charest’s $70,000-a-month services to Xi Jinping’s “national champion” Huawei telecom giant in its efforts to skirt around Canada’s national-security roadblocks. Charest has also been more than happy to serve as a human megaphone for Beijing’s disinformation operations.
The main reason I think it might be too late involves a weirdly overlooked-but-in-plain-sight legislative manouvre Justin Trudeau’s government made immediately after getting elected. Those were such heady days! Cash-for-access banquets for senior Liberal Party donors and Chinese billionaires, Foreign Affairs Minister Stephane Dion’s enthusiasm for an open-arms approach to his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov, a reopening of Tehran’s spy nest of an embassy in Ottawa. . .
The manouvre I’m alluding to was openly debated at the time, and it was intended as a rebuke to those mean and xenophobic Harper Conservatives who had placed certain conditions on the acquisition and retention of Canadian citizenship. Among other things, Trudeau’s legislation - “A Canadian in a a Canadian is a Canadian!” - repealed a clause that stripped dual citizens of their Canadian status if they were convicted of terrorism, treason or espionage.
It seems to me that the manouvre effectively extends legal protection to Beijing-directed and Tehran-directed operatives doing their dirty work here in Canada: once they’re here, you can’t get get rid of them.
From We’re at the point of no return, back in February:
The thing is, it’s not even news that Beijing was running an election-subversion operation in 2021. The Atlantic Council’s Forensic Research Lab found that Beijing-directed hatchet jobs were country-wide: “China-linked actors took an active role in seeking to influence the September 20, 2021 parliamentary election in Canada, displaying signs of a coordinated campaign to influence behaviour among the Chinese diaspora voting in the election.” Canada’s own DisinfoWatch was onto it too. I wrote about it at the time. Headline: China's disinformation campaign against Canada's election is undeniable.
But CSIS knew - of course CSIS knew - and CSIS knew a hell of a lot more than any of us, and that’s the public service {Robert] Fife and [Steven] Chase have done for us all in the Globe. Either by some black magic of bureaucratic inertia or incompetence, Trudeau has been able to play dumb, like he didn’t know the details, or at other times he implies that he did know, but hey, big deal, this sort of thing happens all the time and now CSIS better start plugging its leaks.
That’s the bigger story here. Rather than come clean with the public about the scope and extent of what CSIS has discovered about Beijing’s illegal operations in Canada - operations that were put to the purpose of a Liberal re-election and the defeat of targeted Conservative candidates - the Trudeau government is going after CSIS.
Why?
If you like you could go back to 2017 when I raised the question in the Ottawa Citizen: Has Canada just given up and decided to join with Beijing? In that case, the facts showed the answer was “yes,” that within Trudeau’s circle a kind of consensus had built around the explicit proposition about relations with Beijing put forward by former Liberal cabinet minister Martin Cauchon: “There is a saying that if you can’t beat them, join them.”
La Lutte continue
Next week, lifelong Trudeau family friend and former Trudeau foundation luminary and former governor-general David Johnston, also a lifelong advocate of pulling Canada closer into Beijing’s orbit, whose Rideau Hall Foundation is a who’s who of some of Beijing’s dearest friends in this country (see David Johnston the right man to whitewash Chinese interference) will deliver his interim report on Beijing’s election-interference operations.
Owing to the cap-doffing and forelock-tugging postures press gallery journalists are obliged to slavishly adopt at the very mention of Johnston’s name, it will be interesting to see how his report as Trudeau’s “special independent rapporteur” gets covered.
Get a load of this column only yesterday by the Toronto Star’s otherwise level-headed Susan Delacourt: “Johnston has to figure out a way for the government to reassure Canadians that their democracy remains free and fair, against the din of politicians shouting that it is not.”
No, that’s not what Johnston is supposed to be doing, and that’s not what politicians have been shouting about. Johnston was called up by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as a strategem to block his duty to answer three simple questions, which of course he still hasn’t answered: What did he know about Beijing’s interference operations in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections, when did he know it, and what did he do about it?
Fun times. All for now.
RangerRay
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Andrew Coyne lays everything out and calls for a broad but narrow mandate to focus on Beijing's influence, interference and intimidation campaigns under this Liberal government.
www.theglobeandmail.com
Opinion: How we got here: China’s unrelenting influence campaign, the Liberals’ mishandling and the questions that remain
A public inquiry into China’s foreign interference is our best and only shot at answering questions that cannot be left hanging
www.theglobeandmail.com
Looking back, we should have known. No, strike that, we knew; everybody knew. However much China might have liberalized its economy, whatever material gains it might have made, it was always clear that the Communist Party of China was the same brutal gang of thugs it always was. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989 because Mikhail Gorbachev would not approve shooting the protesters. That same year, at Tiananmen Square, China went in another direction.
And yet, after a relatively brief interval, Western investment and Western trade with China resumed as before. Canada was among the earliest and most eager of China’s suitors. Only a few years after Tiananmen, newly elected Liberal prime minister Jean Chrétien led the first Team Canada mission to China: all those minivans stuffed with premiers and chief executives, falling over themselves to flatter their Chinese hosts, hoping to get the jump on their Western competitors.
For there was money to be made, and besides, wasn’t China the rising power in the world? Wasn’t it just shrewd statesmanship to get onside with the regime? After all, it wasn’t as if we had put aside all concern for human rights.
Rather, we told ourselves, with trade and investment would come, sooner or later, freedom. It wasn’t we who had sold out to China; rather, over time they would become more like us: not just more capitalist, but more liberal, more democratic.
It wasn’t a crazy idea. I bought it. But after Xi Jinping became President in 2013; after China launched the Belt and Road Initiative, extending its influence around the world; after it laid claim to virtually all of the South China Sea; after it became clear it had no intention of living up to the terms of the 1984 handover agreement in Hong Kong; as the threats to invade Taiwan became louder and more insistent; and as the campaign of repression against the Uyghur population in Xinjiang intensified, it became harder and harder to sustain the illusion.
By the time Justin Trudeau’s Liberals came to power in 2015, it was evident that the “democratization through trade” strategy had failed: No longer just a bestial dictatorship at home, China had become an increasingly aggressive power abroad, bent on exporting its model where it could and imposing its will where it could not.
Chinese corporations like Huawei and CNOOC were enlisted in the campaign. So was the Chinese diaspora, over whom Beijing asserts authority and whom it expects to toe the regime line. So were China’s efforts to surveil, suborn and intimidate Western political leaders, including Canada’s.
And yet our courtship, if anything, grew more ardent. Under Mr. Trudeau, Canada tilted hard toward China at the very moment it was tilting even further away from the West. The talk through the first years of the Trudeau government was of a historic opening to China: a free-trade agreement, maybe even an extradition treaty. The Prime Minister attended private fundraising dinners in the company of Chinese billionaires. Fervent Sinophiles, first John McCallum, later Dominic Barton, were appointed as ambassadors to Beijing.
It was only in late 2018, after the regime-ordered detention of two Canadians, Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, in retaliation for Canada’s decision to extradite Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou to the United States, that the affair began to cool. But even then, there were voices urging a speedy return to normalcy. Pity about the kidnapping. Now, where were we?
Open this photo in gallery:
Former governor general David Johnston appears before a Commons committee on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Nov. 6, 2018.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
All of this is to say, with regard to the matters David Johnston has been asked to advise the Prime Minister on, there is a context. After all this, few could claim to be genuinely surprised by what has emerged over the past few months of reporting by The Globe and Mail and Global News, even if it was based on top-secret intelligence.
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What was shocking was rather the scale and scope of it: a broad, deep and unrelenting campaign of interference in Canada’s political, economic and social life, going back years; an onslaught of bribes, threats and disinformation aimed at every level of government; the attempted capture of a country, a class and especially of a party.
Or rather, what was shocking was how little response any of it seemed to have provoked in official Ottawa. Consider each of the allegations in turn:
The disinformation campaigns against certain Conservative candidates. Intelligence reports detailing China’s use of social media and community proxies to spread disinformation about some Conservative candidates – allegedly part of a broader strategy to ensure that the Liberals were re-elected in 2021 – were reportedly shared with senior government officials, as well as with Canada’s intelligence partners.
Yet neither the Conservatives nor the public at large were given any warning of this. The Conservatives, to be sure, had their own suspicions, but when they took these to the agency responsible, the Security and Intelligence Threat to Elections (SITE) task force, they say they got no response.
Support for other candidates, mostly Liberals. As far back as 2017, the office of the National Security and Intelligence Adviser (NSIA), which reports to the Prime Minister, was warning that Beijing was targeting Canadian politicians for influence operations.
A February, 2020, memo prepared by the Privy Council Office (PCO), which also reports to the Prime Minister, described a Chinese-sponsored “interference network” of at least 11 federal candidates in the 2019 election, almost all Liberal, plus 13 or more staffers: some of them witting participants, some unwitting. The support allegedly took the form of under-the-table funds provided through a series of proxies, as well as campaign workers recruited from among the international Chinese student community.
According to a January, 2022, PCO memo, a Conservative member of the Ontario legislature was also allegedly involved in the network, as an intermediary. Another intelligence report alleges Chinese involvement in the past Vancouver municipal election, grooming candidates for city council and intervening on behalf of a candidate in the race for mayor.
Would any of this have come out had it not been for the willingness of intelligence sources to risk jail time to make it public knowledge? Would anything have been done about it? Doubtful.
Open this photo in gallery:
Tourism, Culture and Sport Minister Michael Chan waves following a swearing-in ceremony at Queen's Park in Toronto on Feb. 11, 2013.Kevin Van Paassen/The Globe and Mail
The Michael Chan affair. A former minister in the Ontario Liberal governments of Dalton McGuinty and Kathleen Wynne, now deputy mayor of Markham, Ont., Mr. Chan is a major fundraiser and influential figure in Liberal circles. He has also been under Canadian Security Intelligence Service surveillance for many years, allegedly over his links to officials in the Chinese consulate. (Mr. Chan denies any wrongdoing.)
Mostly, The Globe reported, quoting a national-security source, that CSIS sought a warrant under Section 21 of the CSIS Act with regard to Mr. Chan in early 2021, allowing it to intercept his electronic communications and bug his home, car and office. The warrant was approved by lawyers for CSIS and the Justice Department, as well as CSIS director David Vigneault, but was allegedly held up for four months by then-public safety minister Bill Blair. (Mr. Blair has issued a statement saying “no warrant application ever took as long as four months to approve.”)
The attempted intimidation of Conservative MP Michael Chong. The Globe reported earlier this month, quoting an intelligence assessment dated July, 2021, that Chinese officials had been gathering information about family members of Mr. Chong, a prominent critic of the regime, in an effort to “make an example” of him.
The campaign was allegedly directed by an official in China’s Toronto consulate, Zhao Wei. Though Mr. Zhao was subsequently expelled from Canada, Mr. Chong was apoplectic that no on had thought to inform him of the threat to his family in the nearly two years since the report was prepared.
Open this photo in gallery:
Conservative MP for Wellington-Halton Hills Michael Chong speaks to reporters before appearing as a witness at the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs (PROC) regarding foreign election interference, on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, on May 16.Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press
As with previous reports, the Prime Minister insisted he had not seen the intelligence assessment, asserting CSIS had failed to pass it on. Yet Mr. Chong was informed by the Prime Minister’s current National Security and Intelligence Adviser, Jody Thomas, that the report had in fact been provided to one of her predecessors. Still, none of her predecessors could recall having seen it. And the Prime Minister claimed not to have been told what Ms. Thomas was told, days after the matter had come to light. This is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside a clown car.
Of course, Mr. Chong and the other MPs are only the latest alleged victims of Chinese intimidation campaigns. Chinese Canadians have been complaining of similar, or worse, tactics by the regime for years, with no apparent response. The issue was recently highlighted by reporting on China’s installation of several “police stations,” in Canada and other countries, as bases for its operations against dissenters.
The Trudeau Foundation mess. After one of Mr. Trudeau’s fundraising dinners with Chinese businessmen, it was announced that two of them would donate $200,000 to the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, an organization in which friends and family of the late prime minister loom large (a first cousin once removed of mine is a former board member) but which was nevertheless the recipient of $125-million in public funds.
As The Globe reported earlier this year, the donation was in fact indirectly funded by the Chinese government, in hopes of buying influence with the younger Mr. Trudeau. It later reported that the foundation had falsely identified the donors on the tax receipts, apparently at the request of an organization affiliated with the Chinese state – activities that, once discovered, prompted most of the current board and executive to resign.
Open this photo in gallery:
Chair of the Board of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Edward Johnson appears as a witness at a standing committee on access to information, privacy and ethics on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on May 9.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
And these are just the highlights. The picture that emerges is not just of extensive and apparently successful efforts on the part of China to penetrate Canadian politics and government, but of the critical enabling role played by the Trudeau government. At the least it seems to have somehow remained entirely unaware of a series of ever-more-alarming reports, coming not only from CSIS but from the PCO and NSIA.
(The same apparently applied to the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians, a creation of the current government which, like PCO and NSIA, reports directly to the Prime Minister. It complained in a recent report that no action had been taken on any of its recommendations.)
Worse has been its performance after the reports started leaking: an endless series of deflections, non-denial denials and flat-out stonewalling (days of filibustering, for example, at the Commons ethics committee in an ultimately fruitless effort to prevent the Prime Minister’s chief of staff from having to testify) that gave every evidence of a government with something to hide.
Compounding this has been the tone deafness of its belated attempts to show the public it was getting to the bottom of things. Did the Critical Election Incident Public Protocol (CEIPP), the body tasked with warning the public about attempts to interfere with Canadian elections but which chose not to do so, do its job? Let’s get the former chief executive of the Trudeau Foundation, the person who approved the Chinese donation, to look into it.
And who should we get to look into the whole mess, in which we are so deeply implicated? Why, David Johnston, of course – a lifelong family friend, previous political appointee, with an extensive personal and professional commitment to closer Canada-China ties and a member of the Trudeau Foundation to boot? Either these people do not understand the principle of conflict of interest (as I’ve said before, the rule is not “avoid conflicts unless you are a highly credentialed former Governor-General,” it’s “avoid conflicts”) or they don’t care.
One consequence of Mr. Johnston’s conflicted position is that, on the question to be addressed in this preliminary report (a broader report is to follow this fall), whether to call a public inquiry, he can give only one answer. Were he to recommend against it, even if he thought it was a bad idea, the cries of “cover-up” would ring from here to Beijing.
But if we are to have a public inquiry, it’s important that it be done right, taking account of an inquiry’s particular strengths and weaknesses. On the one hand, it should not cast its net too narrowly – to focus only on explicit interference in federal elections, say, rather than the broader pattern of interference in Canadian politics, or indeed Canada. On the other hand, its scope should not be so broad as to lose sight of the most immediate and pressing threat to our national security, which is China.
If Mr. Johnston recommends an inquiry into all sources of foreign interference – Russia, Iran, the works – we’ll know he has lost the plot. The same holds if the inquiry is turned into a history assignment, looking at Chinese interference through the ages, about which much is already known, rather than under this government, about which much is not.
The point is to focus on the particular purposes to which a public inquiry is best suited. We don’t need a public inquiry to tell us how China is attempting to interfere in our politics: that’s what the intelligence services are for. Neither do we need an inquiry to frame a response: That’s the job of cabinet, and its advisers in the civil service.
What a public inquiry, with all of its legal powers and all of its legal safeguards, is good at is telling us what went on inside the government – the sorts of questions we would never get answered without its power to compel the production of government documents and the testimony of government witnesses. Questions such as:
The only honest answer to any of these questions at this point is: I don’t know. But they are questions that cannot be left hanging, and a public inquiry is our best and only shot at getting them answered.
- Intelligence reports say that China wanted to help the Liberals get re-elected. Why?
- Were the intelligence reports broadly correct in their assessments: that is, was China attempting to interfere, in the ways described?
- Who knew what when? Is it conceivable that not one of these multiple reports over several years could have reached a minister’s desk, the Prime Minister’s in particular? What about their advisers?
- If so, what does that say about how we are governed, if critical intelligence on a pressing matter of national security never reaches the final decision-makers? But if not, then why would they lie about it?
- And the ultimate question, assuming somebody knew: Why was nothing done about any of it? Was it incompetence? Negligence? Or was a deliberate choice made to look the other way – perhaps out of embarrassment at having been played by the Chinese regime, an inability to admit that they bet the farm on China, and lost? Worse, was it because, as Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has suggested, the Liberals benefited from it? Or worse yet, was it out of fear of what might come out: potentially, that certain Liberals had been compromised?
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RangerRay
Army.ca Veteran
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OS may be referring to our home-grown business and political class who fall all over themselves to ingratiate themselves to Beiging, rather than the Chinese community here.
thanks for placing this on the open forum. Thought of adding an emoj but I couldn't chose between anger, sorrow, or just plain wow! so consider all threeAndrew Coyne lays everything out and calls for a broad but narrow mandate to focus on Beijing's influence, interference and intimidation campaigns under this Liberal government.
Opinion: How we got here: China’s unrelenting influence campaign, the Liberals’ mishandling and the questions that remain
A public inquiry into China’s foreign interference is our best and only shot at answering questions that cannot be left hanging
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This, in The Economist, is worth your time - even if you have to go to the library to read it.
Henry Kissinger, now 100 years old. is The Economist says, still sharp as a tack ... and he's worried. He sees the situation in 2023 as being very analogous to 1913 with less than stellar leadership on either the American or Chinese sides.
He has some recommendations, they are worth considering.
War with China need not be inevitable but if we screw this up it will be massively destructive.
Henry Kissinger, now 100 years old. is The Economist says, still sharp as a tack ... and he's worried. He sees the situation in 2023 as being very analogous to 1913 with less than stellar leadership on either the American or Chinese sides.
He has some recommendations, they are worth considering.
War with China need not be inevitable but if we screw this up it will be massively destructive.
An interesting article looking into the huge number of Chinese diplomats in Canada (more than they have in Britain).
www.ctvnews.ca
Why does Canada have a disproportionately high number of Chinese diplomats?
As former governor general David Johnston prepares to release his report on foreign interference Tuesday, new data provided by Global Affairs Canada sheds light on the breadth of China's diplomatic presence.
Halifax Tar
Army.ca Fixture
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I don't think anyone was expecting anything else, were they ?
So he says he doesn't recommend a PI, but instead thinks we should hold a "public process":
"A further public process is required to address issues relating to foreign interference, but there should not and need not be a separate public inquiry"
"The public process should focus on strengthening Canada's capacity to detect, deter and counter foreign interference in our elections and the threat such interference represents to our democracy,"
So don't look behind the curtain, lets just try to move forward and let bygones be bygones.
Don’t know. I would have thought that a public inquiry would have been called given the pressure. But…
An inquiry would have raised the curtains regardless and much if not everything would likely be behind closed doors anyways.
OldSolduer
Army.ca Relic
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Not all that surprising considering who he is and how he is an old family friend.
"These aren't the droids we're looking for....move along."
My respect for government figures has been taken another notch down.
"These aren't the droids we're looking for....move along."
My respect for government figures has been taken another notch down.
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