After Liquidation Day: Chaos and Panic
Beijing's gravitational pull grows stronger every day as Europe and Canada look to a world without the U.S. in the wheelhouse.
My usual Sunday Real Story was postponed to this morning because of an embargo on a project that’s been in the works for quite a while. It was out as of noon Eastern time today.
There’s a lot going on in this Real Story edition so I’d suggest you press on through it and come back to the links when you’re done, as usual with link-rich Real Story newsletters. My Canadian subscribers might want to bookmark this newsletter’s web version because this story isn’t going away and there are plenty of resources here. As for the embargoed report, a colour printer and legal-size paper would come in handy.
The report, Dotting the Map: A Visual Guide for Canadian Voters, contains granular schematics illustrating the relationships between the Chinese Communist Party and its complex social, cultural, political and financial networks in Canada. I’ll be coming to it below. It’s going to be increasingly necessary for people to get their heads around this stuff in the coming weeks and months.
In the National Post this past week I laid out the story behind the Paul Chiang affair: Beware, Mark Carney's affection for authoritarian China. The incident was indeed, in Carney’s own words, “a teachable moment,” except not in the way Carney would have wanted. It was teachable in thie way t provided a brief glimpse inside the networks explored in the Dotting the Map report.
Reluctant to disturb Beijing’s powerful friends in his party, Carney had refused to intervene against Chiang despite the appeals of 40 Hong Kong diaspora organizations from the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany and Australia. As the scandal spun out of control, Chiang was invited to fall on his sword and make way for a substitute.
The new Liberal candidate in Markham-Unionville is Paul Yuen, another favorite of the Liberal Party’s Beijing-aligned Mandarin bloc establishment in the Greater Toronto Area. Sam Cooper’s got some handy background on Paul Yuen here.
My National Post piece is not meant as a “takedown” of Mark Carney, but it does raise a number of questions Carney hasn’t addressed, and probably can’t address openly. Charles Burton, the sinologist and former diplomat, shows up in my Post piece with a warning: As U.S. president Donald Trump knocks the struts out from under North America’s integrated economy, Canada is at increasing risk of being pulled into Beijing’s orbit.
Carney’s Liberals are now polling ahead of the Conservatives by double digits. An Ipsos poll released Sunday shows that 46 percent of respondents say they’re going to vote Liberal, up two points from a few days earlier, while Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives fell four points to 34 percent.
The polls are consistently showing a determined, unshakeable Conservative voter base up against a softer, less motivated but larger cohort of would-be Liberal voters. The accepted wisdom is that Carney, the former national bank governor and global money manager, has succeeded in presenting himself as more competent and capable in the task of dealing with Mad King Donald than Poilievre would be.
Not to question the received wisdom, but the question that’s topmost in my mind is whether Carney would be much more inclined to rationalize concessions to Beijing than Poilievre would be. I can’t help but conclude that Carney is Beijing’s guy in the federal election, just as he was Beijing’s guy in the Liberal leadership race. I’m not suggesting that he solicited this support. I’m just saying.
Just this morning, the SITE Task Force reported that it observed “large spikes of what is believed to be coordinated inauthentic behaviour on March 10 and 25, 2025,” concerning Carney. Arising from the Chinese social media platform WeChat, SITE TF detected articles about Carney receiving between 85,000 and 130,000 interactions, amplified to 1 to 3 million views, to the effect that the U.S. is up against a “tough guy” in Carney, and the current federal election is about Canada’s survival.
There’s several decades of the Liberal Party’s legacy of intimacies with the Chinese Communist Party to take into account here, too. And after all, Beijing’s bagmen, diplomats, proxies and influence-peddlers went all out to secure a Liberal win in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections. I see nothing to suggest a shift in Beijing’s preferences.
Burton has an important essay on the peril Canada is facing owing to Canada’s predicament, stuck between a Trumpist rock and a Chinese Communist Party hard place, in the Toronto Star. And of course China says we should choose the hard place. Burton doesn’t sugarcoat things: “Canada is entering its greatest existential upheaval since Confederation.”
It’s not just Canada that’s being drawn to the Eye of Sauron: Spurned by Trump, Europe and China weigh closer economic ties. See also Trump is pushing Europe and China closer together. Europe should tread carefully.
Canada and Mexico weren’t on Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs list, but it’s facile to say we dodged a bullet. Trump’s April 2 barrage wasn’t aimed at us, so there was no bullet to dodge; Trump has already targeted Canada with a series of crippling on-again, off-again, on-again full, partial and threatened tariffs, some of which are expected to get steeper in the coming weeks.
Meanwhile, China has slapped extortionate tariffs on Canadian canola, seafood and pork exports in an effort to scuttle Canada’s 100-per-cent tariffs on Chinese electrical vehicles - a necessary measure to prevent Beijing from dumping its EVs here and throttling Canada’s automobile industry. China has spent $230 billion on EV subsidies in its plans to assert global domination of the market.
Here’s how things looked as of 4 a.m. today. More than six trillion dollars evaporated in a matter of days. Notice anything about China?
The “counterintuitiveness” of the current moment
It should come as no surprise that Moscow is ecstatic about U.S. president Donald Trump’s April 2 Trade War On The World extravaganza. Beijing isn’t especially bothered, either, as we shall see.
Vladimir Putin’s loudest propagandists are proclaiming that a statue should be commissioned depicting Trump on a horse, or at the very least his image and likeness should be cast into a big medal of some sort. It’s not just because Trump’s list of countries on his global tariffs hit list exempted Russia and North Korea (inexplicably named on the list is an Australian volcano arising from the Southern Indian Ocean in the vicinity of Antarctica, populated only by penguins).
Moscow has been in turns amused and overjoyed by the ugly stupidity of the Trump White House from the beginning. Vladimir Putin wants nothing more than to have the Trans-Atlantic alliance enfeebled and teetering. Thank you, President Trump.
It may seem odd that Beijing isn’t terribly concerned with Trump’s April 2 tariffs, even though they amount to 34 percent on all China trade, bringing the total duties charged to American importers of Chinese goods to 54 percent. It isn’t particularly odd at all.
Beijing is going through the motions and filing a complaint with the World Trade Organization, and of course Beijing is saying all the right things about the WTO’s rules and sustainable development and the importance of openness and cooperation. Beijing says this kind of thing with a straight face all the time, and its music to the ears of the Canada-China Business Council and other collaborationist forces in the global corporate sector.
Bill Bishop over at Sinocism has the party line straight from the People’s Daily today: The sky won’t fall. China’s exports to the United States have already dropped to 14.7 percent of China’s total exports, down from 19.2 percent in 2018. Americans are far more likely to feel the pain of Trump’s chaos, and Beijing is right about that. “Many US products have high dependency on China. Currently, the US relies on China not only for many consumer goods but also for investment and intermediate products, with dependency exceeding 50 percent for several categories, making alternatives difficult to find in the international market in the short term. . .”
It also helps to know that, counterintuitively, Beijing’s monkeywrenchers were rooting for Trump during last year’s U.S. presidential election campaign. Beijing’s operatives were masquerading online as Trump supporters and behaving exactly the same way Russia’s massive bot farms were behaving, rooting for Trump during the 2016 presidential elections. The Chinese influence campaign in 2024 targeted the Biden-Harris Democrats.
It will not seem odd to anyone who has been paying attention that Beijing’s influence-peddlers in Canada have picked Mark Carney as their guy. It’s of a piece with Trump’s expression of contentment that Carney’s polling numbers were pointing the Liberals straight at the bullseye of an April 28 federal election win.
That didn’t mean Trump “endorsed” Carney, as some Conservative Party enthusiasts suggested. That line is as silly as the Liberal-NDP proposition that Poilievre is Trump’s guy in this election. For a detailed breakdown of all that, see On the limited utility of war-room spin.
Long story short:
Trump's obsessive belligerence targeting Justin Trudeau’s Canada was immensely popular with certain windbags in his MAGA base who regarded the Trudeau Liberals’ “woke” they/them politics. The last thing Trump wanted was to be up against a patriotic, populist conservative government in Ottawa.
Poilievre’s rise in the polls was ruining Trump’s talking points. His remarks about Poilievre (“stupidly, no friend of mine”) reflect an obvious hurt-feelings resentment. Trumpworld celebrities Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro had already begun to mock Trump’s tariff war on Canada, and a handful of Republican senators last week joined with Democrats to declare their support for Canada. So a Carney win would mean Trump could be rid of Poilievre, a guy Republicans tend to like.
About the Dotting the Map report
It’s a visual guide for Canadian voters consisting of nine cross-sectional “maps” outlining the breadth and depth of the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department infiltration of Canada. It’s a magisterial undertaking, the product of a great deal of hard and serious work by the Canadian Friends of Hong Kong (CFHK) and my old chums at Found in Translation (FiT) who have stepped back from their public profile lately.
I’ve been in touch with the CFHK’s Ivy Lee about this project for some while and I go back with FiT, necessarily anonymous, quite a ways. My old friends Burton and Jonathan Manthorpe, well senior to me in their expertise and authority, have lent the project their imprimatur. That should give you a sense of its gravity and integrity.
The “maps” are quite busy and dense. Don’t get too bogged down in them; each map is accompanied by its own references document, containing links, backgrounders, character sketches and that sort of thing. The report also contains sample questions that voters can ask of candidates and of elected politicians, and a section “What We as Voters Can Do.”
Beijing’s Friends in Canada: Some Real Story Resources
Close followers of The Real Story newsletter may find the Dotting the Map report contains information that seems strangely familiar. That’s because Beijing’s “elite capture” networks in Canada have been a particular concern of mine.
Apart from my contributions in the Ottawa Citizen, Macleans and the National Post over the years, here are some immediately relevant deep-dive projects from The Real Story archives:
China's "Magic Weapon" Hits Canadian Targets
Stigmatize, Vilify, Detest. Do Not Obey
Compradors and Eminent Canadian Gentlemen
Changing the subject, burying the story
Beijing’s Best Canadian Friends, Part Etcetera
Dominic Barton and the Damage Done, Part I and Part II
National Security In A "Post-National" State
The Michael Chong Uproar: What's Changed?
Kowtowing: A Necessary Evil in Canada Now?
All the King’s Horses, All the King’s Men
It’s not just about the Liberal Party, remember. See:
Welcome to Jean Charest’s World (Which reminds me. This story came and went in a flash: Mark Carney camp offers role to former Quebec premier Jean Charest: sources.)
The Comprador in the Conservative leadership race keeps digging
Conservatives, the Media and CCP Psy-Ops
Anyway, that should hold you for a while. And do take up a paying sub, or upgrade, or gift a friend:
You hit this one out of the park, Terry.
Canada’s present dilemma recalls Melampus, the Greek seer who warned of danger long before others could understand the signs. The "Dotting the Map" report speaks in that same prophetic register, exposing deep links between Beijing’s influence networks and Canadian institutions. While no direct wrongdoing is alleged, the reluctance to confront these ties—especially among rising figures like Mark Carney—reveals a troubling political silence. As foreign pressures mount, the greater risk may be not betrayal, but willful inattention.