All The King's Horses, All The King's Men.

David Johnston's job is to put Justin Trudeau together again. He can't.

Back in the saddle after what was intended as a month away from the Ottawa Citizen and the National Post. Hell of a month to do that, but at least I’ve been on the China beat here at the Real Story in the interim, so cut me some slack.

The very moment China’ss Mandela, Liu Xiaobo, was murdered in a Chinese prison, David Johnston was stuffing his face and smiling for the cameras with Xi Jinping at a banquet in Beijing.

I’m writing this before I’ve seen the interim report on Beijing’s interference operations expected today from lifelong China enthusiast and “Special Independent Rapporteur” David Johnston. You might think that’s odd. Here’s what’s odd:

Johnston had written his report before he’d even stopped by to hear from from Erin O’Toole or seen anything from the binders of evidence O’Toole’s 2021 Conservative Party leadership team had prepared for him. Remember: the defeat of the O’Toole Conservatives at the polls was the whole point of Beijing’s interference operations in the first place.

And if you think that’s odd, remember what I reported back in March, in Beijing simply could not abide Erin O'Toole's tough-on-China policies: Johnston’s fellow Trudeau Foundation bigshot Morris Rosenberg gave the 2021 election a clean bill of health without speaking with any of the Conservative Party’s campaign officials whose complaints to the Critical Election Incident Public Protocol went strangely unheeded.

O’Toole’s got a blistering account of his encounter with Johnston in his newsletter, here. “I was flabbergasted and realized that nothing I was going to provide to the Special Rapporteur was going to impact his work,” O’Toole writes. “I was left with the clear impression that my meeting was nothing more than a box checking exercise.”

Archive of the Dodgy and the Damned

This edition of the Real Story newsletter happens to conclude a series on the subject of the Chinese elite’s friends in high Laurentian places. Or not quite conclude: There are some important matters that you haven’t read about in the press that should concern you if you’re inclined towards the Conservative Party, and some useful backstory if you’re puzzled about who to trust in the journalism racket. That’s to come in short order.

In an upcoming Real Story edition there’ll also be an important follow-up to my last column before my hiaitus that should tell you something about the horrors that can befall you if you’re Chinese-Canadian and you say the wrong kind of things. That last column: Evidence of China's interference has been lying in plain sight for years.

I hope this series served as useful background. The most important parts were paywalled. If you want what paying customers get, it’s cheap and easy.

Installments here: Real Story Series: Diplomat, Socialite, Spy; The Michael Chong Uproar: What’s Changed? and Kowtowing: A Necessary Evil in Canada Now? There are links embedded in each installment to earlier Real Story contributions, to my Post & Citizen pieces and other material, and the whole package should serve as a kind of archive of Beijing’s successful and largely unreported capture of much of Canada’s political and corporate class.

Known Affectionately To China’s Rulers As “Jiangshan”

In the public conversations about the propriety of Johnston’s appointment as an “independent” expert to whom we must turn for answers Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has outright refused to provide (about what he knew about Beijing’s election interference operations, when he knew and what he did about any of it, if anything) the focus has been on the absurd claim that Johnston is in any way an “independent” party.

And fair enough. The Johnstons’ and Trudeaus’ neighbouring cottages in the Laurentians, the Trudeau boys’ childhood ski trips with Johnston’s daughters, and so on. And Johnston’s former role as a governing member of the Trudeau Foundation, which has been caught up in the scandal owing to its back-alley dealings with a certain super-rich Chinese benefactor in a Beijing-run grooming operation targeting Trudeau himself going back to 2013. That sort of thing.

Far more incriminating is Johnston’s own half-century of kowtowing to Beijing, his own direct and willing role in Beijing’s influence operations in Canada and his personal and ongoing association with figures deeply compromised by their collaboration with Chinese government institutions and by their own vested interest in the making nice to Xi Jinping and his regime’s Canadian proxies. Johnston’s own Rideau Hall Foundation is like an abbreviated who’s-who of Beijing’s Canadian compradors.

I detailed Johnston’s sordid curriculum vitae for the National Post here: David Johnston the right man to whitewash Chinese interference; elaborated upon In Real Story pieces here and here.

Over at the Globe, Andrew Coyne is postively magisterial about the juncture we’ve reached in How we got here: China’s unrelenting influence campaign, the Liberals’ mishandling and the questions that remain.

All this is just some context to take into account, whatever Johnston’s report today contains.