Beijing's Best Canadian Friends, Part Etcetera
Weekend Special: Trump-Russia was nothing compared to Trudeau-China, but this isn't just about the Trudeau Liberals. The hour's later than you think.
When Is A Foreign Influence Operation A Liberal Policy Paradigm?
In light of the hullabaloo about the election monkeywrenching operations Beijing’s emissaries and proxies put in place during the federal elections of 2019 and 2021, it’s a great advance in the cause of civic hygiene that Canadians are slowly but surely getting around to asking the most important question:
Why would the Chinese Communist Party go to such desperate and determined lengths to help the Trudeau Liberals win?
One would have to be quite new to the parish, to borrow an expression, to struggle for an answer to that one. But fair enough, a lot of people don’t follow these things as closely as I do and I do because it’s my job. In this weekend’s National Post I try to explain why in terms even the most casual observer might understand. Headline: Trudeau's relationship with China far uglier than any links Trump had with Russia.
Quite a few people are reacting to that explainer with shock, disbelief and outrage (poor old Gerald Butts; these must be difficult days for Trudeau’s former senior adviser). How very dare you talk about our Justin in this fashion! Well, sorry, but it’s all true, chapter and verse.
And I just scratched the surface. I think it’s one of better uses I’ve made of my National Post perch in a while. It’s based on a thought experiment: Try to imagine if Trump had done for Russia after 2016 the same things Trudeau did for China after 2015.
Try to imagine if Trump had appointed the head of the Russian-American Business Council to nominate his cabinet picks and had the guy run the transition team to carry him into the White House, and then immediately replaced all the Obama-era czars and mandarins with creepy Kremlin-friendly bureaucrats, then finagled the Russian-American Business Council boss into the topmost spot in the United States Senate.
Then imagine Trump heading off to Moscow to talk up a free trade deal and an extradition treaty with Vladimir Putin, then returning with Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev to skate out on the ice at Madison Square Garden in New York Rangers jerseys, then inviting Putin’s closest and richest oligarchs to take over as many of the biggest businesses in the most critical industries in the United States as they wanted. . . and so on and so on.
Trudeau did all those things, just in the opening acts of his tenure in the Prime Minister’s Office, except with the Canada-China Business Council and the Canadian Senate, not the Russian-American Business Council and the U.S. Senate, and Beijing instead of Moscow, and Li Keqiang instead of Medvedev and Habs jerseys in Montreal instead of Rangers jerseys in New York and so on. And it got worse from there.
I didn’t even mention the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service investigation that uncovered a Beijing-run influence operation with a happily compliant Justin Trudeau in the middle of it going back to 2013, with antecedents going back to 2005. Or the precursors in the Trudeau family that go back to the 1960s when Pierre Trudeau was one of Mao Zedong’s most valuable propaganda assets in the western world, and how Justin came into office determined to fulfilling papa’s weirdly messianic China dreams.
Pierre’s service to the Chinese Communist Party began during the Great Leap Forward and the cataclysm it put in motion, a horror that swept away perhaps 70 million people in a famine worse than the Holdomor. As the regime’s invited guests, Trudeau Senior toured his way across China with his pal, Jacques Hebert. They dined well, and noticed no hungry people whatsoever, not even rationing, just “controlled distribution of foodstuffs.”
The pair co-authored a book about their travels, Two Innocents in Red China. They sneered at proper journalists who were trying to alert the world about what was really going on. The “conservative press of the west” was not to be believed. The Maoists were building an exciting new world, and you know what they say about making omelettes. Eggs get broken.
You’d think all this would be at least embarrassing to Trudeau Junior, but his father’s legacy among China’s ruling elites and his adulation of the Chinese regime is a routinely-repeated point pride for him. You’d think the family would have wanted Two Innocents in Red China binned and forgotten, but it was republished in 2007 with an introduction by Justin’s brother Alexandre, who retraced his father’s journey, and gushed in likewise fashion.
Writing in Saturday Night magazine in 1997, the author Kenneth White said Two Innocents “may well be the worst book ever published in Canada.” Quite possibly, I’d say, but then I’ve never read The Legend Continues, the Chinese title of Justin’s autobiography, published by the regime-owned publisher Yilin Press, in 2016.
Canadians do not like thinking of the Trudeaus in this way, not one bit, let me tell you. Justin Trudeau’s the guy that got put on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. He’s the Antitrump. Pierre Trudeau is the Swinging Sixties wise man we’re all supposed to recall with hushed reverence. What other former prime minister has a federally-endowed foundation in his name?
Elsewhere I’ve delved into Trudeau’s determination to meld Canada’s advanced capitalist economy and natural resource wealth with China’s investment capital and vast consumer markets. That was his platform when he was running for the Liberal Party leadership. China was the rocket to a future of fabulous middle-class riches, and he was the guy to put Canada on the launching pad. “Obviously, my family has historical ties with China,” he explained.
The Chinese Communist Party was all in. Trudeau’s Liberal Party was all in. You don’t need some conspiracy theory or cloak-and-dagger job to explain this. It’s not like Beijing’s got the goods on him in some way, with some blackmail video or something. It’s just bred in the bone with him, and with all those Montreal guys around the Desmarais family and Power Corp and SNC-Lavalin and Bombardier and former prime minister Jean Chretien and the rest.
What Beijing wanted from Canada, Trudeau wanted to give Beijing as a willing “win-win” partner. Like his father, Justin Trudeau wanted to “diversify trade away from the United States.” That’s exactly what Beijing wanted Canada to do too. Trudeau came to power determined to forge “a new era in the Canada-China strategic partnership.” That’s what Beijing wanted too.
The clearest conjoining of a Liberal policy project and a Chinese influence operation I know about is probably the creepiest, because it involves the manipulation of Canadian public opinion in China’s favour. What’s never been clear to me about the project is whether Beijing came up with the idea or Ottawa did, but it was a total mind-meld.
During Trudeau’s official visit to China in December, 2017, members of the Canadian delegation told the Globe and Mail they were being hectored by Chinese officials about the newspaper’s critical coverage of China. The Chinese side wanted Canada to do something about it. It was as though the Chinese diplomats just didn’t understand the concept of a free press in a democracy - but of course they did.
Months later, at a symposium in Ottawa, Ambassador Lu Shaye blasted Canadians for their “immoral” opposition to Chinese state-owned enterprises taking over Canadian companies. “We hope Canada could adjust its mindset and do not always see China through tinted glasses, nor create barriers for two countries’ co-operation at the excuse of national security.” Conveniently, going into the 2015 election, Trudeau’s senior advisor on China was Margaret Cornish, who held exactly the same view.
In 2012, Cornish had written a policy paper for the Canadian Council for Chief Executives arguing absurdly that Chinese state-owned enterprises were “profit-driven to the core” and should not be understood as the overseas acquisitions arms of the Chinese Communist Party - which is exactly what they are.
Trudeau’s first foreign affairs minister was the hapless Stephane Dion, whose senior policy advisor, Pascale Massot, had authored a major contribution in a compendium to guide Trudeau’s shift towards China that echoed the Chinese officials’ admonitions about doing something about Canadians’ attitudes, and also reflected Cornish’s views on state-owned enterprises, and replicated Ambassador Shaye’s standpoint, all in one go.
“We have to move beyond basing our criticisms of Chinese SOE behaviour on the notion of the preservation of an existing liberal and fair economic order,” Massot wrote. The title of Massot’s submission: The Political Economy of Canadian Public Opinion on China.
By the summer of 2017, Ottawa and the Canada-China Business Council were collaborating on a two-year project led by the Public Policy Forum to employ a variety of polling techniques to the purpose of molding a strategy to change the way Canadians think about China, and to build public support for a full bore Canada-China free trade deal, which was already in negotiations.
Unfortunately for the Public Policy Forum, Canadians turned out to be made of sterner stuff. Canadian attitudes about the Chinese police state kept on hardening. By the time Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor were taken hostage in China in retaliation to Canada’s detention of Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou in December 2018, Canadians had lost their patience with the China trade lobby’s “win-win” mumbo jumbo. China’s approval ratings fell off a cliff.
Not that the Mikes’ abduction stopped Team Trudeau from hoping and praying and conniving with notions like well, the Canada-China relationship has always been “complex and difficult,” and countries keep dealing with one another despite the most difficult “consular cases.” But back up there a minute.
What was that thing the Public Policy Forum was up to? How do you describe it? Was it a Beijing-directed operation aimed at manipulating public opinion in Canada, or an Ottawa-directed project aimed at influencing Canadian attitudes on Beijing’s behalf? This brings us to the deepest difficulty in covering the story of Beijing’s influence operations in Canada. It’s a paradox. I put it this way in the Weekend Post:
It’s all been unfolding right in front of our eyes — and in recent years, it’s become difficult to determine where those operations end and the Trudeau government’s official China policy begins. At times, it’s been difficult to find the line between these things, and difficult to know whether the line exists at all.
Sorry, but it’s all true. All of it.
Conservative In Hot Water! Timely or what.
Let’s spare a thought for poor old Vincent Ke, shall we? Or not.
Thrust this week into the election-interference spotlight, Ke is not a Liberal. He’s the Conservative MPP for Don Valley North, the same patch of Greater Toronto that the dodgy Liberal MP Han Dong won with the Chinese consulate’s help in 2019, the guy in the eye of Beijing’s election-monkeywrenching hurricane ever since our pal Sam Cooper broke the story wide open for Global News last November. Dong’s the charmer CSIS warned Trudeau’s officials about in a high-level briefing before the election.
Dong is reported to have been described as “a witting affiliate in China’s election interference networks,” and Team Trudeau is reportd to have ignored the warnings. To be fair to Vincent Ke, the evidence is not that he took any money directly from the Chinese consulate, but rather that he handled the dirty money through an intermediary in the same network that threw itself behind Han Dong. And CSIS has been clear that not all the goombas in that network were necessarily aware of where the money was coming from, and not all the MPs elected in the operation were necessarily aware that the Chinese consulate was among their benefactors.
Vincent Ke’s outing is timely for me because this past week I was turning my attention to certain Conservatives implicated in Beijing’s overseas elite-capture and influence-peddling operations, and then, bang, there goes Vincent Ke. He’s been frogmarched out of Premier Doug Ford’s ruling Conservative caucus at Queen’s Park where he’ll sit as an independent while he “clears his name.” Ke proclaims his innocence.
To get back to that question Canadians are slowly but surely getting around to asking, in my regular column this past week I thought it might be helpful to ask it in a slightly different way, with specific reference to the backstairs work Beijing’s emissaries and operatives were up to in the 2021 federal election:
Why was Beijing so desperate and determined to see the Conservatives lose?
My effort to answer that question for the general reader showed up on the front page Thursday under a headline that gives the answer this way: Beijing Could Not Abide Tough-On-China O’Toole, online version here, or the Ottawa Citizen version if you’d prefer: China's main goal? Ensuring Canada's Conservatives would lose.
Long story short, the policy O’Toole and Shadow Foreign Affairs Minister Michael Chong developed, in close consultation with a cross section of diaspora groups and foreign-policy eggheads, was something Canadians from across the political spectrum could be proud of. It was the whole deal.
I wrote about it at the time, right here. Seriously, the Conservative position on democratic rights in China, the genocide in Xinjiang, the Tibet question, trade with China, how to deal with Chinese state-owned enterprises, a proper Canadian approach to the catastrophe in Hong Kong, China’s interference operations in Canada - the whole thing was quite the deal. If you want to get more acquainted with it, it’s all here, and it’s still rock solid.
But some members of the Conservative Party family are not quite what rank-and-filers think they are, and I’ll be getting into the greasy details below the paywall. Down there I’ll also have what came of an enlightening conversation with Bert Chen, the Conservative Party National Council coup plotter who was turfed for getting up that petition calling for the ouster of party leader Erin O’Toole in the days following the 2021 election.
At least I managed to fill in that strange gap from about a decade ago in Chen’s curriculum vitae. Which explained enough. And I had quite a quarrel with one of the Conservative caucus mutineers who brought about O’Toole’s downfall.
Before we get into all that, just a quick observation about that paradox I mentioned a couple of paragraphs back. Most Real Story subscribers will be more than merely casual observers of China’s tightening vice grips in and around Ottawa, as will anyone who’s been following my work in the Post and the Ottawa Citizen over the years, but holy cow.
The past few days and weeks have been like a dam bursting. I’m seeing headlines on news stories I wrote six years ago popping up on stories every day now, everywhere. As in: Learn from Australia – we should beware of Chinese influence-peddling, from 2017. Or this one from nine years ago: The continuing corruption from Beijing’s dirty money. That’s from before Justin Trudeau was elected, I shouldn’t have to point out.
A hell of a lot is happening everywhere and all at once. Unless it’s blocked again by Liberal-appointed Yuen Pau Woo and those other creepy senators the Chinese ambassador has called “people of vision,” and so long as the broad cross section of ethno-cultural diaspora organizations in the Canadian Coalition for a Foreign Influence Registry (CCFIR) keep the pressure up, we might just be getting that long overdue national-security guardrail in place after all.