Beijing's Interference Ops: Vindications.

If Chinese students could vote en masse for Han Dong and the Liberals thought it was okay, who elected Justin Trudeau to lead the Liberal Party in 2013? There's no way of knowing.

Coming up this week at Justice Marie-Josée Hogue’s public inquiry into foreign interference in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections: About a dozen witnesses. Among them: On Tuesday, Katie Telford, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s chief of staff; On Wednesday, Prime Minister Trudeau and cabinet ministers Bill Blair, Karina Gould and Dominic LeBlanc.

Should be fascinating.

A target-rich environment.

I genuinely don’t know where to begin here. What should I focus on in this newsletter? Puzzling out that question is just one of the reasons it’s been a week since the last edition of The Real Story.

It’s also because I’ve been busy digging fairly deeply into some seriously outrageous unreported backstory in the China-Canada file, which I’ll report when I get it nailed down. It will be paywalled. But no paywall today.

Paradoxically, nothing much was revealed at the inquiry hearings last week that Real Story subscribers would not already know, but at the same time last week was a very big deal in news about Beijing’s influence in Canadian affairs. Here’s what I mean.

The big thing about last week: All the testimony and Canadian Security and Intelligence Service summaries merely confirmed the same bombshell reports about Beijing’s election monkeywrenching that have been consistently sneered at, disputed or outright denied by the Trudeau government, all along.

Trudeau took high-dudgeon umbrage with the reports whe they first came out. Canadians were treated with the same contempt for Parliament and the public by Trudeau’s “special rapporteur” and whitewasher David Johnston, one of the most senior “friends of China” in Canada.

Those bombshell reports were denied up and down as well in the most melodramatic fashion by that serial dissembler Han Dong, the Dishonorable Member for Don Valley North.

Just one story from last week: It turns out that Dong wasn’t only misleading Inquiry Commission counsel as recently as last month about what he was up to. He now admits he actively recruited those Chinese highschoolers from New Oriental International College who showed up by the busload to cast votes for him in the 2019 nomination race that paved his way to a seat in the House of Commons.

And CSIS says China’s Toronto consulate threatened the students with severe repercussions if they didn’t do what they were told, and a Beijing proxy arranged for false addresses for students outside the riding, just in case anybody checked.

All the creepy stuff about Dong that grabbed all those headlines last week was known to Trudeau nearly five years ago, and it was all known to Johnston, too, before he filed his dog’s breakfast of a report last June. The point: They knew all along. They said nothing and did nothing. They pretended the hullabaloo was all about “racism.”

Nothing to see here. It’s just “multiculturalism.” Move along.

Liberal party brass told the commission last week that as far as they could see, no rules were broken in Dong’s dodgy Liberal nomination win.

This is the weirdness I’d had my eye on, well before it came up at the commission hearings.

For several years now, the point I’ve been trying to hammer home about what amounts to Beijing’s capture of the Liberal Party - or more precisely the Trudeau Liberals’ collaborations and collusions with Beijing - is that it’s all perfectly legal, and it has occurred mostly in plain sight, right under our noses.

It’s been right there for any journalist with the talent and the nerve and the inclination to look for it. The key to understanding the “Chinese foreign interference” phenomenon is that while it might shock the conscience of most Canadians, the Trudeau Liberals see nothing wrong with it. They like it.

Beijing was very clear and on the record about what it wanted in 2019 and 2021. The Chinese Communist Party wanted the Conservatives to lose and the Liberals to win.

The Liberals have given every impression that they’re fine with this.

Think of the way it was put by Canada’s senior palm-greaser in China, the disgraced former prime minister Jean Chretien, last March: “Ten or 15 constituencies in Canada at most? I don’t think it’s a very big problem.” Je ne pense pas que ce soit un gros problème.

I’m sorry (sort of) but I can’t quite resist the temptation to say “I told you so” about Johnston and the report he filed last June.

Johnston happened to be not just a Trudeau Foundation hanger-on and a longtime Trudeau family friend, but he’s also Beijing’s most senior comprador in Canada. Duroing his term as Trudeau’s “rapporteur” he was also privy to all the intelligence summaries tabled last week, but he mentioned nothing about their contents in his report last year except in the most oblique, offhand way. He revealed nothing and occluded everything.

Johnston was adamantly opposed to the idea of a public inquiry, remember. He wanted to do things Beijing’s way, to “immediately stop this self-directed political farce,” as China’s ambassador Cong Peiwu described it, to “not go further down the wrong and dangerous path.”

When you have a moment, if you like: David Johnson the right man to whitewash Chinese interference. David Johnston escapes inquiry into his own China dealings. Here’s the report on Chinese interference that Johnston should have written. All that from last year.

Here’s Global News from last week: New foreign interference documents raise questions about special rapporteur. Ya think?

Here’s me in Maclean’s magazine, from five years ago, before the 2019 election: The real election threat is China.

So, I could say ‘I told you so,’ but as I said the other day to Sam Cooper, formerly of Global News, now over at The Bureau, none of us has a more rightful claim to vindication than he does.

In November, 2022, Sam reported that intelligence officials had warned Trudeau about a vast influence campaign Beijing was involved with that included a network involving at least 11 federal candidates in the 2019 federal election, and that Beijing’s Toronto consulate had provided the network with a slush fund amounting to $250,000.

Trudeau shrugged it off. Everybody in Trudeau’s circle was at it: Deny, deny deny.

CSIS also warned Trudeau back then about what Dong was up to. That was almost five years ago. Trudeau did nothing about that, either.

Quite a few perfectly upstanding people in the political class in this country, including certain journalists I could mention, appear to have convinced themselves that Sam Cooper had made it all up. One or two suggested that if there were a public inquiry, journalists like Sam Cooper should be among the inquiry’s targets.

Here’s the Global and Mail from last week: A document presented to the Foreign Interference Commission says Canadian intelligence suggests Chinese officials may have transferred around $250,000 to “threat actors” in Canada in late 2018 or early 2019.

So take a bow, Sam.

And as always, a tip of the hat to Bob Fife and Steve Chase over at the Globe and Mail. A decent summary of their work, which is also a handy reference guide: The revelations and events that led to the foreign-interference inquiry.

‘And who are you?’ ‘Bond. James Bond.’

One thing I’ve been fascinated with for a while now is the weirdness that burrowed its way deep into the Liberal Party itself while Trudeau was just a junior backbencher. Back then he just couldn’t shut up about what a great thing it was that Chinese state-owned enterprises were gobbling up Canadian natural-resource properties like there was no tomorrow.

See: Justin Trudeau went all in on China a decade ago — and nothing can shake his resolve. See also: The Trudeau family’s weirdly close relationship with Communist China.

Both immediately before and after Trudeau was elected to lead the party, the Liberal organization was undergoing a radical constitutional deconstruction. Trudeau was a big booster of the transformation, and at the time he was also mobilizing and recruiting feverishly in Canada’s Mandarin-bloc hierarchy. A new Liberal party was emerging.

The plan was that the party would no longer be a party but a “movement.” You could just waltz in and “register,” without even paying a fee, and you could vote in local candidate races, and even national leadership contests. You only had to be 14 years old and “ordinarily resident in Canada,” whatever that might mean. That’s how the Han Dong schoolbus caper wold later work.

It was also a time when Beijing was radically ramping-up the Chinese Communist Party’s overseas strongarming and influence-peddling infrastructure: the United Front Work Department and its Overseas Chinese Affairs Office. The UFWD-OCAO has branches in the Ottawa embassy and China’s Canadian consulates, and a budget bigger than China’s entire foreign ministry.

Trudeau was already the target of a UFWD “grooming” operation going back to 2013 - as if something like that was even necessary - and he went into the 2015 federal election with 300,000 registered Liberals, most of whom he and and his own team had recruited. It wasn’t so much the “Liberal Party” anymore as the Trudeau Party.

Immediately after the election, Trudeau availed himself of the Mandarin bloc’s fundraising capacity via “cash for access” events in Metro Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal. There were also those strange methodically-organized donations to Trudeau’s Papineau riding war chest, amounting to nearly a quarter of a million bucks.

This brings us to the investigative report I mentioned in my column two weeks ago, and again this past week: PM said nothing, did nothing about MP's recruitment of Chinese students. Published in the journal of the Canadian International Council, the report is titled “Beyond general elections: How could foreign actors influence the prime ministership?”

While the Conservatives and the New Democrats are similarly slackass when it comes to verifying members, the report’s authors focus on the anybody-can-vote anomaly in the Liberal constitution that allowed those foreign students to vote en masse for Han Dong.

At stake is a lot more than a hostile foreign power’s ability to tilt an election in a local nomination race. The Trudeau Party’s registration rules provide “a perilous loophole that is highly susceptible to foreign interference by effectively allowing anyone to become a party member, and hence eligible to choose party leaders and subsequently the prime minister,” the report found.

“At worst, using fake or random identities through the online registration process, foreign actors could purchase large numbers of memberships without needing to resort to diaspora manipulation or mobilization.”

This is something that Liberal Michael Kempa noticed in 2015. He’d spent more than a year developing a team and building a campaign for the Liberal nomination in Scarborough. And then, all of a sudden, Team Trudeau dropped Bill Blair into the nomination race, and suddenly there were “hundreds of complete strangers” eligible to vote.

Kempa lost to Blair. The whole thing left Kempa disillusioned and certain that “nomination races stand as optimal weak links in Canada’s electoral chain that are ripe for capture by foreign interests with bad intentions.”

So what was the deal with Trudeau’s own national leadership win in 2013, and what role did those 300,000 newly-registered voting “supporters” play in the contest that resulted in 81,389 votes for Trudeau against the 12,148 ballots picked up by his nearest runoff-vote contender, Joyce Murray?

“It would be very hard to tell anything about who exactly Trudeau recruited back then,” Au-Yeung said.

In his research for the study, here’s how easy it was for Au-Yeung to register with the Liberal Party in the guise of Hollywood’s suave British spy, James Bond, with a fake address, fake telephone number, fake birthdate, the lot.

I’m happy to see that questions along the lines I’d been raising were brought up at Justice Hogue’s inquiry last week by the Conservatives’ shadow foreign minister Michael Chong, one of the more prominent Opposition MPs targeted in Beijing-aligned disinformation campaigns confirmed by CSIS. Chong told the commission that foreign agents could easily infiltrate leadership races and influence the selection of Canadian prime ministers and premiers.

CSIS has also confirmed that Beijing’s proxies were hard at work in 2022, attempting to influence the outcome of provincial and federal party leadership races. The CSIS report confirmed that Beijing also mobilized “co-opted” community groups to secretly finance an unidentified mayoral candidate in 2018 and 2022.

Sam’s got a good report here. The federal Conservatives were clearly targeted.

For a thorough analysis of Beijing’s disruptions in the Conservative Party, Real Story subscribers may remember this investigation: Conservatives, the Media and CCP Psy-Ops.

All for now.