Compradors and Eminent Canadian Gentlemen

"Ten or 15 constituencies in Canada at most? I don't think it's a very big problem," says Jean Chretien, Comprador Extraordinaire. No paywall today.

Comprador (kämprəˈdôr): a person within a country who acts as an agent for foreign entities engaged in investment, trade, and economic or political coercion or exploitation; ordinarily drawn from elements in the national bourgeoisie, acting on behalf of multinational corporations, bankers, and military interests.

I don’t think I need to expend much effort today to make the case that Canada is in the throes of a genuine national-security crisis. The recent revelations about Beijing-directed interference in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections - and the polite-society rage directed at the “whistleblowers” behind these revelations, and the current Parliamentary pandemonium - is evidence enough of that.

But I will make some effort to elaborate on a conclusion I’ve come to, which is this: We have reached an historic juncture in an inexorable and tectonic process that has been underway for years. And it’s been both hidden away from public view, and right in front of our noses, all along.

It could be that we’ve stumbled past the turning point already, that the die is cast. Then again, with the acute public attention being paid to the scope and breadth of Beijing’s reach in Canada, we all might somehow soon be shut of it. There are quite a few moving parts to this, and they’re very much in play.

There’s a rarely-examined backstory to all this that I got into in my column in the National Post and the Ottawa Citizen this week. Journalists tend go skittish in reporting about it. It’s about an almost unimaginable amount of power and money, both dirty and clean.

Its epicentre is Montreal, and it radiates outwards from the Canada-China Business Council, the Power Corporation, SNC-Lavalin, Bombardier, Sinopec, Rio Tinto, and on and on. Its milieu is the Laurentian establishment. Yes, there are Conservatives involved, as I’ve made plain here, Welcome to Jean Charest’s World, and elsewhere. But its vanguard is the Liberal Party, and its mascot is Justin Trudeau.

Here’s the point.

The deeper Beijing’s reach has extended into Canadian political and corporate life, the more Beijing’s influences have become normalized as unremarkable, sometimes even strangely unmentionable. Collaboration with a genocidal police state intent upon ruling the world is taken in big-business and high-society circles as just the way things are done, old boy. It’s best to mind one’s manners and avert one’s gaze.

Oh dear, there’s Jean Chretien, caught in the shot behind and to the left of Xi Jinping, fella with the red tie in the crowd, at a high-level gathering of 300 delegates to a three-day Chinese Communist Party “dialogue with world political parties” in 2017.

I’ve declined this instruction in decorum as regards former Governor-General David Johnston, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s “Special Independent Rapporteur” assigned to stickhandle the messiness of Beijing’s cloak-and-dagger work, as paying subscribers will know. The obtusely unreported but directly pertinent aspects of Johnston’s public and private life was something I reckoned was worth laying out this week in print, too: David Johnston the right man to whitewash Chinese interference.

Just about everybody has been asking what the hell Trudeau was thinking, appointing a close family friend going back to Justin’s childhood days when his father Pierre and Johnston were neighbours in Laurentian cottage country. After all, the Trudeau boys and Johnston’s daughters went on ski trips together, for goodness sake, and Justin and the grandfatherly Johnston have both publicly professed their affections for one another.

And there’s Johnston on the governing body of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, oh my, and the Trudeau Foundation was caught up in the recent scandals having been gifted all that dirty money from Beijing. It was all bound up in a Beijing-directed influence operation with Trudeau its willing subject, going back to 2013.

What was Trudeau thinking? I expect he was thinking something along these lines:

It’s just the way things are done, old boy. And surely you wouldn’t insinuate anything louche or unstylish about a lifelong eagerness and fervor about the Peoples Republic of China if it’s also a preoccupation of the unimpeachably upstanding David Johnston!

Saying these kinds of things out loud is just bad manners. It’s best to trot out the former Liberal prime minister Jean Chretien on television chat shows as the colorful elder statesman who knows a thing or two about Canada-China relations. Mustn’t mention that ever since he resigned in scandal in 2003 he’s been greasing palms for Denton’s Canada LLP, the Canadian stepchild of the global conglomerate Beijing Dacheng. It’s no big deal, this election-interference thing, Chretien told TVA Nouvelles on Thursday.

To comprehend where the mojo has been in Canada since Justin Trudeau’s Liberals came to power eight years ago, you don’t have to know fancy five-dollar words like “comprador,” but a familiarity with the concept will serve you well. The term comes from the word the Portuguese used to describe the local intermediaries, interlocutors and middlemen in service of Portugal’s overseas merchant class in Asia, starting around the late 16th century, from Goa to Macao.

Think of Chretien as an elder statesman of Beijing’s comprador class in Canada, and things will become a little clearer.

As for Johnston, his associations with Beijing’s intentions for this country go back to the 1980s with his work clearing the ground for the Canada-China universities exchange program. As president of the University of Waterloo, he oversaw the establishment of the Sino-Canada University and a campus branch of the Confucius Institute, the sinister Chinese Communist Party propaganda and espionage project. Johnston’s nickname in Chinese ruling-class circles is “Jiangshan.”

Three of Johnston’s daughters attended university in China. During a luncheon speech to the Canada-China Business Council in 2013, Johnston said it would be “wonderful” if all Canadians learned to speak Chinese. At a 2017 conference on “science, technology and innovation” at Chongqing University, Johnston delighted his hosts by saying he was possessed of a “profound Chinese complex.”

Do you think Johnston will deliver anything like an “independent” remedy to the scandals plaguing his old friend Justin Trudeau, or go to any lengths to expose the backstairs work of Beijing’s best friends in Canada? Of course you don’t.

Never mind the Trudeau Foundation - Johnston quietly stepped away this week. If it’s a rogues’ gallery of Beijing’s enablers in Canada you want, here’s the board of the Canada-China Business Council, but if it’s a pared-down list of Beijing’s best Canadian friends you’d prefer, here’s the board of directors of Johnston’s own Rideau Hall Foundation. Or read my piece in the papers this week for some of their career highlights.

I’m not going to get into all the sturm und drang about this week’s events in Ottawa, the new revelations about the unambiguously dodgy Liberal MP Han Dong or the House of Commons adoption of the New Democrats’ non-binding resolution calling for a scattergun public inquiry that will at some point get into Beijing’s election-interference operations.

No public inquiry, no transparency reform measures in Canada’s national-security system, no Foreign Agents Registry and certainly no “Special Independent Rapporteur” will meet the threat Xi Jinping and his Canadian friends pose to this country. All good, to a point. But Canadians will have to turn things around for themselves, to decide by their own lights that this has gone quite far enough, thank you, and it ends here and it ends now.

We’ve definitely reached a kind of existential inflection point, as a country, in that process that went into hyperdrive after the election of the Trudeau Liberals in 2015. That election coincided with a massive acceleration of the Beijing’s overseas “elite capture” operations in Canada, when straight away the United Front Work Department’s policies and priorities in this country became indistinguishable from high-level Liberal government policies and programs. I went into that in great depth here: Beijing’s Best Friends in Canada, Part Etcetera. No point in repeating myself.

I do want to stress, again, that this shouldn’t be understood as something nefarious about Canada’s “Chinese community.” Its about Liberal fundraisers and campaign organizers and candidates from the United Front’s base in the fabulously wealthy Mandarin-bloc hierarchy. That’s who ruthlessly bullies and browbeats Canada’s “Chinese community.” It’s those same high rollers who were wining and dining Trudeau in those gross cash-for-access banquets back in 2016.

Besides, if you wanted you could notice that all of Beijing’s friends in high places that I deal with in the newsletter you’ve just read, every one of them is as white as the driven snow.