'Consequences for years to come'
The ascendancy of Beijing's powerful proxies, agents, dupes and apologists in Canada: Usually overlooked, unreported and otherwise unmentionable. Will the NSICOP hubbub make a difference?
“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle. One thing that helps toward it is to keep a diary, or, at any rate, to keep some kind of record. . .” George Orwell in Tribune, March 22, 1946.
Real Story subscribers will know I’ve had occasion to recall that citation more than once since this newsletter was launched on February 20, 2022. Think of the Real Story as a diary of that sort, or at least some kind of record. Or, God forbid, an epitaph.
Ordinarily this newsletter comes on Sundays, sometimes also midweek. My excuse: Sunday was Father’s Day, which was a bit of a mayhem, but in a nice way. Then there were Substack “network error” issues, and the National Post has me on double duty this week on the “foreign interference” story.
So let’s get straight into it now.
I’ll be elaborating here on my piece in Saturday’s National Post, The Stench of Deception Grows, which appears online as Trudeau's Chinese collaboration has been in broad daylight all along. That piece picked up from It isn't 'foreign interference' if the culprits are willing MPs, earlier in the National Post.
Those pieces are about the Special Report on Foreign Interference in Canada's Democratic Processes and Institutions authored by NSICOP, the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians.
As I’ve noted in previous Real Story newsletters I’m not downplaying the backstairs work done by India’s unscrupulous Canadian friends that the NSICOP report alludes to.
It’s just that China’s shadow darkens every door in Ottawa. The case I laid out in the Post over the weekend was that if the NSICOP report contained simply a “list” of Beijing’s collaborators and friends in high Canadian places (it doesn’t), our own prime minister’s name would be at the top of it.
There’s also this paragraph:
The stinking reek of it all should not be expected to subside any time soon. All the parties in the House now seem content with having the matter kicked over to Justice Marie-Josée Hogue’s Foreign Interference Commission. In the short term, if any legislative good comes of the international spectacle Canada’s political class has been making of itself, it will be in the outcome of Bill C-70, the Countering Foreign Interference Act, which completed third reading in the House of Commons on Thursday.
A light at the end of the tunnel?
One faint hope about Bill C-70, which proceeded to the Senate where it’s at committee stage as I write this, is that within it is the proposed Foreign Influence Transparency and Accountability Act. I’m now beginning to have serious doubts about whether even this law, which was never going to “solve the problem,” will make much more than a speck of difference.
I already had nagging suspicions about why a foreign influence registry so vigorously blockaded by the Trudeau Liberals and opposed by their friends for so long, apparently became so suddenly acceptable. A concerned friend in the Chinese democracy movement has arrived at the same concerns.
I’ll be turning to that in the coming days. I’ll also be putting some flesh on the bones of the backgrounder in last Monday’s Real Story newsletter - NSICOP: Enemies On Parliament Hill - specifically the parts that provided subscribers with the names of several deeply compromised politicians. You know, the ones whose identities somehow became a contested mystery in the tabloidish news cycles that have been churning out of Ottawa for two weeks now.
Anyway, as for the prospect of repairing the deep damage done by the Trudeau government, the authors of the NSICOP report have an opinion of their own. When it comes to the Liberals’ refusal to address their repeated warnings going back six years:
“The slow response to a known threat was a serious failure and one from which Canada may feel the consequences for years to come. The implications of this inaction include the undermining of the democratic rights and fundamental freedoms of Canadians, the integrity and credibility of Canada’s parliamentary process, and public trust in the policy decisions made by the government. Canada is only now beginning to see the introduction of additional measures to address foreign interference activities.”
Right here, right now
There are numerous links to various resources and to relevant Real Story editions in last week’s newsletter that are directly pertinent to the matter of Justin Trudeau’s deeply compromised leadership.
Here are three more from the Real Story archives that get to the guts of it: National Security in a Post-National State, from November, 2022, We’re at the point of no return, from February 2023, and Changing the subject, burying the story, from March 2023.
For a broader beginner’s introductory background, this is from the Post in 2017: The Liberal government has become a pro-China propaganda machine. This is from Macleans in 2018: China is a bigger threat than Russia, but you won’t hear Trudeau say it.
For new paying subscribers unfamiliar with this subject (I regret to include quite a few prominent Canadian journalists in this category) this newsletter’s archives are searchable. This is a deep investigation for a general readership, from 2021: Justin Trudeau went all in on China a decade ago — and nothing can shake his resolve. This one, from just last year, is perhaps especially useful for the Americans who keep asking me what the hell is going on up here: Trudeau’s relationship with China far uglier any links Trump had with Russia.
Getting our heads around what we’re up against
It was on June 3 that NSICOP released its 84-page blockbuster. Ever since: Spies? Traitors? Whatever shall we do? Who’s right, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh or the Greens’ Elizabeth May? Why doesn’t Pierre Poilievre submit to a gag order like everyone else?
The latest ephemera that’s supposed to keep us occupied while we’re denied the right to know what the NSICOP report says about certain irredeemably mobbed-up MPs: Elizabeth May is calling for secret meetings to discuss secret allegations of foreign interference in the secret portions of the NSICOP report.
For the love of God, just stop, I find myself muttering, but that Toronto Star reportage is at least consistent with the strange tone you’ll find in much of the recently-arrived Press Gallery interest in what is an existential threat to Canada’s democratic sovereignty.
Much of the coverage gives the impression that what we’re dealing with here are a few exchanges of secrets and favours and perhaps the occasional bag of cash in encounters between MPs and Chinese spies in the back alleys around Parliament Hill. That’s not even close.
We’re dealing with the Mao-era United Front Work Department. The Chinese state has ramped up and accelerated UFWD operations in the Xi Jinping era in all its globe-encircling debt trap Belt and Road, Moscow-subsidizing, world-order-overturning, influence-peddling, nation-devouring rapacity.
By the time of the 2019 election, the UFWD’s $2.6 billion budget, greater than that of China’s foreign affairs ministry, included nearly $600 million for initiatives amed at “elite capture” operations in western countries, the strongarming of diaspora communities and the takeover of overseas Chinese community, home-county and social organizations, and the election of friendly candidates.
There are good reasons why Beijing’s UFWD came to see Canada as an “attractive and permissive target” for its operations after Justin Trudeau’s assumption of power in 2015.
Beijing had already drawn the Trudeau family into its circles of influence long before 2015, and Trudeau had proved himself a perfectly “witting” Chinese influence operation in his own right from even before the day he walked into the Prime Minister’s Office, when “win-win” intimacies with Beijing’s state-capitalist empire went into hyperdrive and were embedded as a Canadian whole-of-government policy.
In an internal training manual uncovered by the Financial Times in 2017, the UFWD noted the success of its election interference operations in Canada going back to the election of six of its preferred candidates in 2003, and the electoral sucess of 10 of its 44 preferred candidates in 2006. “We should aim to work with those individuals and groups that are at a relatively high level, operate within the mainstream of society and have prospects for advancement,” the UFWD advised its cadres.
Mission accomplished
See Bob Fife and Steve Chase in the Globe from February last year: China appears to have targeted Justin Trudeau in a foreign influence operation after he became Liberal Leader in 2013. That’s about the flattery and the blandishments and all that dirty money laundered to the Trudeau Foundation by Beijing’s proxies at Trudeau’s 2016 cash-for-access banquets. The operation was facilitated by Trudeau’s Beijing fanboy brother Sasha, who eventually caused the entire foundation board to resign in embarrassment in April last year.
See also my piece from 2017: Here’s how the prime minister is ramming China down our throats. Or see CSIS (from page 19 of the NSICOP report):
“United Front work has been successful in co-opting or subverting political opponents of the CCP and incentivizing public displays of support for the Party. The UFWD has produced propaganda, suppressed critical narratives, and engaged academics, media, businesses and politicians to influence them to adopt pro-China positions or avoid adopting what the PRC considers anti-China positions.”
In the Real Story archives and in the specific links in this edition and last week’s Real Story, you’ll find a surfeit of evidence for the UFWD’s successes along these specific lines, and for the central role our prime minister has played in it all.
It’s a maze of tunnels and cul-de-sacs and turnpikes, but all these roads lead back to Justin Trudeau. And here’s where we go to backchannel content. . .