Inside Stories, Unreported Stories, True Stories

I've lately come to expect the worst, and my expectations haven't let me down.

Today and tomorrow I’m wrapping up a Real Story series that began May 8 with Diplomat, Socialite, Spy.

Among many other things, the series began by detailing the numerous connections between the now-dismissed Ministry of State Security operative and social butterfly Wei Zhao and quite a few Members of Parliament and cabinet ministers, and especially a certain Liberal Party kingmaker at the centre of the election-interference scandal.

Much of the series has played out on the far side of this newsletter’s paywall, but there’s clearly been enough in it to keep everyone interested, judging by the responses. Much of tomorrow’s edition of the Real Story will be for paid subscribers only. Sorry.

Among other things I’ll cover tomorrow:

What’s the deal with that English-language magazine that the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service says has been paid to run pro-Beijing propaganda? What’s the story behind that dubious “China expert” who keeps showing up in the press? And what’s the story behind a former registered China lobbyist who has somehow ended up on the Conservative Party’s governing council?

Hold on, there’s good news in all this.

I’m not a cynical guy. I’m ordinarily a cheerful optimist in spite of everything, and I mean everything I’ve covered on my travels in recent years. The crucifixion of the Syrian people. The bloody betrayal of the Afghans. The west’s abject surrender of Hong Kong to Xi Jinping. The imbecility of NATO’s corporate class in aiding and abetting the rise of the world’s ravenous torture-state bloc at the United Nations. That kind of everything.

I don’t intend to lapse into cynicism here, but holy cow.

Two months ago I strolled out onto a limb in the National Post and the Ottawa Citizen: David Johnston the right man to whitewash Chinese interference. On Tuesday in this very newsletter, in the hours before the release of the interim report by that eminently respectable gentleman about whom no impudent word must be spoken, subscribers got this: David Johnston's job is to put Justin Trudeau together again. He can't.

Ah yes, happier times, “sunny ways” from what was supposed to be a “golden decade” of middle class prosperity arising like magic from all those “people-to-people relationships” between Canada and China.

I’m not going out on any kind of limb today to notice that pretty well on all sides, the interim report by the former governor general (whose otherwise weirdly unexamined lifetime of kowtowing to Beijing’s ruling elites and their unspeakably wealthy agents of influence in Canada just might have coloured his judgement a tiny bit) has landed with a deafening thud.

That’s the good news. Everyone from Rex Murphy at the National Post to the Toronto Star’s editorial board to the Toronto Sun to all three leaders of the Opposition and a plurality of Canadian public opinion - we’re all on the same page here. Outside of a small circle of Trudeau’s friends and supporters and that scheming coterie around the plush Ottawa offices of Ambassador Cong Peiwu in the cavernous Chinese embassy over on Patrick Street, it’s pretty hard to find anyone who’d be pleased with Johnston’s whitewash.

The people in this story who matter most, the Canadian victims of Beijing’s free-for-all operations in Canada - the pro-democracy refugees from the Chinese mainland, the Hongkongers, the Taiwanese, the Uyghurs, the Tibetans, the Falun Gong community - all say the same. That they’re shocked and disappointed that there will be no proper inquiry into what has happened in this country.

They’re also understandably unimpressed that Johnston has nominated himself to hold public meetings to hear the same things they have been saying, over and over, for years. Our pal Margaret McCuaig-Johnston from the University of Ottawa, now with the freshly-minted China Strategic Risks Institute, says the quiet part about Johnston’s idea, out loud: “He clearly doesn’t know that that would be dangerous for them and attract more threats. They should not be forced to appear in public just because he wants to hold public hearings.”

Even so, the report is way worse than most have noticed. Here’s me in print this week: David Johnston escapes inquiry into his own China dealings.

It’s not just that Johnston was called in to support longtime family friend and “ski buddy” Justin Trudeau in dismissing the will of Parliament as expressed in a 172-149 vote in favour of the public inquiry proposed and endorsed by all three Opposition leaders. It’s not just that former Trudeau Foundation bigshot Frank Iacobucci from the days of the SNC-Lavalin scandal was the guy Johnston relied on to dismiss apprehensions of his conflicts of interest here. It’s not just that Sheila Block, the lawyer for Johnston’s report, has donated thousands of dollars to the Liberal Party in recent years. Democracy Watch is on the case.

It’s that Johnston’s pretexts for siding with Trudeau’s extraordinary efforts to keep the doors closed on this unprecedented national-security crisis are a hodgepodge of obvious contradiction and brazen misdirection. Johnston’s purported rationale doesn’t come close to adding up. It makes no sense. Long story short, in my column in the National Post and the Ottawa Citizen:

Disappointing, but under the circumstances, not especially surprising, since a proper inquiry into Beijing’s influences in Canada would sooner or later turn its attention to Beijing’s many friends in high places here, including Johnston himself.

My friend Charles Burton, the former diplomat and academic now holding his fort over at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, told me this: “I daresay at the Chinese Embassy they are cracking open the celebratory Maotai at Johnston's report.”

The last puzzle pieces

I’m no clairvoyant, but in the first installment of the series I’m wrapping up tomorrow I laid out the excuse Johnston would end up offering Prime Minister Trudeau for his disgraceful handling of the election-interference imbroglio.

Although Johnston didn’t use these words, his report makes plain that a combination of inattention, incompetence, negligence, and imbecility, especially when it comes to China, has crippled Canada’s capacity to deal with national security threats ever since Justin Trudeau came to power.

It’s not just that Trudeau might even plausibly claim that he didn’t have a clue about the extent of Beijing’s subterfuge and backstairs work on the Liberals’ behalf in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections. The thing to understand is that Trudeau didn’t want to know and he didn’t care to find out.

Now for the final pieces of the puzzle that I promised at the outset of the series. The remainder will come tomorrow. If you’re susceptible to paranoia, try harder to fight it. Don’t succumb. If you can’t fight it, you’ll probably want to steer clear of what’s coming down the pike. For the moment:

Mission: Destroy Sheng Xue

This is about the horrible fate that befell Sheng Xue, the democracy activist who warned Parliament back in 2006 that all this was coming. I touched on her case May 3 in the last column before my too-brief hiatus from newspapering this past month, before this series began: Evidence of China's interference has been lying in plain sight for years.

It’s of immediate relevance now that Johnston has appointed himself to convene those public hearings to draw out the Canadian victims of Beijing’s strongarm operations in Canada. I don’t know what he was thinking. Perhaps he imagined CBC clips showing him listening thoughtfully, in that grandfatherly way of his. Perhaps he wanted photos of Uyghurs whose relatives have been murdered, crying on his shoulder.

Here’s the top bits from that May 3 column:

“The Chinese community here is frightened by the Chinese government, even though they are in Canada … A lot of Chinese organizations or social groups are very close to the consulate and to the embassy. Why is that? It’s not because they don’t understand the values, or they don’t trust or agree with the values. It’s just because they are so frightened. They know that the Chinese government is so brutal they could do anything.”

If you thought that those words appeared in some news story over the past few days, perhaps in an interview with a Canadian Security and Intelligence Service whistleblower speaking anonymously out of fear of prosecution under the Security of Information Act, you’d have guessed wrong.

Those words were spoken 17 years ago, quite publicly, in testimony before the Subcommittee on International Human Rights of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development. Sheng Xue, the vice-president of the Federation for a Democratic China, was trying to explain to Parliamentarians the vicious reach of Beijing’s strong-arm operations in Canada.

Whatever happened to Sheng Xue?

Five years ago I reported on what happened to Shawn Zhang, a 28-year-old student at the University of B.C., who told me: “It’s like they are holding my parents hostage there, so that I can’t say things. . . In Canada, in general, most Chinese students are not willing to express any opinion about China, or to talk about China.” And just a couple of weeks ago the Vancouver Sun reported on how the esteemed former journalist and teacher Victor Ho had his course on Chinese history at Trinity Western University cancelled, out of the blue 18 months ago. It was a course for seniors.

In my columns I’ve made repeated reference to a still-mostly-overlooked report about Beijing’s strongarm operations in Canada, first presented to CSIS in 2017 and updated several times since. Assembled from extensive investigations by Amnesty International and a coalition of Chinese-Canadian and other human rights organizations, the report set out in horrific detail the breadth and scope of Beijing’s bullying and intimidation operations in Canada.

Sheng Xue’s case figures fairly prominently in that extensive report. She has been the target of a long-running, complex and lurid smear campaign involving computer hacking and identity theft that the New York Times spent a year investigating.

The case bears all the signs of a Chinese Communist Party operation to ruin the Federation for a Democratic China, where Sheng played a leading role from her home in Mississauga. It’s “a textbook destabilization of the exile movement,” Nicholas Bequelin, Amnesty International’s regional director for East Asia, told the Times.

Operations like these are primarily functions of the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department, the overseas influence-peddling, harrassment and espionage superagency that specializes in “elite capture” operations in priority countries like Canada. I don’t think I need to say anything much about Canada’s “elites,” starting with the Trudeau family and its powerful circle of friends, as the often-willing objects of the United Front’s inducements.

The United Front is mentioned in Johnston’s 53-page report only once, in passing.