Johnston out, but the puck-ragging goes on.
Trade with China is up & the same disinformation that doomed Conservative Kenny Chiu is in circulation again. Bonus: A Beijing influence-operation story unfolds right under the CBC's nose.
In the National Post today I note that David Johnston has finally conceded what everybody who’s paying attention already knew: that he can’t be trusted to shed any useful light on the clandestine operations Beijing put into motion to keep Canada captive to the Trudeau Liberals’ foundational intention to deepen Canada’s political, institutional and economic integration with Xi Jinping’s China.
The Trudeau government did not abandon those plans with the 2018 kidnapping of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, and Beijing’s subversions did not end with the results of the 2019 and 2021 elections; their disinformation operations are in high gear again. Besides, follow the money and you quickly notice that it’s as though all that nastiness with the Two Mikes never even happened.
Out there in the real world, it’s business as usual
The Canada-China trade racket is doing a booming business, for instance. Four years ago the US-Mexico-Canada free trade agreement forced Ottawa to prohibit the import of slave goods from Xinjiang, but all Ottawa did was add a meaningless amendment in a schedule to the Canada Customs Tariff. By the end of 2022 the Americans had blocked 2,398 shipment of forced-labour goods into the United States. Canada had blocked a single shipment.
To my friend Mehmet Tohti of the Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project, it looks very much like Canada has become a dumping ground for goods made by Xi Jinping’s Uyghur slaves, in shipments diverted from U.S. markets.
As it turns out the year 2022 ended up a gangbusters year for the Canada-China trade establishment. The year started off slow but business was back up by December. China’s trade-deficit advantage continues to rise, of course. Even so, Canada’s exports to China in 2022 grew by 22.96 percent over the year previous.
On the far side of the paywall l’ll be coming to what China’s diplomats and Xi Jinping’s Canadian proxies have been up to lately. It’s a campaign that most recently involved an event that CBC journalists covered without even knowing it, and without even knowing who it was they were interviewing.
But first:
About David Johnston’s about-face departure.
It’s all very amusing, but we know nothing more now (officially at least) about the matters Johnston was ostensibly asked to inquire into than we did before he was appointed back in March. Depending on how you look at it, you could say we know even less, thanks to Johnston’s interventions and the main-stage distraction Johnston became, which is precisely the purpose Johnston’s appointment was intended to serve.
Still, Johnston explains his departure this way: "When I undertook the task of independent special rapporteur on foreign interference, my objective was to help build trust in our democratic institutions. I have concluded that, given the highly partisan atmosphere around my appointment and work, my leadership has had the opposite effect."
No, that’s not why his “leadership” has had the opposite effect. There’s nothing partisan about noticing what a clown show this was destined to be or noticing that a clown show is exactly what it became. I do my best in my column today to set out the circumstances behind Johnston’s appointment, how it was intended as a cynical evasion from the beginning, and how his report was intended as a whitewash from the get-go.
The column also points out that Johnston changed his own mandate at some point along the way to be about building “trust” in institutions that the Trudeau government has rendered unworthy of our trust. I also get into the backgound this newsletter provided subscribers (mostly on the free side of the paywall) on Thursday, Team Trudeau and David Johnston's Whitewash, about the hole the Opposition parties have ended up digging for themselves.
It’s about the purpose their proposed commission of inquiry would serve, and its absurdly broad scope in place of a laser focus on what Beijing and Beijing’s accomplices in high places have been up to in this country.
From the outset, I’ve maintained that the reason Johnston was not the “enlightened choice” of respectable opinion was not so much because of the appearance of a conflict arising from his “ski buddy” relationship with the Trudeau family, which goes back to the days when it was Justin’s father Pierre who was running errands for Beijing.
The impropriety of Johnston’s appointment arose more pertinently from Johnston’s own lifetime of championing the Liberals’ catastrophic fealty to China’s state-capitalist ruling class, his lifelong devotion to the project, and his own ongoing affiliations with some of the most deeply China-compromised institutions and personalities in Canada’s Laurentian establishment.
It’s that entire complex of money-grubbing “post-national” compradors who left Canada so vulnerable to Beijing’s kidnap diplomacy and to Beijing’s election-interference operations in the first place.
It’s not like Johnston was going to investigate his own role and that of his friends in plunging Canada into an historic national-security crisis.
Johnston’s complicity in this cavalcade of sleaziness will not be news to you if you’ve been following my Real Story inquiries (See March 16, Go Ahead Liberals, Rag The Puck or May 23, All The King's Horses, All The King's Men: David Johnston's job is to put Justin Trudeau together again. He can't, or June 1, The Elephant In The Room: Why is David Johnston going out of his way to camouflage the United Front?).
And it won’t be news to you if you’ve been following my impertinences in the National Post, as in March 22 David Johnston the right man to whitewash Chinese interference or in the Ottawa Citizen, as in May 24 It's no surprise David Johnston nixed a public inquiry on Chinese meddling.
Do skip those links entirely if you like and read Tom Blackwell’s piece in today’s National Post. If you’ve been following any of my stuff, Tom’s piece won’t contain any news for you either, but it’s still handy to have it all in once place: How David Johnston embraced China for decades before probing election interference.
I was pleased to see that Tom reported Ivy Li’s observation about Johnston: “He’s obviously both in love with and infatuated by the PRC. When you are madly in love with someone, you want to be close to that person. You want to be loved by that person. You won’t do anything to jeopardize the relationship and you can’t see, or don’t want to see, the ugly side of that person.”
Bingo.
I’m a big fan of Tom’s work. I was dismayed that he’d taken the Postmedia buyout but I’m very pleased that he’s occasionally freelancing pieces back to the newspaper, as in his contribution today.
Funny how the “news” business works sometimes. Speaking of which. . .