Kowtowing: A Necessary Evil in Canada Now?

On the lateness of the hour. Third in a series.

Culling and disassembling and reassembling a library that’s still a barely manageable 700 books along with sorting files into bankers’ boxes requires more heartbreak and bother than I’d counted on. This is just one of several reasons why I’ve been having a hard time keeping the Real Story lights on while I’m away from my observation tower at the National Post and the Ottawa Citizen.

Do forgive. I’ll be back to newspapering any day now.

Hell of a time for me to be away from the action, right?

I really don’t like throwing shade at the Ottawa Press Gallery but unless I’ve missed something, everybody seems to have ignored (I might be wrong, I just can’t find a thing) Wednesday’s interim report from the House of Commons Committee on Canada-China relations.

I’ll be having a close look at the report in upcoming Real Story newsletters but for now, I’ll just tip my hat to Liberal committee chair Ken Hardie for his comment on Facebook: “Finally, the warnings from Jonathan Manthorpe and Terry Glavin have sunk in.” I’d like to think so, but I’m not so sure.

 Titled “A Threat to Canadian Sovereignty: National Security Dimensions of the Canada-People’s Republic of China Relationship,” the report offers 34 recommendations. My cursory reading leaves me impressed that the recommendations are mostly rock solid. Which is probably a sign that the report will be ignored, as such things usually are.

The always reliable Bob Mackin, my pal over at Business in Vancouver, has a snapshot of the report here, with a first glance from Kenny Chiu, the Conservative MP for Steveston-Richmond East who Beijing’s proxies in Canada targeted for defeat in the 2021 federal election. Chiu says he’s pleasantly surprised.

So many stories, so little time

This edition of the Real Story began with Diplomat, Socialite, Spy. It’s focus was mostly on the many well-connected acquaintances of Chinese Ministry of State Security operative Wei Zhao, whose reassignment out of Canada was the polite resolution to his involvement in the plot to put the squeeze on the Conservatives’ shadow foreign affairs minister Michael Chong.

That newsletter was followed by last Saturday’s Weekend Special: The Michael Chong Uproar: What’s Changed? Spoiler: Nothing of consequence has changed in any way at all. Immediately relevant in light of the Globe and Mail’s scoop yesterday, that last newsletter contained a good deal of inside story on Ontario Liberal kingmaker Michael Chan, whose codename at the the Chinese embassy is “the minister.” You’ll want to take particular note of that newsletter’s contents, and Chan’s connections to Zhao Wei, the diplomat, socialite and spy that headlined the first in this series, in the context of the Globe story yesterday:

Canada’s spy service sought an electronic and entry warrant to monitor former Ontario cabinet minister Michael Chan in the lead-up to the 2021 federal election, but it took several months for then-public safety minister Bill Blair to sign off on the clandestine surveillance of the influential Liberal Party powerbroker, according to a national-security source.

Owing to “recent developments,” there’ll be a fourth installment in this series where I’ll get into the awful consequences of standing up to Xi Jinping, Beijing’s willing accomplices across party lines in Canada, and the question: Who to trust?

If there’s an overall point I’m making in this series - and I didn’t set out to make this point or any other - it’s this. In the matter of Beijing’s friends in high places in this country, and the long reach of Xi Jinping’s strongarm and influence-peddling infrastructure in Canada, it’s way later than we think. It may be too late.

As I’ve done previously, I’ll leave that question to Real Story subscribers. There’ll be resources below to help you make up your minds. It just happens to be a question that unavoidably arises with increasing frequency, as it did this week in the disclosures about NDP fixture and front-running Toronto mayoral candidate Olivia Chow’s vote-harvesting dalliance with an arm of the United Front Work Department, Beijing’s vast overseas influence-mongering superstructure.

A necessary evil or a cynical & convenient capitulation?

That’s the question making the rounds among the prominent Chinese-Canadians I trust and respect, and the emerging standpoint, though not universally shared, goes like this: Chow is kowtowing to Beijing’s active agents of influence in Canada, and doing so is both evil and unnecessary.

The National Post has mustered the temerity to notice this and Tom Blackwell has a good piece here this week that outlines the discontent and dismay among Chow’s supporters, along with some hairsplitting in play about whether the United Front grouping in Toronto has outright endorsed Chow and some fussiness about the circumstances of her meetings with the outfit.

Going along to get along. That is the excuse (or rationale, or pretext) available to Toronto mayoral front-runner Olivia Chow, who knows very well what she’s doing.

(A brief lament: Tom has decided to take the Postmedia buyout that’s making the rounds, leaving us China watchers in the journalism racket with one less set of eyes. Tom’s a gem. A solid reporter. He freelanced the Chow story back to the Post, and with luck he’ll still keep his hand in, one way or another, but there aren’t many of us around.)

Anyway. . .

The Chow unpleasantness is an instructive case study of the question about the lateness of the hour in the matter of Canada’s capacity to resist Beijing’s massive, multi-year, multi-billion-dollar effort to influence, undermine, manipulate and monkey around with the political sovereignty of the world’s liberal democracies.

It’s a snapshot of a disorder that is especially pronounced in Canada, eight years into the rule of a federal government that set out to welcome Beijing’s overtures with such enthusiasm that Beijing’s influence operations have been at times indistinguishable from official federal policy.

It’s the sort of thing one is disinclined to discuss in polite company, owing to several awkward circumstances.

First, the usual disingenuous claims of “racism” that get chucked around whenever the subject comes up. Secondly, the presence of a wholly new Mandarin-bloc overclass that wealth-migration schemes have allowed to entrench itself in Canada in recent years, especially in Metro Vancouver, Montreal and the Greater Toronto Area. And not least, the unseemly collaborations and compromises Canada’s political establishment has made with Xi Jinping’s massive corporate presence in this country.

Not what it says on the tin

The “Council of Newcomer Organizations” that has been cuddling with Chow is not what it says it is. Its name in Chinese translates accurately as “the Federation of Canadian Chinese Associations” and its charter requires that its affiliates purport to represent Chinese-Canadians.

Founded by former Beijing-aligned Liberal MP Geng Tan, the FCCA is a notorious megaphone for Beijing propaganda that circulates lies about the reality of the brutally persecuted Uyghurs of Xinjiang and the crushing of democracy in Hong Kong. The organization is intimately and openly associated with the United Front Work Department, Beijing’s overseas strongarming and influence-peddling superagency.

None of this has dissuaded the federal government from showering the FCCA with roughly $180,000 in grants since 2016, in the same way Ottawa has paid out roughly $200,000 over the past three years to the Montreal front that has been identified as a site of one of those overseas “police stations” the RCMP is hovering around. Since at least 2016, the Montreal agency has been a designated unit of the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office, which was swallowed up by the United Front in its massive 2018 consolidation.

But that’s just how Team Trudeau rolls. It’s how Ottawa has normalized the activities of Beijing’s proxies in Canada. Following on my point from the last Real Story newsletter, it’s because they don’t see anything wrong with it. But the overwhelming majority of Canadians, and Chinese-Canadians, see quite a lot wrong with it. Hence the current imbroglio.

What Olivia Chow’s supporters find astonishing and worrisome is that until recently at least, Chow has not been shy about standing in solidarity at Tiananmen Massacre commemorations and so on. So what’s changed?

The respected academic and former diplomat Charles Burton expresses some alarm, but also worth noticing is that Gloria Fung, a reliably honest interlocutor from the group Canada Hong Kong Link, suggests a caution: “Proxies of CCP [the Chinese Communist Party] like to endorse any candidate with winnability. That does not necessarily imply the candidate they endorse has been compromised.”

Fair enough, but I also find myself pursuaded by my old pal Ivy Li, founder and spokesperson for the Canadian Friends of Hong Kong group: “There’s always a choice! There’s a thing called the ‘bottom line’. For a politician it’s the well being of Canada and its democratic system. Knowingly subjecting oneself to foreign influence to get votes is crossing that line.”

The thing is, however you might fall on this sort of thing, Olivia Chow knows full well what she’s doing. She is a lifelong Toronto politician, having started out in municipal offices and then MP for Trinity-Spadina from 2006 to 2014. She’s also the widow of beatified and by now pretty much fully canonized former NDP leader Jack Layton.

So, an open question to subscribers - Is kowtowing to Beijing’s agents of influence now a necessary evil in Canada? Is it too late to stand up to these forces?

Some Real Story resources:

From a few weeks ago, Beijing's Best Canadian Friends, Part Etcetera:

In great swathes of Greater Montreal, Metro Vancouver and the GTA, it’s got so that you can’t get elected to school board without the blessing of the United Front consiglieri up there in the top floors of the office towers.

In 2018, the United Front absorbed the Chinese state’s Overseas Chinese Affairs Office, and its budget now exceeds the entire budget of China’s Foreign Affairs Ministry. Also by 2018 the Liberal Party’s activist, fundraising and electioneering base in Canada’s “Chinese” community had become fully embedded in the super-wealthy and populous Mandarin bloc, a fairly new phenomenon owing to dramatic surges in wealth migration in recent years from the People’s Republic of China.

The United Front is embedded at the pinnacle of the GTA’s Mandarin bloc hierarchy, which is overseen by the tycoon Wei Chengyi, the United Front’s GTA generalissimo. Real Story subscribers got a fairly clear view of that crowd and its friends in high Liberal places here: National Security In A "Post-National" State. . .

Justin Trudeau was their golden boy, and 2015 was the dawn of their “Golden Decade,” and Trudeau’s Liberals have flourished in this ecosystem, which is brimming with questionable white people. Elections are like league sports events. Conservatives who play along are contentedly tolerated, and some have done very well for themselves. Quite a few New Democrats, too, have done just fine.

. . . All you have to do, really, is conduct your affairs in such a way as to not be displeasing to the United Front. Ultimately, all United Front orders come from the top, from Xi Jinping, who presides over the seven-member Standing Committee of the 25-member Politburo of the 370-member Central Committee of the 100-million-member Chinese Communist Party.

And what Xi Jinping wants is to rule the world. So you just do what you’re told, and nobody gets hurt.

From last October, Police-state compradors and corporate collaborators have had the run of this country for years. Is Canada already too far gone?

This was mainly about the thousands of Iranians who have fled to Canada from the Khomeinist regime, only to find the regime has its own friends in high places in Canada, and the police state’s rich and powerful come and go as they please. But it was also about the Chinese princeling caste and its influences in Canada across party lines:

Although he got whooped last month by Pierre Poilievre, Jean Charest was a serious contender for the Conservative Party leadership. Quite a few Conservatives were perfectly prepared to overlook Charest’s $70,000-a-month services to Xi Jinping’s “national champion” Huawei telecom giant in its efforts to skirt around Canada’s national-security roadblocks. Charest has also been more than happy to serve as a human megaphone for Beijing’s disinformation operations.

The main reason I think it might be too late involves a weirdly overlooked-but-in-plain-sight legislative manouvre Justin Trudeau’s government made immediately after getting elected. Those were such heady days! Cash-for-access banquets for senior Liberal Party donors and Chinese billionaires, Foreign Affairs Minister Stephane Dion’s enthusiasm for an open-arms approach to his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov, a reopening of Tehran’s spy nest of an embassy in Ottawa. . .

The manouvre I’m alluding to was openly debated at the time, and it was intended as a rebuke to those mean and xenophobic Harper Conservatives who had placed certain conditions on the acquisition and retention of Canadian citizenship. Among other things, Trudeau’s legislation - “A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian!” - repealed a clause that stripped dual citizens of their Canadian status if they were convicted of terrorism, treason or espionage.

It seems to me that the manouvre effectively extends legal protection to Beijing-directed and Tehran-directed operatives doing their dirty work here in Canada: once they’re here, you can’t get get rid of them.

From We’re at the point of no return, back in February:

The thing is, it’s not even news that Beijing was running an election-subversion operation in 2021. The Atlantic Council’s Forensic Research Lab found that Beijing-directed hatchet jobs were country-wide: “China-linked actors took an active role in seeking to influence the September 20, 2021 parliamentary election in Canada, displaying signs of a coordinated campaign to influence behaviour among the Chinese diaspora voting in the election.” Canada’s own DisinfoWatch was onto it too. I wrote about it at the time. Headline: China's disinformation campaign against Canada's election is undeniable.

But CSIS knew - of course CSIS knew - and CSIS knew a hell of a lot more than any of us, and that’s the public service {Robert] Fife and [Steven] Chase have done for us all in the Globe. Either by some black magic of bureaucratic inertia or incompetence, Trudeau has been able to play dumb, like he didn’t know the details, or at other times he implies that he did know, but hey, big deal, this sort of thing happens all the time and now CSIS better start plugging its leaks.

That’s the bigger story here. Rather than come clean with the public about the scope and extent of what CSIS has discovered about Beijing’s illegal operations in Canada - operations that were put to the purpose of a Liberal re-election and the defeat of targeted Conservative candidates - the Trudeau government is going after CSIS.

Why?

If you like you could go back to 2017 when I raised the question in the Ottawa Citizen: Has Canada just given up and decided to join with Beijing? In that case, the facts showed the answer was “yes,” that within Trudeau’s circle a kind of consensus had built around the explicit proposition about relations with Beijing put forward by former Liberal cabinet minister Martin Cauchon: “There is a saying that if you can’t beat them, join them.”

La Lutte continue

Next week, lifelong Trudeau family friend and former Trudeau foundation luminary and former governor-general David Johnston, also a lifelong advocate of pulling Canada closer into Beijing’s orbit, whose Rideau Hall Foundation is a who’s who of some of Beijing’s dearest friends in this country (see David Johnston the right man to whitewash Chinese interference) will deliver his interim report on Beijing’s election-interference operations.

Owing to the cap-doffing and forelock-tugging postures press gallery journalists are obliged to slavishly adopt at the very mention of Johnston’s name, it will be interesting to see how his report as Trudeau’s “special independent rapporteur” gets covered.

Get a load of this column only yesterday by the Toronto Star’s otherwise level-headed Susan Delacourt: “Johnston has to figure out a way for the government to reassure Canadians that their democracy remains free and fair, against the din of politicians shouting that it is not.”

No, that’s not what Johnston is supposed to be doing, and that’s not what politicians have been shouting about. Johnston was called up by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as a strategem to block his duty to answer three simple questions, which of course he still hasn’t answered: What did he know about Beijing’s interference operations in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections, when did he know it, and what did he do about it?

Fun times. All for now.