National Security In A "Post-National" State.
Is it whatever the Trudeau government says it is?
In the coming days you should expect a hell of a lot of spin, disinformation, misspeaking and misremembering about the scope and scale of Beijing’s “elite capture” operations and influence-peddling and election interference in Canada. That’s just my guess, based solely on conjecture of course.
I’m not just going by the dizzying pace of Team Trudeau’s clever misdirection over the weekend, or by the pattern over the past two weeks, although, holy cow. As of Sunday, Team Trudeau had fully entrenched its party line on Sam Cooper’s November 7 Global News bombshell, and it’s this:
Move along, nothing to see here. Here’s the clip from CPAC: “I do not have any information, nor have I been briefed on any federal candidates receiving any money from China.”
What?! Global News was wrong?!
Spoiler: Global News was not wrong, and I’m going by both the known facts and the unreported facts. As for the official dissimulations on the subject, I’m going by the pattern over the past seven years.
Here’s the story. The reason Team Trudeau is behaving so frantically at the moment (hey look over there!) is mainly because of the company they’ve been keeping among the Beijing-friendly operatives and influencers who are suddenly getting pulled into a frightfully unflattering limelight.
It will be useful enough to know right away that Wei Chengyi - the strangely generous and well-to-do Beijing annointee at the centre of the election-interference scandal that Team Trudeau is trying so hard to shake - is, shall we say, an intimately familiar acquaintance of quite a few Liberal cabinet ministers and MPs.
We wouldn’t want that getting around, now would we?
We wouldn’t want too many public questions, after all, about a high-society network of Liberals and Chinese agents of influence that goes back even farther than the lucrative Liberal Party racket that put Prime Minister Trudeau at the banquet tables of Chinese billionaires in that cash-for-access scandal that Trudeau’s teflon, it never ceases to amaze, has prevented from sticking. Would we?
Top marks are due the tireless research team at Found in Translation for publishing a kind of rogues’ gallery situating Wei Chengyi with a who’s who of Canada’s A-list politicians. Wei’s also in the middle of the RCMP investigation into those offshore police stations Beijing has lately set up around the world, 54 in total, three in the GTA. So at least the Mounties won’t have to travel far in their inquiries.
There will be a lot more about this sort of thing - it’s not just going on in the GTA, by the way - below the paywall. But it’s a good distance down this newsletter. So stick around.
Anyway, on the Beijing election interference story, in the space of two weeks the spin’s gone from subject-changing and distraction to “everything’s under control” to “I sure gave Xi Jinping a piece of my mind” to “My goodness it’s just so “disappointing” that the Conservatives persist in raising these impudent questions.”
As if the Conservatives alone are asking. The same questions are being raised right now by pretty well everybody. Here’s Andrew Coyne: “There is much that needs to be investigated: the identities of the candidates and staffers on the Chinese payroll, what if anything the Prime Minister did about it, why the information was not made public – and, most important, how to prevent future such outrages.”
Here’s the thing. The claim that Trudeau is now denying up and down is not the thing that Sam Cooper reported. Clever, that.
On November 7, Cooper disclosed that beginning back in January, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service in Ontario had presented a series of briefings and memos for the prime minister and several cabinet ministers to the effect that the Chinese consulate in Toronto had flushed about $250,000 through an Ontario MPP, a campaign staffer and a certain intermediary into a loosely-coordinated network involving at least 11 candidates and 13 campaign staff in the 2019 federal election, among other things.
I suppose it’s possible that Trudeau wasn’t paying attention back in January, or just didn’t want to know, or it happened just as Trudeau’s eminently competent national security adviser Vincent Rigby was on his way out and the career bureaucrat Jody Thomas was just taking over, or Thomas kept Trudeau in the dark about it, deliberately or by mistake. Quite a few things are possible, I guess.
Then again, it’s sometimes hard for Trudeau to keep his story straight, or at least keep his story true. Remember what he said about the Globe and Mail’s reporting on the strongarming of Jody Wilson-Raybould in the SNC-Lavalin scandal? "The allegations in the Globe story are false. Neither the current nor the previous attorney general was ever directed by me or by anyone in my office to take a decision in this matter." Things turned out to be rather more muddy than Trudeau was letting on at the time, to put it mildly.
Fast forward to the current scandal and last week Trudeau was reassuring us: “There are already significant laws and measures that our intelligence and security officials have to go against foreign actors operating on Canadian soil.” But only the week before, CSIS Director General for Intelligence Assessments Adam Fisher was telling a House committee that Canada’s intelligence agencies don’t even have “the tools to understand the threat.”
Perhaps tools like a foreign influence registry would come in handy, a law of the very kind the Liberals persist in refusing to countenance, for instance. I wonder why that is.
Here’s something to keep in mind as you try to get your head around this stuff: It’s not even news, or at least it shouldn’t be, that Beijing’s United Front Work Department, Xi Jinping’s “magic weapon” for seducing, inducing and bashing people around, has already pulled off masterstrokes in monkeywrenching Canadian elections.
Five years ago, an investigation by the Financial Times uncovered a 2014 UFWD training manual that boasted about its Canadian operatives’ successes on behalf of Beijing-friendly candidates in Toronto: Six were elected in 2003 and 10 were elected 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 manual advises.
During Xi Jinping’s ascendancy to his multi-titled perch as the most powerful of China’s supreme leaders since Mao Zedong, the UFWD has followed that advice closely, and Xi has poured massive resources into the effort, including the hiring of 40,000 new cadres by 2018, according to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.
Two years ago the Jamestown Foundation’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology reported the results of a massive data-mining exercise that bored into more than 160 Chinese government and Chinese Communist Party entities. Among the project’s findings: United Front organizations spent more than $2.6 billion in 2019 - more than the budget of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs - and nearly $600 million was poured into foreign influence operations and overseas Chinese proxy groups.
And it was in 2018 and 2019 that the UFWD’s operations in Canada ramped upwards, really fast. Here are two thick files of evidence prepared by a former adviser to the RCMP about the UFWD’s accelerated operations in Canada, starting in 2018 and shifting to warp speed in 2019. It’s meticulously detailed, almost entirely unreported, solid stuff.
Sam’s November 7 report was a bombshell mainly because it put some flesh on the bones of what CSIS had already reported to Parliament about foreign interference in the 2019 election. This is from CSIS in February, 2021: “CSIS actively investigated a number of threats across Canada related to the 2019 Federal Elections and provided classified briefings on its threat assessments and investigations to the Critical Election Incident Public Protocol Panel.”
According to Trudeau, that’s the panel that gave the 2019 election a clean bill of health. Which is true enough, so far as it goes, or truthy enough, but it’s not even news. It went out via Radio Canada International on October 23, 2019.
The CEIPP panel consists of Trudeau’s national security adviser, the Clerk of the Privy Council and the deputy ministers of Justice, Public Safety and Global Affairs. The protocol requires public reporting only when a significant threat to the overall integrity of Canada’s election processes is detected, and only if there’s a consensus of the panel to do so. And the panel didn’t report anything that met that threshold in 2019.
That’s what Trudeau’s falling back on. If you’d listened to Trudeau after Bali last week, you’d be given the impression that there’s nothing to this Chinese election-interference hullabaloo at all. During both the 2019 and 2021 elections, Trudeau said, the “experts” were confident that “the elections in Canada unfolded in the right way and Canadians can be reassured of that. . . the integrity of Canada’s elections have not been compromised.”
Strangely, Trudeau had to be asked twice whether he’d even raised the matter of election interference with Xi Jinping (the spin that produced those groovy Trudeau the Hero headlines, like China taking ‘aggressive’ steps to gut Canada’s democracy, warns Trudeau) The prime minister eventually said he’d only “raised the issue of interference with our citizens” and the importance of “having dialogue about that.”
I’m not quite sure how to be “having dialogue” about Beijing’s agents strongarming “elected officials, Chinese-Canadian media outlets, social media, and academic institutions” by means of “cyberbullying, death threats, racist insults, and aggressive counter-protests. . . clearly linked, either directly or indirectly, to Chinese state actors.” But I don’t claim to be a diplomat.
Here’s what CSIS disclosed in July last year: "CSIS has observed persistent and sophisticated state-sponsored threat activity targeting elections for many years now and continues to see a rise in its frequency and sophistication." Everybody knew, and everybody knew what was coming in 2019, and anyone who pays the slightest attention watched it happen, in real time, and maybe even especially during last year’s federal election. Global Affairs’ own “Rapid Response” unit had noticed Beijing’s disinformation operations going viral last year on Chinese-language social media accounts.
Here’s me back in 2017 on the way Beijing’s friends in the Senate were determined to scupper Bill S-239, which would have banned foreign entities from directly or indirectly inducing Canadians to vote for or against any political candidate or political party, during elections or between elections. The bill called for fines and possible jail time for accepting foreign donations. The Liberals were happy to let the bill die just before the 2019 election.
Maybe I’m just a bit too suspicious-minded, but I do find it strange that the Liberal response to repeated questions in the House last week was to assert that the Conservatives didn’t care about foreign influence operations. Erin O’Toole had, after all, “walked away” from the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (known around the Hill as NSICOP).
In case we’ve all forgotten, O’Toole was raging about Beijing’s interference in the election and the Conservatives and the other Opposition parties initially walked away because the Liberals refused to hand over unredacted documents related to the firing of two Chinese scientists who were rather too closely associated with the Peoples Liberation Army from Canada's highest security laboratory, in Winnipeg. The government insisted the matter be dealt with by NSICOP. The documents should have been surrendered to a proper House of Commons committee instead, the Opposition argument went.
Last summer, an Ontario judge ruled that NSICOP’s enabling legislation is unconstitutional precisely because it usurps the authority of the House of Commons by violating long-standing customs of MPs’ parliamentary privilege. So it would seem the Opposition had a point.
And for all the useful work NSICOP has done, Ottawa has failed to even respond to the recommendations in seven of NSICOP’s eight reviews undertaken in the five years since it was founded. Until last week, the Liberals were pushing for questions about election interference to be shifted from the Commons committee on Procedure and House affairs to NSICOP. The manouvre failed.
Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t help but wonder what the hell that was about.