Real Story Series: Diplomat, Socialite, Spy.

The Chinese agent behind this week's scandal is a high-society social butterfly well known to several Liberal MPs and cabinet ministers. But that's not the half of it.

Part One

While I try to keep Real Story subscribers in the China loop, I managed to go the entire month of April without filing a thing to either the Ottawa Citizen or the National Post about the national security threats posed by Xi Jinping’s many friends in this country’s high Laurentian places.

There were too many other stories to chase down that nobody else was paying attention to. Besides, April’s workload was a bit heavier than usual and I reckoned the China file was in good hands (Steve Chase and Bob Fife over at the Globe, take a bow). It was hard work keeping my powder dry.

In last Tuesday’s Real Story newsletter I dove straight into the “post-national” bedlam Team Trudeau has invited by expunging conventional understandings of what constitutes threats to Canada’s national security, A haven for terror proxies, police-state goons. That’s Canada for you.

And this past week in the Ottawa Citizen and the National Post I broke my abstinence from chronicling Justin Trudeau’s toleration of Beijing’s strongarm rackets: Evidence of Beijing's terrorizing of Chinese-Canadians, and its manipulation of Canadian politicians, has been in plain sight for years.

I’m taking a long-overdue break from my Postmedia work for the rest of this month but I’ll be keeping the lights on at the Real Story. I’m going to run a bit of a series in the coming days. It will focus on what’s been going unnoticed in the story about China’s Ministry of State Security secretly going after the ordinarily unflappable and unimpeachably decent Conservative MP Michael Chong (Wellington-Halton Hills).

The thing that put a target on Chong’s back, remember, was his sponsorship of a February, 2021 House of Commons motion condemning Beijing’s persecution of the Uyghurs and other captive Muslim minorities as a genocide. There’s a lot to that motion that’s gone under the radar. I’ll be coming around to that.

I’ll be looking closer at that spy, Wei Zhao, the agent working for China’s Ministry of State Security out of the Toronto consulate. He’s well aquainted with at least a half-dozen Liberal MPs and cabinet ministers (named in last Tuesday’s newsletter) and there will be more in the coming days.

Here’s the thing: CSIS has been warning about the Liberals’ liaisons with Wei Zhao for at least three years, and warning about a certain Liberal kingmaker who hangs around with Zhao, to no avail.

The facts of Wei Zhao’s liaisons can be derived mostly from open-source intelligence and publicly-reported information that hardly anybody bothers to notice. But there’s a lot more about him that CSIS has been trying to draw attention to.

And there’s a lot more to that 2021 CSIS intelligence assessment titled People’s Republic of China Foreign Interference in Canada: a Critical National Security Threat than just some cryptic reference to an unnamed MP that’s turned out to be Michael Chong.

Sorry to tell you, but there’s no backing away from a fight with Xi Jinping.

I’ll be getting into these questions too:

What’s the deal with these “gatekeeper” political staffers that append themselves to MPs, “thereby placing them in a position,” as the CSIS report describes, “where they can deceptively control and influence the activities of elected officials in ways that support PRC activities”?

What’s the story with that English-language magazine that’s being paid to run pro-Bejing propaganda? What was the horrible fate that befell Sheng Xue, the democracy activist whose warnings to Parliament back in 2006 I wrote about in my column last week?

But first, I need to get past the “news” in order to get into the backstory. I can’t just breeze by the contradictions in the “narrative” the Trudeau Liberals are expecting us to believe.

Not to offer the Prime Minister’s Office any advice on how to spin all this, but there is a reasonable excuse. The only problem with it is that it’s slam-dunk evidence 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.

So let’s get all that out of the way now.