Shooting the messengers

Caught red-handed in Beijing's embrace time and time again, Team Trudeau reaches for the nuclear option: Attack CSIS to the point of collective perjury.

Crashing through the thin ice of plausible deniability

Perjury. Noun. The crime of telling lies when you have promised to tell the truth.

In the absence of a specific amicus brief from one of the intervenors in the Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference in Federal Electoral Processes and Democratic Institutions, or a ruling from Marie-Josée Hogue herself, I’m going to leave the incendiary question of perjury wide open.

Specifically, I’m referring to what we heard last week from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, from his chief of staff Katie Telford, from Jeremy Broadhurst - the Liberals’ national campaign director during the 2019 election - from Trudeau’s deputy chief of staff Brian Clow, and from Dominic Leblanc and Bill Blair, both of whom held various top cabinet posts relevant to elections and national security in 2019 and 2021.

I went through their testimony for the National Post here, and contrasted what they said under oath with the public record, with open-source intelligence and with sworn CSIS evidence to the Hogue inquiry commission and to various House committees. And I didn’t even have my boots on. Quite a few people seemed to be outright lying.

Trudeau has insisted that he’s the guy telling the truth, but that he can’t prove it because to do so would require disclosing classified information that would put CSIS informants or methods at risk. Telford said much the same thing. Quite the trick, that.

After I filed my piece to the Post, the contrast was more directly between the Trudeau crew’s simply-not-credible version of events and what CSIS director David Vigneault had to say in response. Vigneault was recalled on Friday to explain the contradictions between what he’d already submitted and the testimony from Trudeau and his officials earlier in the week.

“I can say with a high degree of confidence that I used these examples in both private briefings, but also in public speeches,” Vigneault said, referring to the CSIS alerts about Beijing’s voter-suppression and mass disinformation campaigns in 2019 and 2021.

Vigneault also reiterated that he’d told the Trudeau government more than once that Canada’s absence of effective countermeasures made election interference a “low risk and high reward” endeavour for hostile foreign actors.

That matches perfectly with the examples I outlined for the National Post.

This whole subject requires further attention. A glaring example of the contradictions was in what Broadhurst said about the contents of a 2022 briefing note from Vigneault that was tabled with the inquiry, about the scope and extent of China’s clandestine interference in the 2019 and 2021 elections. "This stuff has never been said to us," Broadhurst claimed. "We’ve never heard language like the stuff that is in this document."

That is simply not true. CSIS has provided Prime Minister Trudeau, his appointed officials and various cabinet ministers with 34 briefings on the subject of foreign interference since 2018. Among other things, those briefings have variously articulated Beijing’s orchestration of operations in this country designed to clandestinely and deceptively influence Canada's 2021 federal election, and last year, this: “We know that the PRC clandestinely and deceptively interfered in both the 2019 and 2021 general elections.”

Also in sworn testimony, Trudeau covered his tracks by saying that he didn’t read all the security briefings addressed to his office, preferring instead to rely on “conversations” with his staff.

I spent a good bit of time this past weekend kicking around a couple of questions arising from all this - when I wasn’t inquiring on the National Post’s behalf into the implications of Tehran’s barrage of missiles and drones aimed at Israel - which is why this newsletter is a bit late, which is also why there’s no paywall today.

Question: Is there anything that came to light during last week’s proceedings of the Hogue Commission of Inquiry into Foreign Interference that I haven’t already disclosed in the National Post or in greater depth in this newsletter, or that haven’t been reported already by the Globe’s Bob Fife and Steve Chase or by Sam Cooper over at his shop?

Not really, oddly. See Vindications.

But this much is new: Until now, the Trudeau government has relied on false accusations of racism, direct insinuations that its critics are following the “Trump playbook” to undermine confidence in the integrity of our elections, absurd claims that it’s all just the Conservatives’ sour grapes about having lost the elections, and commissioning that transparently outrageous whitewash effort, David Johnston’s fraudulent “investigation.”

It’s been a careful strategy of misdirection, deception, obstruction, filibuster and blockading the House of Commons committees that were trying to get to the bottom of it all. The strategy has now turned to attacking CSIS and undermining the credibility of Canada’s intelligence agencies.

Trudeau’s earlier case against CSIS was mainly confined to reprimanding CSIS agents for agents’ leaks to the news media and demanding that CSIS officials be held accountable under the law for failing to “keep their secrets.” This new turn is designed to undermine public confidence in Canada’s primary intelligence service and threatens to sabotage the effectiveness of links between CSIS and Canada’s Five Eyes partners: The United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.

This will not end well.

Things that get in the way of telling the story straight

Interference; from interfere. Verb. To involve yourself in a situation where your involvement is not wanted or is not helpful.

In the context of “foreign interference” in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections, here’s something that’s getting in the way of the penny dropping, loudly and fatally for the Trudeau Liberals. The story is being reported as though all these obviously Beijing-inspired interventions were “not wanted.”

The disinformation campaigns targeting Conservative candidates on Beijing-controlled social media platforms, the weirdly coordinated and massively generous Mandarin-bloc infusions of money into Trudeau’s own Papineau war chest, the candidate-selection privileges granted to Beijing’s network of New Huaqiao in the Liberal Party - it’s exceedingly strange to present all this as “interference” in the Liberal Party’s electoral fortunes.

In the case of all those sordid cash-for-access fundraisers with Chinese billionaires, they were invited. An intervention is not “interference” if it’s solicited and gratefully accepted.

It only becomes unwelcome in those occasions when the news media notices. It becomes unhelpful only when CSIS brings it to the public’s attention. It’s awkward in the extreme to call all this stuff “interference” when it looks a lot more like welcome, agreeable collusion, when every story about foreign electoral interference warrants the same headline: They knew. They said nothing. They did nothing.

It was cold comfort when the House of Commons Committee on Canada-China relations released its report, titled “A Threat to Canadian Sovereignty: National Security Dimensions of the Canada-People’s Republic of China Relationship,” and Liberal committee chair Ken Hardie commented: “Finally, the warnings from Jonathan Manthorpe and Terry Glavin have sunk in.”

I’m not so sure the gravity of the situation is sinking in at all. David Vignault appears to be similarly uncertain. In his testimony Friday, responding to the claims from Trudeau and his officials that it was news to them that anything was amiss about Han Dong’s nomination vote, Vigneault said: “If you go back to the initial briefings about Don Valley North around 2019, the passage of time between 2019 and 2021, my assumption is that this was not the first time that I would've personally talked to the Prime Minister about this.”

Close observers and otherwise perfectly competent and admirable journalists sometimes get in the way of themselves when they’re trying to explain what is happening here. For instance, you’ll sometimes read versions of this proposition: ‘Beijing must be delighted with how things have turned out; the Liberals were re-elected in a minority government and Canada has been disrupted by the voters’ loss of faith in their democratic institutions.’

Yes and no. Yes, of course Beijing got what it wanted in 2019 and 2021. Despite Trudeau’s pretended skepticism and Leblanc’s feigned disbelief, CSIS has intercepted conversations among Chinese diplomats saying just that, and those intercepted communications have been passed up to the highest levels around Ottawa. But no, Beijing does not like it when voters start losing faith in their system of government, which is what happens when the extent of the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department’s influence becomes the subject of unwelcome public attention.

The UFWD, Beijing’s offshore palm-greasing, arm-twisting and strongarming superstructure, recently swallowed up the Office of Chinese Overseas Affairs, and now boasts operational funding greater than the budget for China’s entire foreign ministry. When the UFWD’s overseas operations gets noticed, it means things are not running smoothly.

It will mean that Trudeau is found to be badgering Xi Jinping to get his Canadian proxies to pipe down, and Xi will resent the impudence and box Trudeau’s ears, as he did on the sidelines of that G20 summit in Bali in 2022.

“The CCP is not so much interested in disrupting or seizing alien institutions,” a Sinopsis analysis explains, “but rather in repurposing them to align with its own goals.” When Justin Trudeau was elected in 2015, we should all remember, he was openly devoted to repurposing Canada’s entire economy and foreign policy and immigration policy to align with Beijing’s goals.

Thanks to the Trudeau government’s strategic Beijing-friendly appointments to the Upper House, for instance, that’s what Beijing’s friends managed to do to the Senate, as I noticed five years ago. This suited the United Front magnificently, and over time, the United Front’s Canadian proxies grew confident enough to pop in and out of the shadows. Sometimes, UFWD operatives just can’t help themselves, like when they boasted publicly about helping Olivia Chow win the mayoral race in Toronto.

Canadians don’t like this sort of thing. These operations are supposed be carried out in the dark, not in the open. But either way, it’s always the UFWD orchestrating everything.

As CSIS told Erin O’Toole about Beijing’s operations targeting him in the 2021 election. “It was 100 per cent the United Front.” That’s what O’Toole told me at the time. “One hundred per cent.” And O’Toole’s version of events checks out. Here’s the CSIS briefing note to O’Toole, made available to the Hogue inquiry only a few days ago.

That’s the kind of thing you see when you pull way back from the slam-dunk “granular” evidence of electioneering by Beijing’s network of big-money agents of influence in Canada. You see the United Front.

This preposterously sanitized CSIS document tabled at the Hogue inquiry contains an unredacted section titled “Xi’s ‘Magic Weapon’: the United Front Work Department (UFWD),” in which CSIS describes the UFWD this way:

“The United Front Work Department (UFWD) is a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) body responsible for conducting covert influence operations, both inside and outside China. Its goals are: (1) to clandestinely influence overseas communities, foreign governments and other actors to take actions or adopt positions in support of Beijing’s preferred polices; (2) to discourage individuals living in open and democratic societies from discussing issues that are unfavourable to the CCP; and (3) to harass or undermine groups that are critical of CCP ideology programs or policies. The UFWD conducts these operations outside of the PRC through official and quasi-official entities, including other government and military organizations, cultural and "friendship" associations, and academic groups.”

These are precisely the groups that Beijing’s “man of vision” in the Upper House, Senator Yuen Pau Woo, devotes so much of his time to championing and defending. It’s why Senator Woo was granted intervenor status at the Hogue inquiry in the first place. It was explicitly because of Woo’s accustomed role “advocating for a community that risks being stigmatized or negatively impacted by counter-interference measures, whether proposed or put in place.” Like the foreign-influence registry, which Woo so adamantly opposes.

That’s the kind of thing you notice when you take a bird’s-eye view of “foreign interference.” It’s also exactly what you see when you look up close, really close. You see the same damn thing.

News to nobody, not even the politicians deliberately ignoring it.

The Liberals were not caught by surprise in the case of Han Dong’s dodgy nomination victory in Don Valley North. Han Dong was Beijing’s guy from the beginning, and the Liberals knew it. They knew. They did nothing. They said nothing.

They knew long before Sam Cooper’s amazing reporting back in February, 2023. They knew well before the September 28, 2019 CSIS briefing about Dong’s dodgy nomination-race conduct that the Hogue inquiry heard about last week, in the bit about CSIS telling Liberal campaign boss Jeremy Broadhurst about the “irregularities” in Dong’s September 12, 2019 nomination win.

The “irregularities” included Chinese seniors brought in to vote with Dong’s name written under their sleeves. Foreign students from a private high school with its own Chinese Communist Party oversight committee showing up with voter registration cards in buses under threat of having their visas pulled, The whole schmeer.

Broadhurst told Trudeau about the CSIS briefing, straight away, at a meeting in an airport lounge. You’re supposed to keep your mouth shut about CSIS briefings like these but the rules were such that it was kosher to tell Trudeau. Even so, it turns out some Liberal Party bigshot decided to tip off Han Dong that CSIS was watching him.

And CSIS was watching Dong, months before the September 12, 2019 Don Valley North candidacy vote, owing to his deep connections to the United Front netherworld. After Broadhurst informed Trudeau about what CSIS had told him, Trudeau personally greenlit Dong’s candidacy anyway. Trudeau and his officials publicly defended Dong’s presence in the Liberal caucus, up and down, ever since Sam Cooper’s stories broke. At the moment, Dong - who was visiting various officials in China on a friendly tour only two weeks ago - is sitting as an independent while he sorts out his lawsuits and his reputational difficulties.

But back in June 2019, when Dong declared he was making his bid for a federal Liberal ticket, he made the announcement from the corporate headquarters of the grocery chain and real estate mogul Wei Chengyi, the honorary chair of the UFWD’s primary locus of power in the Greater Toronto Area - the Confederation of Toronto Chinese Canadian Organizations.

It bears repeating: Trudeau knew. They all did. Anyone paying really close attention knew. I knew. I told Gerald Butts, Trudeau’s senior adviser at the time. Butts told me he’d known Han Dong since he was a kid staffer for the Ontario Liberal MPP Gerry Phillips: “He’s no more a covert tool of China than you are an IRA sleeper cell,” Butts told me. I hadn’t said anything about covert tools, but there we are.

Dong was joined at the unveiling event by Michael Chan, himself a subject of intense CSIS interest going back years. A Liberal party kingmaker in Ontario, CSIS had tried and failed to warn Trudeau’s Liberals away from Chan, too. He was International Trade Minister Mary Ng’s campaign co-chair in the 2019 federal election.

The June Reveal: Han Dong declares his candidacy for the federal Liberals. Wei Chengyi is second from left. Michael Chan, Mary Ng’s campaign co-chair, stands immediately behind Dong.

Wei had served as an overseas member of China’s 12th National People’s Congress. He was a director of the China Overseas Exchange Association, an operation run by the UFWD’s Ninth Bureau that had just merged with the UFWD’s China Overseas Friendship Association. For starters.

To move things along, here’s a detailed picture of Wei Chengyi’s associations and the network of MPs and political staffers that was the beneficiary of that $250,000 slush fund from the Chinese consulate in Toronto you’ve probably heard about (I’ve removed the paywall): China’s ‘Magic Weapon’ Hits Canadian Targets.

Fun fact: one of those overseas “police stations” Beijing opened in Canada was situated in one of Wei’s UFWD branch operations. Back in November 2022, our friends over at Found in Translation undertook a magisterial investigation of the United Front’s whole GTA crew.

Han Dong was their guy. It was no secret. You didn’t need a CSIS briefing note to know that. The Liberals knew, from the beginning.

Again: They knew, they said nothing, they did nothing.

In that Real Story investigation from last year, China’s ‘Magic Weapon’ Hits Canadian Targets, I put it this way:

Say you’re a CSIS agent and your work requires you to track and trace Beijing’s subterfuge in Canada. Say you’re investigating the United Front’s above-ground and subterranean activities, and you keep encountering all these amazingly well-connected millionaire United Front princelings with intimate political and social links to Trudeau and his cabinet.

What are you supposed to do? Spy on federal cabinet ministers? Open a file on the prime minister?

You’re supposed to do your job, and you hope that your reports go up to the Prime Minister’s Office and the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians and the SITE Task Force and the “Panel of Five” senior bureaucrats overseeing the Critical Election Incident Public Protocol.

So that’s what CSIS did, as the evidence before the Hogue inquiry has shown. And nothing happened.

Nothing.