Some Tentative New Year's revolutions.
The "shadow government" you're not supposed to know about. The Covid lies we're all expected to forget about. The foreign influence operations you're not supposed to talk about. And other marvels.
THIS NEWSLETTER IS GOING TO BE ABOUT unreported, under-reported and now-breaking news, much of which Real Story subscribers will be familiar with, and broadly about some serious perturbations in the ecosystem of journalism.
I’m happy that I’m well past whatever it was that laid me low last weekend and delayed this edition of the Real Story. I’m feeling quite chipper now, and it’s been more than a week since the last Real Story instalment, so here comes a Weekend Special.
I’m happy as well to see Radio-Canada upping the CBC’s game this week in the matter of the “shadow government” in this newsletter’s headline. It’s “almost a supranational government” running things behind the scenes, which is how Benoit Duguay from the University of Quebec’s School of Management Services describes it.
The Radio-Canada story, L’influence de McKinsey explose sous Trudeau, surtout à l’immigration, is about the explosive growth of sole-source contracts Ottawa has been doling out to the sketchy global consulting and management firm McKinsey & Company, whose shady former global boss, Dominic Barton, was largely unknown to Canadians before he was appointed ambassador to China.
This is an important story because of the central and largely unexamined role played by Barton and McKinsey in the formation, development and execution of the Trudeau government’s profoundly destabilizing notion of Canada as a “post-national” state with no “core identity.” See especially Dominic Barton and McKinsey have been China's best friends in Canada.
The Radio-Canada story has been posted in English on the CBC News website, so, you know, there must really be something to it, right? Well, you read it here first. See especially Dominic Barton, and the Damage Done, Part 1 and Dominic Barton and the Damage Done, Part 2. It’s pretty well all there.
Even so, full marks to Radio-Canada reporters Romain Schué and Thomas Gerbet. They’ve added some new context and detail to what I’ve been banging on about for a while in the Ottawa Citizen and the National Post, and in much greater detail in this newsletter. More on all that below.
I wasn’t going to make any predictions for the new year beyond noticing certain developments in my “beat” that should be drearily obvious, so in my look-ahead for 2023 I drew attention to the obvious patterns of tragedy, then farce, then tragedy, then farce: Russia's disastrous war; the threat of Iranian theocrats and Taliban tyrants; China's COVID chaos: the world needs some luck this coming year.
In Thursday’s column (Ottawa Citizen version: China finally being called out for its role in the COVID-19 scourge) I cop a bit of an attitude, and now I’m going to go out on a limb with something like a prediction.
It’s this: Across the political spectrum of the Anglosphere, and maybe in Canada especially, there’s going to be something of a righteous backlash in the coming year against disingenuous tone-policing and dirty insinuations masquerading as concern for civility or the virtues of “diversity.”
That’s part of the point I was making in my column this past week. National Post version: Beijing once again deceiving the world about COVID — but this time, we're not buying it. Subhead: It's worse than merely stupid to conflate an apprehended animosity towards Chinese people with skepticism of the Chinese regime and a refusal to go along with its lies.
To get something clear straight off the top: If I’m right and 2023 provides overdue and welcome opportunities to break through the high-fashion conversation stoppers that have effectively sabotaged necessary public policy debates, then it’s going to be doubly important to be vigilant in the rejection, isolation and quarantine of racist, misogynistic and bigoted vulgarities.
I’m all for diversity, and I’m all for civility, which is why I have a great deal of sympathy for people who have had quite enough of the kind of hectoring, badgering, bullying and bullsh*tting that’s so routinely employed by the powerful to protect their interests or to otherwise get their way, by keeping the rest of us quiet, or at one another’s throats.
This is of particular concern to me because for most of my life I’ve made my way in this world in the work of “mainstream” journalism, and the news media has a tendency to platform this stuff, and to normalize it. Sometimes journalists themselves engage in it.
And yes, I’m looking at you, CBC News, with your triple-byline badgering of CTV’s W5, the Toronto Star and even the CBC itself, in Anti-trans views are worryingly prevalent and disproportionately harmful, community and experts warn. “Experts” warn about a lot of things. And this is just. . . I don’t know what to call it. But it’s not recognizable to me as journalism.
Just one crippling consequence of this hall-monitor patrolling is that the news media will sometimes shy away from reporting the facts of huge stories that are right there, in front of everyone’s noses. Important issues of serious public interest get overlooked or avoided entirely because they’d be construed as “problematic.”
I’ll come to that stuff down below, for paid subscribers, along with those developments on the “shadow government” front. These are touchy subjects. For everyone and for now, the thing is this:
When mainstream news organizations allow politicians and public personalities to get away with bullsh*t, decent people who ordinarily know bullsh*t when they see it sometimes go looking for “news” in the sketchiest and creepiest sorts of places. This happens on the “right” and on the “left,” and even the most level-headed people can get sucked into a vortex that leaves them susceptible to fall for anything.
SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant XBB 1.5: Lies and Conspiracy Theories
That vortex is what I was thinking about in my column this week, recalling that in the pandemic’s early innings, Patty Hajdu, who was Health Minister at the time, was allowed to get away with accusing journalists of “feeding into conspiracy theories that many people have been perpetuating on the internet.” That’s how Hajdu responded when questioned at a news conference about whether it was sensible for her government to believe what Beijing was telling the world about the Covid-19 virus.
Back then, Beijing’s high-gear disinformation and propaganda operations were stupidly aided and abetted by dense western politicians like Hajdu and her cabinet colleagues. Here’s the investigation I conducted for Macleans back then: The coronavirus pandemic is the breakthrough Xi Jinping has been waiting for. Now, as then, the Xi regime’s policy is that if China staggers under the crushing weight of the disease, so will the rest of the world. And here’s the result, in graphic form, from a separate Macleans piece I wrote: Footprints of the coronavirus: How it came to Canada and went around the world.
As it quickly turned out, it was Hajdu and her fellow cabinet ministers who were “feeding into conspiracy theories,” and the Trudeau government has never owned up to trafficking in the lies that the World Health Organization’s most senior officials were content to circulate on Beijing’s behalf after it became impossible for Chinese authorities to hide the terrible thing that had come into the world by way of Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province.
It’s no wonder that genuine skepticism and distrust of Ottawa’s explications of “the science” went on to metastasize into paranoia about Covid’s origins, about vaccines, and about vaccine mandates.
My heart goes out to Ottawa residents who had to put up with the truckist pandemonium last year, and many journalists did a creditable job in trying to cover the story. But quite a few journalists wasted their time combing the streets looking for Nazi flags when the public interest would have been more effectively served by listening for the reasons why so many people seemed to have lost all faith in government in the first place, even if some of them lost their minds along the way.
As you’d expect, Beijing’s propaganda mills are at it again. From Thursday: Restrictions on China arrivals for political motive 'toxic trend'. Also Thursday: How can US media expect Chinese tourists when its govt sends a hostile signal? Here’s British foreign policy “expert” James Smith, who was already at it three weeks ago: Sinophobia, racism prevent West from seeing China’s COVID fight fairly.
The good news is that Xi Jinping failed to put the global pandemic to the Chinese Communist Party’s purposes of overthrowing the “U.S.-led” world order. The “west” endured, and Xi’s plan backfired in ways that were catastrophic for the Chinese people.
As for Beijing’s cultivation of friends in high places in this country, here’s some clearly welcome news: If you’ve had just about enough of it, you’re not alone. You’re a normal, ordinary, decent citizen. Last month, a Nanos Research public-opinion survey found that 88 per cent of Canadians express varying degrees of support for a foreign-influence registry of the kind pioneered by the brave MP Kenny Chiu and currently championed by Senator Leo Housakos with Bill S-237.
Only seven percent of Canadians side with Senator Yuen Pau Woo, Canada’s most reliable interlocutor for the Chinese embassy, who revealed himself as an errand-runner for China’s tyrannical oligarchy the very week he was sworn in seven years ago. “Canadians should be rightfully concerned that Justin Trudeau has appointed an apologist for the Chinese dictatorship in the Senate,” the Tory MP Peter Kent said at the time. Kent was right.
The Nanos poll is all right here (.pdf). A separate Nanos poll for Bloomberg has found that only one in five Canadians are impressed with the way Ottawa deals with Beijing, and only five percent of us want to see any increase in Canada’s trade with China - the McKinsey-formulated organizing principle for trade, immigration, foreign policy and for building up a new “middle class” that has served as the Trudeau government’s foundational theory-of-everything for most of its term in power.
And no, 95 percent of Canadians aren’t racist. And no, Mr. Prime Minister, asking necessary questions about, say, the shocking news that CSIS had to evict scientists affiliated with the People’s Liberation Army from the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg was not “raising fears about Asian-Canadians.” You might have listened to Asian-Canadians before saying something like that.
Foreign Influence in Canada’s politics? Shut up, you racist.
Here’s Senator Woo whining about what he calls a “witch hunt” and “irresponsible speculation” incited by Global News investigative reporter Sam Cooper’s reports last November about a network of Beijing’s Canadian proxies and their efforts to monkey-wrench at least 11 ridings in the 2019 federal election. As if Canada’s intelligence agencies have not been shouting into the void for years about Beijing’s interference in federal elections and public policy.
Brass balls: Here we have Don Valley North Liberal MP Han Dong, of all people, insinuating that racism is what we should be worried about in the scandal. “I have a big target on the back,” he complains.
Well, no wonder. Dong just happens to have announced his 2019 candidacy from the headquarters of real-estate mogul Wei Chengyi, the big boss of Beijing’s influence-peddling and enforcement operations in Greater Toronto. Wei is also alleged to have served as the Chinese consulate’s 2019 GTA election-interference intermediary.
Never mind merely “alleged”. Confirmed: Wei is the supremo of the Confederation of Toronto Chinese Canadian Organizations (CTCCO), which enforces compliance with Beijing’s claims on Taiwan & Beijing’s persecutions in Tibet and Hong Kong and Xinjiang. Wei is also the “Permanent Honorary Chairman” of the Canada Toronto Fuqing Business Association (CTFQBA), which identifies the United Front Work Group, the high command of Beijing's overseas strongarm operations, among its guiding founders. The CTFQBA headquarters is also the location of one of those overseas Chinese “police stations” the RCMP is investigating.
Real Story subscribers got a bird’s eye view and close-up shots of all that here already: National Security in a ‘Post-National’ State.
Full marks to the New Democratic Party’s Jenny Kwan, who knows a thing or two about what it’s like to be singled out and abused for merely having a Chinese name. Kwan is also quite familiar with the threat Beijing’s proxies pose in Canada. “The threat is real,” she says. “If the Liberals persist in hiding this information, they are not helping to clear the air. . . We have a Liberal MP and a senator trying to redirect the focus of the issue to the media and their reporting.”
Now for the touchy stuff.