Something is broken, way down deep.

Playing along with Beijing's proxies; How "Islamophobia" alarms accommodate antisemites and coddle the far right; The UK deals with it; CBC's Canada is Trudeau's Canada, so hey, it's all good.

After everything that’s happened, the Liberal government is still refusing to come clean about Beijing’s influence-peddling and strongarm operations in this country. We still have no foreign-agents registry and we won’t have one, either, any time soon. We still have no effective ramparts against slave-labour goods entering Canada from Xinjiang, and it looks like it’s going to stay that way.

I get into all that in my column this week, beginning with Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino’s dodging and weaving at the House of Commons Special Committee on Canada-China Relations.

I must say I admire the patience of the New Democrats’ Heather McPherson and Conservative shadow foreign minister Michael Chong. I mean, the cheek of it: the reason Ottawa has been dragging its feet for years on a proposal for the mildest kind of foreign agents registry is that we need to be “inclusive” and “diverse,” Mendicino says, and “culturally sensitive.”

Sensitive to whom, exactly? The well-connected agents of Xi Jinping’s “magic weapon” United Front Work Department in Canada? Beijing’s strongarming Overseas Chinese Affairs Office and its “police stations” in Toronto and Richmond?

Why hasn’t the Trudeau government been up front with Canadians about that campaign interference operation that drew in 11 candidates in the 2019 federal election? For years, Canada’s national-security agencies have been screaming into the void about this.

And no sooner had I filed my column Wednesday morning than I see our pal Sam Cooper at Global News has dropped another bombshell. Sam’s got his hands on a four-page Privy Council Office memo from more than five years ago setting out that senior intelligence officials had well-documented evidence of China’s efforts to infiltrate “all levels of government” in Canada. The memo further sets out that there’s “a substantial body of evidence that Chinese officials are actively pursuing a strategy of engagement to influence Canadian officials in ways that can compromise the security of Canada and the integrity of Canadian institutions.”

Real Story subscribers will be aware that Sam sustained a hell of a lot of blowback for his blockbuster last November about how the Chinese consulate in Toronto flushed about $250,000 through an Ontario MPP and a certain intermediary into a loosely-coordinated network involving at least 11 candidates and 13 campaign staff in the 2019 federal election.

And you will remember too the way Trudeau responded with, gosh, nobody told me about any of this, and then he boasted that he’d confronted Xi Jinping about it at the G20 summit in Bali, and then Xi boxed his ears for showboating like a schoolboy giving backchat to teacher.

Well. The story Sam broke Wednesday shows that the Prime Minister’s Office wasn’t just sitting on that powderkeg for nearly a year without saying or doing anything about it. The memorandum Sam wrote about on Wednesday goes back to June, 2017.

It was also back in 2017 when I was looking into Beijing’s influence-peddling and propaganda operations that Senator Linda Frum told me that Ottawa needed to launch an inquiry into the extent of Beijing’s subterfuge in Canada, and also needed to tighten laws to prevent Beijing from meddling in Canadian political processes. “It’s critical. It’s essential for Canadian political sovereignty that we examine this very, very closely,” Frum told me. “I think we need to look at it urgently.”

Did the Trudeau government do any such thing? Of course not. Is it any wonder that the Liberals wouldn’t want any of this intelligence getting out into the public? Paying subscribers got the skinny on Beijing’s lavishly-funded network of political operatives in the GTA in this Real Story newsletter, here: National Security in a Post-National State. Just one big happy family:

Beijing’s reputed 2019 election-money “intermediary,” Wei Chengyi (3rd from left) at a 2017 Chinese New Year party on Parliament Hill with Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen (centre) disgraced former ambassador John McCallum (2nd from right) and former Liberal MP Geng Tan on Hussen’s right. Present but not pictured: Justin Trudeau.

It was also nearly five years ago that Amnesty International Canada and the Canadian Coalition on Human Rights in China presented the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the RCMP with an exhaustive overview (updated in 2019) of an organized and sustained campaign of intimidation and harassment aimed at Chinese-Canadians working on China-related human rights issues. The strongarm operations were understood to be run by Chinese government officials and their Canadian proxies.

We’re still pretty well back at square one, waiting for the Trudeau government to figure out an “inclusive,” “diverse” and “culturally sensitive” way to damn well do something about all this.

And it gets worse.

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Islamist windbags and the “far right”: Is there a difference?

Not that I can see.

An organization that is effectively the Canadian wing of a theocratic-fascist movement that was funded by the Nazis in its early years, and brings speakers to Canada who advocate the death penalty for gay people, and who say Christians who protect Jews from murderers are traitors, and that it’s okay to beat your wife. . . that sounds pretty “far right” to me.

But because it’s called “the Muslim Association of Canada,” the organization I refer to here has been granted $3 million in federal “anti-hate” funds and money for youth engagement and security over the past three years. Point this out, though, and they’ll call you an Islamophobe. That’s what the MAC calls me, anyway.

Subscribers may recall that last month this newsletter concerned itself with a deep-state conspiracy theory positing an elaborate plot engineered by a secret Islamophobic cabal within the Canada Revenue Agency. In that newsletter I drew attention to what NDP leader Jagmeet Singh was up to over the holidays. Singh was a speaker at a conference with other speakers who are infamous for gruesome, Holocaust-denying, homophobic, bloodcurdling weirdness.

But we’re expected to see nothing amiss here and accept it as wholly unremarkable, because it was a “Muslim” conference, and certainly not newsworthy. The thing the CBC and the Toronto Star did find time to admonish us to wet our trousers about, however, was Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre giving a talk to the merely paleoconservative Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

I can only deduce from this that it’s what’s to be expected of a political class and a news media establishment that has succumbed to the post-liberal proposition that only white people can be racist, and people who identify as Muslims are to be thought of as “racialized,” and therefore not white. So, hey presto, by all means, go ahead and carry on like that dashing Mister Hitler and we won’t so much as furrow a brow.

Over in Britain there’s been a vigorous debate in recent years about where this fashionable type of intellectual and moral slovenliness will lead. The British are well ahead of us in the matter of properly situating and at least speaking openly about the social contagion and toxicity of Islamism - a reactionary ideology - as opposed to Islam, the Abrahamic faith. And this week, a pretty big event occurred over there that Canadians would be wise to pay attention to.

The United Kingdom relies on a multi-agency program called “Prevent,” which sets out to get in the way of people - young men, mostly - who are inclining towards extremism and terrorism. The program has come under exactly the same kind of criticism that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has himself encouraged regarding the CRA’s Charities Directorate - that Muslim-centred charities are being disproportionately “targeted” by the CRA.

This arises because the Charities Directorate cooperates with national-security agencies in the business of rooting out terrorism financing and money laundering, and the names of the charities audited in this effort are, as I noticed in an earlier newsletter, not suspiciously Lutheran-sounding, if you get my meaning. And some of those charities do have a record of preying upon the generosity of decently devout Muslims.

This week, an independent review of the UK’s Prevent program, four years in the making, was finally published. Authored by the journalist William Shawcross, former chair of the Charity Commission for England and Wales, the report will not leave the Islamist lobby feeling in any way vindicated. A key finding: “Islamist terrorism remains the primary terrorist threat to the UK. Prevent’s activity will be proportionately directed to confront this, whilst remaining vigilant against all other threats including the extreme right.”

I happen to think that’s a distinction without a big difference, and I see in the Guardian that Sunder Katwala is of a similar view: “Pitting the two against each other in this way risks simply relitigating old arguments, as though efforts to contain one of these threats necessarily undermines the other.” Maybe so. But Wasiq Wasiq of the Henry Jackson Society, a founding trustee of Muslims Against Antisemitism, has a sharper view. Britain’s problem, like Canada’s, is that “right wing” is defined too broadly and “Islamist” is defined too narrowly (I’m sure it’s worse here but never mind).

Shawcross concluded the same. “The review demonstrates this in one case,” Wasiq writes, “where a Prevent Education Officer compared recruitment material from Salafi jihadis to that of conservative commentators such as Melanie Philips and Douglas Murray.” There’s no evidence for unwarranted disproportionality in the fact that 80 percent of the Counter Terrorism Police network’s ongoing investigations are focused on Islamists, and only ten percent are focused on the extreme right. The thing is, as they say, what it is.

Unlike the United Kingdom, though, in Canada the government has been all too content to engage in deliberate disinformation and purposeful opacity in the matter of Islamophobia, because it’s a handy way to slander anyone who doesn’t go along with the Liberal approach to the “Muslim” sector of its multiplicity of subsidized and easily manipulable racial, gender and identity quangos. See: The sinister political utility of Islamophobia.

For the love of God what the hell are we going to do with the CBC?

I genuinely regret to say I’m starting to think it’s doomed. And I mean it. I’ve never been in the Defund The CBC camp, but holy cow.

It’s an actually-existing CBC slogan poster thing. It’s part of Catherine Tait’s rebranding exercise, as it that’s what the CBC needs.

Last month I got into it pretty deeply here: About Trust in the Media, Especially the CBC. In that newsletter I implored subscribers to first put themselves in a Conservative’s shoes, then in a CBC reporter’s shoes. Short version:

Say you’re the reporter. How do you fairly cover a politician like Pierre Poilievre, knowing full well that he apparently intends, if elected, to crush every hope you’ve had about a career and throw you out into the street, jobless? Okay now you’re the Conservative. For longer than you can remember all you’ve been getting from the CBC is arrogantly “woke” disregard and contempt for the kind of country you’ve always loved and cared about. They mock you and taunt you and troll you.

See? This would all be fine, except the CBC is supposed to be Canada’s national broadcaster. It’s not some highbrow beatnik network we can all either happily ignore or enjoy, depending on our way of looking at things. Unfortunately, CBC president Catherine Tait, whose tone-deafness I pilloried in that last newsletter, appears to be rather more daft than I imagined.

Well down into this Globe and Mail interview published on Tuesday we read that Tait criticized the Conservatives’ urge to defund the CBC as a mere fundraising slogan, part of an “online fundraising campaign, which very specifically says ‘We’ll save you a billion dollars, please send in $20.’” And she says this: “There’s a lot of CBC bashing going on – somewhat stoked by the Leader of the Opposition. . . I think they feel that CBC is a mouthpiece for the Liberal government.”

Ya think?

There’s a lot of Conservative bashing going on there, somewhat stoked by the President of the CBC, a supposedly independent Crown corporation that does sometimes come off like a mouthpiece for the Liberal government. How is this helping? Even if you’re in the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting camp and you have a poster of Peter Gzowski on your living room wall and a huge tattoo of Bruno Gerussi on your back and the only music you listen to is the Tragically Hip and the Arrogant Worms, would you think this is in any way helpful to the purpose of keeping the CBC above politics and its budget safe from harm?

Now, just for fun, riddle me this.

Anti-Asian racism is a very real thing. But like Islamophobia, it’s also routinely used by everyone from the prime minister to the Chinese foreign ministry as a way to cover up all sorts of sleaziness. Remember when Ambassador Lu Shaye accused Canadians of “white supremacy” for wanting Beijing to release the hostages Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor? That was fun.

I’m with Michael Chong and Kenny Chiu on this because their standpoint is unimpeachable.

When the Conservatives were questioning Trudeau about the scandal of those People’s Liberation Army scientists who had to be kicked out of the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, Trudeau brazenly insinuated that anti-Asian racism was in play. In a joint statement, Chong and Chiu wrote that Trudeau was conflating criticism of Beijing with racism and pushing the Chinese regime’s own propaganda: "Beijing's goal is to conflate legitimate criticism of China's government with intolerance towards anyone of Chinese heritage."

So let’s not do that, okay? Now here’s the riddle.

How did the CBC go looking for evidence of the rise of anti-Asian racism and end up finding it a couple weeks back in data that shows it’s actually declining, and then relied for commentary on the dubious Stop Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Advocacy Group and its spokesman, Ivan Pak, either without noticing or failing to let on who they are and who Pak is?

Pak is notorious for advocating against programs meant to protect LGBTQ people, homeless people, refugees, Muslims and journalists, as our friends over at Found in Translation have gingerly put it. Pak is a regime-friendly eccentric who has openly sided with regime-friendly loudmouths who insist that there’s no persecution of the Uyghur people going on in Xinjiang.

Pak launched his 2018 civic election campaign from the home base of the Canada Wenzhou Friendship Society, the location of one of those offshore “police stations” the RCMP are investigating. In 2019 he ran as a candidate for Maxime Bernier’s fringe right-populist People’s Party, apparently on the grounds that Bernier would cut back on Muslim immigration and boost wealthy immigrants from China.

Pak is also a co-founder of the Maple Leafs Anti-Racism Actions Association (MLARA), set up for the purposes of - wait for it - launching a lawsuit against our pal Sam Cooper over at Global News.

The CBC needs better “experts,” I think it’s fair to say, but enough for now.

The Real Story’s first-year anniversary is coming up any day now. I’ll probably do a little retrospective or something. In the meantime, renew your paid subscriptions and I’ll keep working for you and be eternally grateful.