Stigmatize, Vilify, Detest. Do Not Obey.
Canada's Beijing-aligned Mandarin bloc is the 21st century version of the Nazi-aligned Deutscher Bund from the 1930s. Discuss, while you still can.
In the National Post this week, ably assisted by the damning evidence Senator Yuen Pau Woo provides against himself in his official capacity with Justice Marie-Josée Hogue’s public inquiry into foreign interference in Canada’s 2019 and 2021 federal elections, I raise a question that has been dodged and talked around and papered over for too damn long.
When we say “foreign” interference, what do we mean by “foreign,” exactly? That’s a question Woo has persistently raised in his open determination to defend and advance the interests of Beijing’s friends, loyalists, influence-peddlers and proxies - and even Beijing’s “police stations” - in Canada. So let’s deal with it.
Below I’ll be making the case I alluded to in my National Post column, which is that there really is an historical precedent worth raising in the context of the probably-dead-by-now proposal for a foreign agents registry, and in the context of the foreign interference inquiry that’s finally getting off the ground with public hearings in a few days.
That precedent isn’t the boogeymen of the Chinese exclusion laws or the Japanese internment or the McCarthyism that Woo, his fellow senator Victor Oh, Prime Minister Trudeau, former public safety minister Marco Medicino and Liberal MP Chandra Arya have conjured.
The correct precedent is the Deutscher Bund Canada, the Organisierte Volksgemeinschaft des Canadischen Deutschtums (the organized Volk community of German-Canadians). It was perfectly legal and at large in Canada until a week before Canada declared war on Germany in 1939. Only then did the RCMP begin to measures against the Bund under the Defence of Canada Regulations of the War Measures Act.
This is a terribly saucy thing to suggest about all the glamorous ladies and gentlemen and sketchy Chinese billionaires Trudeau entertained at all those campaign-warchest-replenishment soirees in 2016. It’s more than just impolite to compare the Nazi enthusiasts in the Bund with those delightfully generous but weirdly shadowy Chinese benefactors the Trudeau Foundation lied about getting money from last year.
Surely it’s worse than Bill C-63’s “awful but lawful” permissibility to say such a thing about Canada’s “new huaqiao,” China’s “new capitalist” overseas networks, which were mobilized with a $2.6 billion United Front Work Department budget in 2019 exceeding the entire budget of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China.
The new Deutscher Bund Canada
For the purposes of brevity, I’ll be using the shorthand term “Mandarin bloc” to mean that huaqiao network of wealthy, well-connected and politically hyperactive business-class Mandarin speakers that has lately come to dominate “Canada’s Chinese community,” and quite a few Liberal party organizations in ridings strewn across Montreal, the Greater Toronto Area and Metro Vancouver.
By Mandarin bloc, I mean Beijing’s corporate-sector proxies and influence-peddlers in Canada, and the comparison I mean to make is between Beijing’s United Front Work Department and its Overseas Chinese Affairs Office (UFWD/OCAO) and the Third Reich’s Auslandsorganisation der NSDAP (NSDAP/AO).
In the same way that the Reich’s AO discouraged lawlessness among its overseas Ortsgruppen, the UFWD/OCAO has expected its overseas agents and proxies to act within the law, above ground and out in the open. See: China’s offensive on Canada, in plain sight. So it’s all very sporting and proper, now as it was then.
The Bund had a difficult time of it, throwing its weight around the half-dozen German newspapers in Canada in the 1930s, so it had to resort to establishing a newspaper of its own, the Deutsche Zeitung für Canada.
With an overtly pro-Beijing government in power in Ottawa in 2015, the UFWD/OCAO soon acquired a near-monopoly in conventional Chinese-language media in Canada and went on to exert control of Chinese social media platforms such as WeChat, Weibo, Douyin and Zhihu, flooding the zone with propaganda and disinformation to manipulate the outcome of elections in key ridings across the country.
Senator Woo’s exuberance on behalf of this powerful and relatively new “ethnic” constituency was acknowledged by Justice Hogue herself when she granted Woo intervenor status in the long-delayed public inquiry last December.
Hogue ruled that Woo’s privileges were warranted owing to his record "advocating for a community that risks being stigmatized or negatively impacted by counter-interference measures, whether proposed or put in place."
Woo’s advocacy has been undertaken in turns surreptitiously, disingenuously, and openly and loudly. It’s my contention here that Woo and the interests he represents and defends deserve to be stigmatized as the Deutscher Bund eventually was to be held in contempt, to be vilified, and to be subjected to public detestation.
Merely my opinions of course, but those are fighting words, according to Justice Minister Arif Virani: very specifically, that sentence I just wrote contains evidence of thoughtcrime rising to the level of hate speech in the Liberals’ just-introduced Bill C-63.
In that proposed law, vilification and detestation would be grounds for prosecution in proceedings before Bill C-63’s expanded, newly empowered and cabinet-appointed bureaucracy under the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal.
Its proceedings can be held in secret. If I were to be brought before Bill C-63’s star chambers, I would not be entitled to confront or even know my accuser, and under Bill C-63, truth is no defence. Bill C-63 also provides for retroactive prosecutions, so if I’m going to get myself into trouble here I’ll do it for paying customers, thank you. There will be a paywall down below. But first:
A quick update on this newsletter’s comings and goings.
I have been a very bad man and a very busy man.
Selina Robinson is in the house.
Sunday is of course a Holy Day of O’bligation due to Lá Fhéile Pádraig, otherwise undertood as the Feast Day of Saint Patrick. Even so, on Sunday there will be no paywall to listen in on the podcast of my conversation with Selina Robinson. She’s the mildly-Zionist British Columbia cabinet minister whose public lynching last month was a capitulation to some of the most vile antisemites you could ever have the misfortune to encounter.
Speaking of foreign interference: B.C. Premier David Eby’s ouster of Robinson was the end result of a carefully-orchestated and almost entirely-unreported campaign, the disgraceful denouement of which was celebrated by the propaganda offices of the terrorist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, best known for airline hijackings and suicide bombings.
The PFLP’s Vancouver-headquartered overseas propaganda arm Samidoun was behind the Lynch-Selina campaign from the start. The PFLP head office in Ramallah figured that hounding Robinson out of office on the spurious pretext of something she didn’t say in a January 30 panel discussion was a pretty big deal. On this point, I find myself in agreement with the PFLP.
Background reading for Sunday, if you need it: My original reporting in the National Post: The despicable untruths behind Selina Robinson's political lynching. Too many journalists have fallen for claims that the B.C. cabinet minister said something 'racist.' She didn't. See also The Real Story backstory: The Problem With The Selina Robinson Story.... . . It wasn't true. What follows is the story of what really happened. And in Robinson’s words, the remarkable J’accuse letter she wrote to her New Democratic Party colleagues.
Another bit of newsletter news:
About that star Conservative candidate the Conservatives ditched
I first wrote about the knives that went into the back of my friend Kaveh Shahrooz in the National Post on February 23, here.
The next day, in an in-depth overview of the congenital cowardice in the liberal democracies, I got deep into the weeds of the dysfunction among Iran’s exiled opposition forces here, under the heading: About Kaveh Shahrooz, the Conservatives, and the Persian diaspora.
On March 5, the CBC’s Ashley Burke, who had no more luck than I did in getting Conservative campaign headquarters to comment, produced this well-reported story: More than 100 Iranian-Canadians call for party probe of Conservative nomination race.
That’s really bad form, Conservatives. Pierre Poilievre recruited Kaveh, and for reasons the party can’t or won’t explain, Kaveh was hung out to dry. Really bad form there.
Oh yes, about Bill C-63 and the thin ice I’m treading on. . .
Last Sunday’s newsletter, headlined Things you're not allowed to know. . .and things you're not allowed to say, was all about Bill C-63, which even Margaret Atwood has been wondering about, out loud: “The possibilities for revenge false accusations + thoughtcrime stuff are sooo inviting!”
In that newsletter I confessed that the proposed hate-speech law was even worse than I’d initially made out, and I’d based my growing unease largely on conversations I’d had with the former chairperson of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, David L. Thomas. I mentioned that Real Story subscribers would be hearing directly from Thomas, either in this newsletter or in the National Post.
Here’s David in the Post, on Wednesday: I chaired the Human Rights Tribunal. It has no business policing 'hate speech'. Liberal online harms bill will put an end to robust political discourse. It’s a hell of a read. I certainly strikes me as more newsworthy and important than the hot takes of Elon Musk, or of Margaret Atwood - national literary treasure though she is.
Do read David’s analysis. It’s chilling.
Back to today’s business
The opinion I offered in the Things You’re Not Allowed To Say part of last weekend’s newsletter was taken from Rule #1 in Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the 20th Century.
Do not obey in advance.
I was being only halfway facetious in my National Post piece, headlined The elephants in the room at the foreign interference inquiry, subhead: I'm raising my concerns now because under Bill C-63, such speech may be outlawed.
This is to say I was almost kidding, but not really. Here, I’m not kidding: I’m not going to obey.
I’ll now make that even clearer than I have already today.