Team Trudeau and David Johnston's Whitewash
Bonus: Some "news" about the "news" about all this, and why a proper public inquiry is doomed (it's not for the reasons you might think).
The news
In the National Post and the Ottawa Citizen in print today, a look at that bombshell exposé by Alliance Canada Hong Kong on Beijing's sinister operations in Canada: China's election meddling — Here's the report David Johnston should have written. Subscribers got a sneak peek at the ACHK “Murky Waters” report last week here: The Elephant In The Room: Why is David Johnston going out of his way to camouflage the United Front?
I strongly recommend that subscribers read it, and perhaps compare it with Johnston’s report, and even better, read as well the excellent report from the Canada-China relations committee that has been oveshadowed by everything, titled A threat to Canadian Sovereignty: National Security Dimensions of the Canada-People’s Republic of China Relationship, released to little press attention only three weeks ago.
Sorry for all the links. If you read only my column today it shouldn’t be difficult to reach the same conclusion I’ve reluctantly reached:
Johnston’s willing conscription into the coverup – it’s unfortunate that there isn’t a suitable, less-incendiary word for it — is now the primary barricade against the public’s right to know anything about the breadth and scope of Beijing’s reach into the circles of power that ring the Trudeau government. That’s why the Murky Waters report is so valuable.
For subscribers on the other side of the paywall, I’ve got some news about the news, including news about my beleaguered friend Sam Cooper of Global News, the pitbull of election-interference scoops. I’m going to be quite busy in the coming days. But first, I’ll cut to the chase, and then I’ll explain why I’ve come to fear that almost everybody in Ottawa has dug themselves into holes they can’t climb out of on this issue, and I don’t mean just in the Liberal benches.
The chase
Here’s what Johnston and Trudeau don’t want you to see.
Immediately upon assuming office in 2015, the Trudeau Liberals embarked on a mission to transform Canada into a “post-national state” with Chinese capital and China’s vast consumer markets married to Canada’s resource wealth and advanced capitalist economy. Trudeau took on this history-changing mission with an almost messianic zeal, as though he were determined to outdo his father Pierre, who spent most of his life as one of the Chinese Communist Party’s most valued propaganda assets in the liberal democracies.
It was also in 2015 that Chinese supreme leader Xi Jinping began pouring immense resources into the CCP’s overseas operations, notably the United Fronts “elite capture” strategy. Just one element of that strategy in Canada was a (largely-unnecessary) grooming operation aimed at Justin Trudeau that had been set in motion in 2013. That’s what that dodgy donation to the Trudeau Foundation was all about.
My point is the result was a match made in hell, and if there is ever to be a public inquiry into “foreign interference” in this country, its laser focus should be on that.
How close we came to the cliff edge
By 2018 the United Front was well on its way, mobilizing its networks among the wealthy and the well-connected Mandarin-bloc overclass that has come to dominate Canada’s Chinese diaspora. Those networks sprang into action during the 2019 federal election, and the 2021 election that followed. David Johnston says there is no “network.” Real Story subscribers will know that Johnston is either lying, or inadvertently trafficking in falsehoods.
Remember: With the kidnapping of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor in December of 2018, Xi very nearly succeeded in his long-term goal of driving a fatal wedge between Canada and the United States and the rest of our Five Eyes allies, using Team Trudeau’s imbecility to do it.
Xi bet recklessly that he could pull it off because of the Canadians whose counsel he was taking, not least the former Liberal prime minister Jean Chretien and our ambassador to China at the time, John McCallum, both full-patch, bought-and-paid-for consiglieri in China’s comprador caste in this country.
They were not alone in counseling capitulation to Beijing.
Among that coterie was Jean Charest - who woud go on to contest the race to replace Erin O’Toole, Beijing’s worst nightmare in Ottawa. There’s a long list of establishment figures who joined in, some out of naivete, some out of avant-garde sneeriness about the United States, some out of grubby self-interest, and some just because that’s what compradors do. For a while there, Chrystia Freeland, who was renegotiating NAFTA at the time, stood almost alone in cabinet in putting up resistance.
That’s the background. The foreground is what happened during the 2019 and 2021 federal elections. That’s what a public inquiry should focus on, if there will ever be one. The public inquiry the Opposition has rallied behind will not do that. In what follows I explain why, and let you in on that other stuff I mentioned up top. Paywall time: