The Elephant In The Room

Why is David Johnston going out of his way to camouflage the United Front?

“And it was 100 per cent the United Front. One hundred per cent.”

That’s what the Canadian Security Intelligence Service told former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole about the Beijing-directed operation to monkeywrench the 2021 federal election in the Liberals’ favour.

And that’s what O’Toole told me in our conversation Tuesday, following his address to the House of Commons, which I elaborated on in yesterday’s Real Story, They knew. They said nothing, did nothing.

Today we’ll be stumbling right into the eye of the foreign influence hurricane, straight to the very thing that Eminent Laurentian Gentleman David Johnston does not want you to see.

Untroubled by Tuesday’s 174-150 House of Commons vote beseeching the Trudeau government to tell David Johnston to just go away and to "urgently establish" a public inquiry instead, His Excellency Emeritus David Johnston sets out with his entourage to consult with the colorful hill tribes of the diaspora about how they’re coping with Xi Jinping’s Canadian compradors, such as himself.

These newsletters often contain a lot of links. Today’s is going to be link-rich. This edition of The Real Story might be useful as a kind of background archive or syllabus for people trying to get their heads around the “foreign-interference issue” that has devoured so much public attention in recent days and weeks. So no paywall today.

The focus will be on what the overworked and understaffed and sometimes just inexcusably incurious Ottawa Press gallery (with notable exceptions) can’t figure out how to cover properly, the thing that has been staring them in the face all along, the thing CSIS was outlining to O’Toole: Beijing’s United Front Work Department.

That’s the thing that shows up in a single reference, and only in passing, in David Johnston’s 53-page interim report into foreign interference in Canada’s federal elections. Do refer to the Real Story archive available to paying subscribers, but for quick background: David Johnston the right man to whitewash Chinese interference and David Johnston escapes inquiry into his own China dealings.

First up: a magisterial, extensively researched and copiously footnoted report, Murky Waters: Beijing’s Influence in Canadian Democratic and Electoral Processes, released just yesterday. Produced by our friends at Alliance-Canada Hong Kong (ACHK), the work was undertaken entirely by volunteers. The result is something Johnston utterly failed to do in his interim report, which was a shambles of misdirection and contradiction.

The ACHK is filled with facts and evidence-based analysis, and it pays special attention to the United Front:

“The 2019 budget of the UFWD was $2.6 billion (USD), far exceeding funding for the PRC’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Almost a quarter of UFWD’s annual budget is set aside for offices designed to influence ‘foreigners and overseas Chinese communities’. UFWD operates within the PRC, but also globally. Almost all Chinese embassies and consulates host UFWD and affiliated actors. The term “United Front Work” encompasses a wide range of global activities undertaken by UFWD, in collaboration with other components of the Chinese party-state apparatus, to garner public support for the CCP, including silencing dissidence, swaying public opinion and establishing networks of influencers. . . .

“UFWD utilizes proxy actors, such as law firms, consulting agencies, businesses and government relations firms, to distance themselves to initiatives. They cultivate relationships with influential individuals and organizations in different areas, creating separation between foreign interference and the foreign principal. Some proxy actors may go on to engage in lobbying activities to advocate on their business clients’ behalf, who are doing Beijing’s bidding. Other proxy actors, who may be unaware, allow foreign principals to create distance from influence activities. While some financial regulations are in place, it is difficult to disrupt funding at the speed of their operations.. . .”

There is a lot of detail in the report, and the title Murky Waters is fitting: “For many diaspora community members, they have nothing to gain but everything to lose if they speak up about foreign influence by the PRC publicly. Inherently, the ethnic Chinese diaspora recognizes that certain topics are deemed ‘off-limits’ to Beijing and, as a result, unconsciously practices self-censorship as a habitual response. Political engagement is often perceived as a sensitive and ugly topic, regular folks deem it as 尋釁滋事, translated as “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.”

This is consistent with the testimony of Sheng Xue, the vice-president of the Federation for a Democratic China, to a House of Commons committee 17 years ago. Sheng shows up in a piece I wrote for the National Post and the Ottawa Citizen a month ago, Why we may have finally reached a tipping point on Chinese interference.

Here’s what Sheng told the committee: “The Chinese community here is frightened by the Chinese government, even though they are in Canada … A lot of Chinese organizations or social groups are very close to the consulate and to the embassy. Why is that? It’s not because they don’t understand the values, or they don’t trust or agree with the values. It’s just because they are so frightened. They know that the Chinese government is so brutal they could do anything.”

And here’s what happened to her, from a Real Story newsletter last week, under the subhead Mission: Destroy Sheng Xue.

Another wholly overlooked resource published just last week is A Threat to Canadian Sovereignty: National Security Dimensions of the Canada - People’s Republic of China Relationship, the interim report of the House of Commons’ Special Committee on Canada-China Relations. When the report was tabled last week, committee chair Ken Hardie - a Liberal, I should point out - was, I think, too optimistic, though quite kind: “Finally, the warnings from Jonathan Manthorpe and Terry Glavin have sunk in.”

From the report:

“Witnesses told the Special Committee that, through its United Front work, the PRC government attempts to co-opt ethnic Chinese individuals and communities living outside of the PRC, as well as Chinese organizations based overseas. Noting that the CCP regards the diaspora as a resource and a tool for promoting foreign policy, AnneMarie Brady, Professor, University of Canterbury, described the targeting of diaspora as one of the most difficult challenges New Zealand has faced.

“Carolyn Bartholomew, Chair, United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission, stated that much of the co-opting occurs through the control of overseas Chinese media, addressed below, and through United Front Work Department (UFWD) affiliated professional and academic associations. She added that Chinese students and scholars associations, Confucius Institutes (CI) and professional organizations offer benefits and support to Chinese students on university and college campuses. In return, ‘students are expected to rebut any criticism of the CCP and to encourage support for CCP’s global rise.’”

A final thing for today that tends to get overlooked.

Central to the “sophisticated misinformation and voter suppression campaign orchestrated by the People's Republic of China" that targeted Erin O’Toole and his Conservative candidates in the 2021 election was the Chinese social media and message app WeChat. It’s used by at least a half a million voters in Canada, and Beijing and its United Front proxies here utilized WeChat to lethal effect in 2021, especially against Steveston - Richmond East incumbent MP Kenny Chiu.

Three years ago, when the Trudeau government was making a great show of its intent to closely monitor Facebook and Twitter and other such platforms for Russian-style disinformation operations undertaken during elections, for whatever reason, WeChat wasn’t part of the conversation.

Big mistake, that. At least I hope it was a mistake.