The Michael Chong Uproar: What's Changed?
Weekend Special: It's been great theatre (they don't call it the "world stage" for nothing).
To get at what’s happened in recent days you’ve got to thrash through the underbrush of a great deal of journalese, idle speculation and hollow boasts - “tit-for-tat retaliation,” “will not be intimidated,” “a new beginning with China” - in order for the obvious to reveal itself.
Nothing of any consequence has changed. Nothing.
Key operatives from the Mandarin-bloc network that mobilized to the Liberals’ advantage during the 2019 and 2021 elections were back in Beijing this past week to bask in praise from Xi Jinping himself. There’ll be more on that below.
Dominic Barton - the key architect of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s economic growth strategy, Beijing’s foremost global business-class emissary and briefly Canada’s useless ambassador to China - is the keynote speaker at an upcoming closed-door banquet for multinational China-trade corporations at a luxury hotel in Beijing.
Yuen Pau Woo, Xi Jinping’s best friend in the Canadian Senate, is still busy hypercharging the China lobby’s campaign against an effective foreign-influence registry, relying on Beijing’s grotesque propaganda line - echoed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau himself - that if you want to know how successful Beijing’s elite-capture operations in Canada have been, you’re a racist.
Here’s Woo coming to the defence of Beijing’s Montreal “police station” outpost, a greasier story (well done, Toronto Star) than most in the Anglo media have figured out. Before the Michael Chong story broke, here’s Woo getting taken down a notch by Chinese-Canadian activists for his adoption of the Beijing-designed slant that compares a foreign-influence registry with Chinese exclusion laws from a century ago. And here’s Woo again only last week: “Why give credit to the CCP for raising concerns about racism when we should be raising those concerns ourselves?”
Plus ça change.
As for the response to the eruption of disgust and revulsion over revelations that Ottawa had known and did nothing about the conduct of China’ Ministry of State Security in Canada, as you might guess, I’m not especially impressed. Ottawa and Beijing have settled on a gentlemanly reassignment of a couple of diplomats. That’s about it.
This was a degree of subterfuge, House of Commons speaker Anthony Rota told Members of of Parliament this week, that “squarely touches upon the privileges and immunities that underpin our collective ability to carry out our parliamentary duties unimpeded."
The MSS, remember, had set out to make an example of Conservative MP Michael Chong (Wellington-Halton Hills), a friend of the persecuted Uyghurs and China’s democracy movement, by putting the screws to any of Chong’s relatives that could be found in China. Chong has relations in Hong Kong that he has deliberately avoided communicating with in the hopes of keeping them safe from harm.
Taking up that snooping assignment from his office in China’s Toronto consulate was the operative Wei Zhao, a social butterfly well known to at least a half-dozen Liberal MPs and cabinet ministers, and well known to Canadian Security and Intelligence Service. CSIS has also been warning about a certain Liberal Party kingmaker who liked to hang around with Zhao.
The warnings went back three years, to no avail. The Liberal powerbroker even has his own codename at the Chinese embassy in Ottawa: “the minister.”
I’ll also be getting into that today.
The denouement to all the drama? Wei Zhao will be moving on to greener pastures, no doubt with a promotion for his troubles, and Jennifer Lynn Lalonde, Canada’s consul in Shanghai, is obliged to leave China by tomorrow. That’s about it.
This edition of the Real Story is the second in a series that began Monday with Diplomat, Socialite, Spy. I’m taking a brief break from the Ottawa Citizen and the National Post and reckoned I’d spend a bit of my time off (!) to focus on what’s gone unnoticed in all this. My problem is that more background keeps coming to me and this series could get out of hand, so there’s a lot for you all today, and more for paid subscribers, in this Real Story weekend special.
Also today:
Who are these quiet friends of China’s diplomats in the House of Commons, and what are they trying to hide? Who was CSIS referring to in that intelligence assessment that mentioned “gatekeeper” political staffers who “deceptively control and influence the activities of elected officials in ways that support [People’s Republic of China] activities”?
Coming up in Real Story newsletters:
What’s the deal with that English-language magazine that CSIS says has been paid to run pro-Bejing propaganda? What’s the story behind that shady “China expert” who keeps showing up in the press, most recently this week? And what’s the connection to a rather promiscuous public-relations man and one-time registered China lobbyist who has somehow ended up on the Conservative Party’s governing council?
What was the horrible fate that befell Sheng Xue, the democracy activist whose warnings to Parliament back in 2006 I wrote about in my last column, Evidence of China's interference has been lying in plain sight for years ?
“Affronts to Canadian democracy”? Don’t be racist.
If you think things have changed since it became public knowledge that Beijing had put a target on Michael Chong’s back, you must have missed what happened in the House of Commons on Monday.
House speaker Anthony Rota ruled that it was proper to suspend House business to allow attention to the fact that “a foreign entity tried to intervene in the conduct of our proceedings through a retaliatory scheme” targeting Chong and his family.
This allowed the House to pass a motion demanding that any Chinese diplomat implicated in "affronts to Canadian democracy" be expelled from Canada. The motion also called for Parliament to establish a foreign agent registry along the lines of the American and (evolving) Australian models, and for a national public inquiry into foreign election interference, and for Ottawa to shut down those Chinese “police stations” operating in Canada.
On all four points, the vote was 170-150 in favour, but with the ruling Liberals voting against. So, fat lot of good Parliamentary democracy is accomplishing in defending itself in Canada at the moment.
Remember: the thing that put a target on Chong’s back was his sponsorship of a February, 2021 House of Commons motion condemning Beijing’s persecution of the Uyghurs and other captive Muslim minorities as a genocide. There’s a lot to that motion that’s gone under the radar. I’ll be coming to that today.