This is just to say

About Beijing's friends in high Canadian places. . .

You can’t tell the players without a program, as they saying goes. But you can’t tell the program without the players, either. That was to be the main attraction of this newsletter today - naming names. There was a lot of names-naming here a few weeks ago - and more of it will be the primary contribution of the Weekend Special Real Story newsletter which I’ve rescheduled to tomorrow. I’ll have some insights about the strange crisis that’s gripped Canada from the American intelligence community, too.

There’s just so much going on, it really is hard to keep up. Do stay tuned, but for the moment here’s myself in conversation with Michael Campbell in his MoneyTalks podcast (starts at 8:55). It should bring you up to date as of yesterday around noon. You’ll want to put your feet up.

One of the difficulties of a project like a proper directory of the “Friends of China” in Canada is that the result would be as thick as one of those old telephone books. So I’ll be focusing tomorrow on a cross section, kind of a rogues’ gallery, and the emphasis will be on individuals directly implicated in what we’re now learning from CSIS whistleblowers.

Much of it will have to be on the far side of a paywall. Sorry not sorry. Spoiler alert: They’re not all Liberals. You want the full story, do please take out a paid subscription.

Anyway, the latest bombshell was dropped by our friend Sam Cooper just yesterday: Liberals ignored CSIS warning on 2019 candidate accused in Chinese interference probe. Amazing stuff.

In a nutshell, here are the main things we’ve learned over the past week:

Beijing’s primary overseas strongarming and influence-peddling agency is the United Front Work Department, and the UFWD’s strategy of “elite capture” in Canada has been every bit as successful as our worst fears. Senior China-file CSIS agents have finally stepped out into scary terrain: they’ve had it with the Trudeau government’s collusions with Beijing’s proxies in Canada.

The whistleblowers are trying to avoid prosecution under the Security of Information Act (the 1985 successor to the Official Secrets Act), but they’re also taking care to ensure that if push comes to shove they’ll be able to avail themselves of the “public interest” exemptions from prosecution, under Section 15 of the Act.

It’s that bad.

Team Trudeau is going to the most brazenly absurd extremes to cover up the extent of Beijing’s election-monkeywrenching subversions in 2019 and 2021. The strategy is to pathetically obvious: irretrievably politicize the issue in order to shut down public debate about the damage done to Canada’s core sovereignty and the country’s independent political processes. Just to raise the alarm is to be dismissed as some kind of MAGA loon resorting to “the same Trump-type tactics, to question election results moving forward.”

Yes, the Liberals are that desperate, and it’s that gross.

Even more disturbing: the PMO is determined to thwart the capacity of the House of Commons to discover what Beijing’s proxies have been up to and the degree to which senior Trudeau officials are implicated in acts of collaboration and collusion with Beijing’s proxies.

The Liberals (with an assist from the New Democrats) have already hamstrung the Commons’ Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs: No documents allowed. Now, Prime Minister Trudeau says he won’t allow an independent investigation of the kind proposed by former chief electoral officer Jean-Pierre Kingsley

Here we are, citizens of a Parliamentary democracy, and we’re not allowed to know what the hell is going on. This is uncharted territory. I don’t care what your politics are, but if this stuff concerns you, you’ll want to read tomorrow’s newsletter.

My column in the National Post and the Ottawa Citizen this week marks the anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s full-on war of conquest in Ukraine. An observation: the Trudeau government’s early imbecilities on the Ukraine question are directly related to the catastrophic vulnerability to Beijing’s exertions that Trudeau’s China “policy” ended up saddling us with. Key bits:

When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made his first matinee-idol appearance on the “world stage” in 2015, Canada’s shiny new foreign policy proposed full-on rapprochement with the torture states of the Earth, not only with Xi Jinping’s China and Khomeinist Iran, but with Russia, which had annexed Crimea and invaded Eastern Ukraine only the year before.

. . . Putin was allowed to get away with it, in Syria and Georgia and Chechnya, then Donbass and Luhansk. With Beijing as his guarantor and financier, Putin persists in sending battalions of zombies into Ukraine to commit atrocity after atrocity after atrocity. The final delusion that the NATO capitals have yet to fully expunge from their parliamentary debates is the proposition that that there is “convening” to be done, as Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly has suggested.

Anyway, last thing for now: Marsha Lederman’s lovely tribute to my ma, “my mother the spy,” in the Globe and Mail yesterday.

Here’s herself, from back in her Nazi-hunting days.

The truth of it is I feel no great grief on ma’s passing, just a sense of profound gratitude to have been blessed with the good fortune of having been one of her sons. She was 101, the matriarch of a far-flung tribe, content and plucky, and ready to go. But I must say I did choke back a little bit of a weep at this bit in Marsha’s story, from one of ma’s “Jewish children,” Aviva:

On the last night of her life, Ms. Feuerstein was with her, and her siblings joined from all over the world online to sing songs for Ms. Glavin once again. In her last moments, Ms. Feuerstein crawled into bed with her and sang two favourites: Edelweiss and Josh Groban’s You Raise Me Up. “It was the greatest honor for my family to be able to sing her to sleep at the end of her life, just as she had always sung us to sleep at the beginning of ours,” Ms. Feuerstein says.

That’s lovely. Back at this tomorrow.