For China watchers, the arrest of a retired RCMP officer for allegedly helping China with its interference efforts in Canada is not surprising, given Beijing’s extensive network of spies and agents in Canada and its ambitions for global domination.
Scott McGregor, a former Canadian Armed Forces intelligence operator and intelligence adviser to the RCMP, says Canada is particularly infested with a proportionally higher number of CCP agents compared to other countries.
Canada’s intelligence service told B.C. Premier David Eby during a briefing on Chinese foreign interference in March that it could not share secret information, according to notes of the meeting obtained by Global News.
The hour-long March 28 meeting between the premier and the regional director general of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service followed a news report alleging China had meddled in Vancouver’s 2022 mayoral election.
A second former senior Mountie is allegedly caught up in an investigation into Chinese interference operations in Canada.
Kenneth Ingram Marsh, a B.C.-based private investigator and former commander of an RCMP international organized crime unit, has been named as a co-conspirator in the allegations along with former Mountie William “Bill” Majcher.
As an RCMP officer, William Majcher, 60, used fake identities to infiltrate organized crime groups to investigate money laundering. He even went undercover to help the FBI to build a case against a Colombian drug cartel, knowing that if he was outed, a bounty would be put on his head.
After leaving the national police force in 2007, Majcher moved to Hong Kong, where he helped create a firm called Evaluate Monitor Investigate Deter Recover (EMIDR) in 2016. The company’s raison d’etre was to help China and its corporations recover assets it alleged were stolen, Majcher said in previous interviews.
This month, Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post reported that the Shanghai-based Polar Research Institute of China revealed that “China has completed the field testing and evaluation of an underwater listening device that will be deployed on a large scale in the Arctic Ocean.”
The innocuous-sounding report tells us that China intends to wage war against the United States and Canada from the Arctic.
If there is one thing we as Canadians have heard an awful lot about of late it is what has been termed “foreign interference.” This refers to efforts by foreign states to identify those in our land and use them to advance their own interests, or stifle any activity deemed not in those interests. And while several nations have been highlighted as behind this kind of effort, of late the number one country by far is the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
OTTAWA – A newly released document shows intelligence officials have been tracking China’s attempts to meddle in Canadian affairs for more than one-third of a century.
The February 1986 intelligence report warned that Beijing was using open political tactics and secret operations to influence and exploit the Chinese diaspora in Canada.
It said China was using new and potentially more potent techniques to accomplish these goals.
In 2014, as Beijing was ramping up Operation Fox Hunt, a sprawling campaign to go after corrupt politicians and economic criminals hiding overseas, a representative of the Chinese government approached William Majcher.
A retired former undercover officer with the RCMP, Mr. Majcher had been living in Hong Kong for seven years, working as a corporate investigator and advising banks on money laundering. According to Mr. Majcher, he was invited to meet someone “very close to senior state security,” who asked him whether he would be able to help track down money stolen by corrupt officials.
A retired RCMP officer has been charged with foreign interference, the Mounties said in a news release Friday.
William Majcher, 60, “allegedly used his knowledge and his extensive network of contacts in Canada to obtain intelligence or services to benefit the People’s Republic of China,” the RCMP in Montreal said in the news release.
The release alleged that Majcher “contributed to the Chinese government’s efforts to identify and intimidate an individual outside the scope of Canadian law.”
The federal government was allegedly warned by a Canadian intelligence official that the Beijing-linked video-sharing app TikTok was misleading governments and the general public about its data-harvesting methods nearly half a year before Ottawa banned the app from all federal devices, according to an internal briefing note.
A document prepared for the government in September 2022 by the Privy Council Office’s (PCO) Intelligence Assessment Secretariat said that TikTok was giving “false public and governmental reassurances about data sovereignty and security.”
The plight of the “Two Michaels” might seem a distant memory for most Canadians.
Yet barely two years after China released these two high-profile hostages from prison, Canadians have reason to fear a repetition of Beijing’s strong-arm tactics — through the heavy hand of Hong Kong.
Beijing and other tyrannical regimes exploit gaps in Canadian law to advance their transnational repression in Canada, and a prominent international human rights lawyer says this is a problem that calls for comprehensive legislation to combat their foreign interference.
Winnipeg-based lawyer David Matas, senior legal counsel for B’nai Brith Canada, said repressive states like China, Russia, and Iran have been exploiting organizations such as the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol) to harass and intimidate their own nationals even after they’ve fled abroad to escape persecution back home. He said malign state actors are also abusing conventional mechanisms for international cooperation on criminal matters.
As China increases its reach in diaspora communities, Chinese Canadian politicians in Vancouver are the focus of Chinese state interference in Canadian politics.
The polls predicted a re-election victory, maybe even a landslide.
But a couple of weeks before the vote, Kenny Chiu, a member of Canada’s Parliament and a critic of China’s human rights record, was panicking. Something had flipped among the ethnic Chinese voters in his British Columbia district.
“Initially, they were supportive,” he said. “And all of a sudden, they just vanished, vaporized, disappeared.”
Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre said his party is waiting on the Liberals to move ahead on a public inquiry on foreign interference, saying the government is to blame for any delays.
Poilievre held a media availability in Vancouver Friday, and said the ball is in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s court.
Reports of possible meddling by Chinese government in Canada’s elections are pressuring Trudeau government
RICHMOND, British Columbia—A series of public revelations about alleged Chinese government meddling in Canadian politics has roiled the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, prompting calls from opposition politicians and China analysts for tighter monitoring of foreign-interference threats within Canada’s borders and a full probe of the alleged activities.
The latest concerns flared when Erin O’Toole, the former Conservative Party leader, said he was told recently by Canadian security officials that Beijing had tried to thwart his path to replace Trudeau as prime minister in the 2021 elections.
