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.
BROSSARD—Beijing made an unsolicited donation of Chinese language books to a municipal library in Quebec, which included a piece praising the accomplishments of the Communist Party.
The Chinese consulate in Montreal donated 300 books to a city on the south shore of Montreal in 2017, and attempted another donation in 2019, as first reported by the Journal de Montréal.
Emergency Preparedness Minister Bill Blair says staff in his office and department aren’t to blame for not informing him of Beijing threats to MPs and has repeated that Canada’s spy agency is at fault.
The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) “had Top Secret information that they felt that I should see, and clearly, the process that they had in place to bring it to my attention was not complete, and did not bring it to my office’s attention and that’s now been remedied,” Mr. Blair said in a press conference in Ottawa on July 11.
OTTAWA – Ottawa’s corporate-ethics watchdog has announced investigations into a gold-mining corporation and the Canadian branch of Nike for possible forced labour in supply chains.
Sheri Meyerhoffer, who is the Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise, says the first two investigations her office has launched related to China’s Uyghur minority.
I suspect Canada’s China Class has nothing to fear.
As Olivia Chow campaigned successfully to become Toronto’s new mayor, she received some unsolicited help from controversial sources.
Two prominent community groups aligned with the Chinese government — including one that allegedly hosted a Chinese police station in Ontario — “went all out” to support Chow’s push to be mayor, supplying numerous volunteers to the effort, a letter from one of the groups claims.
This should invalidate the election.
