OTTAWA — The Conservatives are rejecting a proposed deal over access to documents related to the firing of two scientists from Canada’s National Microbiology lab, arguing the Liberals’ efforts are too little too late.
Liberal House Leader Mark Holland offered the compromise last week. It called for striking an all-party committee to review the confidential documents, with a panel of judges enlisted to settle any disputes over whether the documents should be made public or kept secret.
Canada will not send any official representatives to the Beijing Winter Olympics in February as part of a growing diplomatic boycott by allies over China’s record of human rights abuses.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made the announcement on Wednesday after facing several days of questions over whether Canada would stand with allies that have already announced similar plans.
The China Class wants the public fooled into believing Canada has taken a hard line against their paymasters.
” … Both Democrats and Republicans are raising alarms about McKinsey’s lucrative and highly sensitive contracts with the Pentagon during the Barton years while the company simultaneously provided blue-chip services to shadowy Chinese state corporations, including the blacklisted China Communications Construction Company (CCCC), which has been building heavily-militarized artificial islands in the South China Sea. It was only a few months before Barton’s appointment that Ottawa blocked the CCCC from acquiring Aecon, one of Canada’s biggest construction companies, on national security grounds.
As Canada’s spy agency warns that China’s efforts to distort the news and influence media outlets in Canada “have become normalized,” critics are renewing calls for Ottawa to take a far tougher approach to foreign media interference.
The warning is contained in briefing documents drafted for Canadian Security Intelligence Service Director David Vigneault in preparation for a meeting he had with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau earlier this year.
That meeting focused on the rise of foreign interference in Canada — something CSIS says has become “more sophisticated, frequent, and insidious.”
I bet Justin got mad at CSIS and called them racist.
Skates scratch the ice and a coach’s cry echoes through the arena north of Toronto: “Go! Move, move, move!”
Four teens barrel down the rink, breathlessly chasing a puck.
The scene may be typically Canadian, but the players are all visitors — young Chinese here to master hockey.
It’s been more than two months since the September 20 federal election and the verdict is in. Not the verdict that put Justin Trudeau’s Liberals back in power with fewer votes than Erin O’Toole’s Conservatives, but the expert consensus that a disinformation operation hatched in Beijing was in operation during the campaign, and its target was primarily Chinese-Canadians.
Both Bell and Telus have approached the federal government over the possibility of being compensated by taxpayers, should they have to remove Huawei equipment from their networks, sources have told National Post. The two telecom companies could find themselves forced to replace the equipment if the Liberals end up banning the Chinese telecom equipment-maker from Canada’s 5G networks.
Former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, who banned China’s Huawei Technologies from providing equipment for his country’s 5G wireless networks, says Canadians should ask themselves a question as they ponder whether to do the same: are they comfortable with leaving a vital piece of infrastructure vulnerable to the Chinese government?
A decision on whether to formally ban Shenzhen-based Huawei from Canada’s 5G networks – and presumably from successor networks still in development, such as 6G – is expected soon from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government.
TORONTO — Canada will continue to discuss with its partners a potential diplomatic boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympic Games in Beijing, a foreign affairs spokesperson says, amid the recent disappearance of Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai.
“Canada remains deeply disturbed by the troubling reports of human rights violations in China,” said Syrine Khoury, press secretary to Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly, in a statement to CTVNews.ca.
OTTAWA — As the Liberal government prepares to unfurl its policy on next-generation mobile networks, global security experts say all signs point to the exclusion of Chinese vendor Huawei Technologies from the long-awaited blueprint.
The development of 5G, or fifth-generation, networks will give people speedier online connections and provide vast data capacity to meet ravenous demand as more and more things link to the internet and innovations such as virtual reality, immersive gaming and autonomous vehicles emerge.
The opposition Conservatives have long pressed the Liberals to deny Huawei a role in building the country’s 5G infrastructure, saying it would allow Beijing to spy on Canadians more easily.
Retail giant Reitmans brought more than 100 shipments of clothing into Canada from a Chinese factory suspected of secretly using North Korean forced labour, a months-long CBC Marketplace investigation has found.
And they’re not alone.
YM Inc., which owns well-known brands such as Sirens, Stitches, Bluenotes and UrbanKids, also did business with the same factory, Dandong Huayang Textiles and Garment Co. Ltd., up until 2019. Although a smaller volume, the company imported clothing at least 21 times, according to U.S. shipping records.
Opposition parties plan to resume their parliamentary battle for the disclosure of documents on the firing of two scientists from Canada’s highest-security laboratory, a dispute that has pitted the Trudeau government against the House of Commons.
In June, the federal government took House of Commons Speaker Anthony Rota to court in an unprecedented move to prevent the release of documents to MPs that could offer insight into why Ottawa expelled and then fired Xiangguo Qiu and her husband, Keding Cheng, from Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg.
Canadian consumers who purchase popular tomato pastes, sauces and ketchups may actually be buying products harvested and manufactured by Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities under oppressive working conditions in China, according to a CBC Marketplace investigation.
Marketplace, in collaboration with the Investigative Reporting Project Italy — a non-profit media association — and The Guardian, found some of the world’s biggest grocers, including ones here in Canada, are stocked with tomato products that could be tied to forced labour in Xinjiang, a remote area of western China where Uyghurs are subjected to mass detention, surveillance and torture by the Chinese government, in what many countries have labelled a genocide.
Disinformation, extremism threatening democracies, global economies: Trudeau
… “We cannot pretend that China isn’t there, just cross our arms and ignore it,” he said. “It is too important a player in our economies right now.”
Trudeau added that countries like Canada and the Netherlands have to engage China constructively on trade, on climate change, while challenging it on human rights, the situation in Hong Kong, the Uyghurs, Taiwan and the South China Sea.
Don’t worry slaves, Justin is thinking of you.
As the back-story for a self-made business tycoon, Hollywood screenwriters couldn’t have done much better than Allan Zeman’s actual life.
Growing up poor in Montreal, Zeman lost his father when he was just seven years old and joined the working world only three years later. By 12 — he often claims with his trademark toothy grin — he was making more money from his paper route and cleaning job at a steak house than his school teachers took home.
