WASHINGTON, D.C. — Canada is grappling with debates over national identity and security as well as international trade. Ottawa is navigating U.S. tariffs and Donald Trump’s threats of higher trade duties ahead of this July’s review of the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement, while also managing populist and separatist movements, hate crimes, and broader pressures on national cohesion.
In recent years, Americans have become increasingly conscious of the extent to which foreign governments cultivate influence inside the United States. Public debate has focused heavily on Qatar’s funding of elite universities and even the burgeoning influence of the South Korean lobby. China, despite being recognized as America’s primary geopolitical rival, has often been discussed in narrower terms: trade wars, Taiwan, semiconductors, military expansion, and industrial espionage. Far less attention has been paid to the depth of China’s institutional presence inside the United States and other Western democracies. China’s approach differs because the Chinese Communist Party does not view economics, agriculture, education, media, culture, and politics as separate spheres. Each is treated as part of national power.
Since February, there have been two significant reports documenting the extent to which Chinese Community Party (CCP) agents have infiltrated Canadian institutions and community organizations in an effort to woo or strong-arm Chinese Canadians into helping spread Chinese government policies and goals.
The most disturbing aspect of both reports is the willingness of Canada’s Liberal government to turn a blind eye to this level of infiltration and the effects it has on Canadian elections and democratic institutions.
Has the federal government learned nothing from Canada’s foreign interference inquiry?
More than five years after the previous Justin Trudeau regime first claimed to be “actively considering” a foreign lobbyists’ registry (officially the Foreign Influence Transparency Registry) in February 2021, Canada still doesn’t have one.
OTTAWA — A senior New Democratic Party parliamentarian has formally demanded that the Carney government release the full text of its secret law enforcement agreement with China’s Ministry of Public Security, echoing a set of facts The Bureau has been reporting for months, while warning that Ottawa’s continued refusal to disclose the deal is fueling legitimate fear among diaspora communities who have experienced or fear transnational repression by the Chinese state.
Chemicals used to make fentanyl are streaming into the Port of Vancouver on their way to drug labs run by Mexican cartels on Canadian soil, the head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration told senators in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday.
DEA administrator Terrance Cole said U.S. law enforcement officials are “very conscious” of fentanyl being manufactured in Canada for export across the border and there have been “significant seizures” of the drug in Canada over the past two months.
OTTAWA — When the Chinese consulate in Houston was ordered closed in July 2020, it did not go quietly. Within an hour of being told they had 72 hours to vacate, the staff set the building on fire.
What followed was, in the account of the man who ordered it done, a revelation. “Within two days,” former CIA Director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told the Canada Strong and Free conference in Ottawa, “we had identified hundreds of Chinese agents operating in the United States, most of which we were unaware of. They started getting tickets to fly out. You could just see the network light up.”
OTTAWA – Security experts and human rights advocates are sounding the alarm about the renewal of a co-operation agreement between the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and China’s Ministry of Public Security as troubling details surface at a foreign interference trial.
Court documents filed at the trial of alleged double agent William Majcher reveals that at least 25 Canadian residents were targeted by Chinese police under an anti-corruption program, which doubled as a tool of transnational repression. The affidavit shows that the Chinese nationals may have been forced to return to their homeland against their will to face punishment for alleged financial crimes.
Some of them would have faced life imprisonment, or even a death sentence.
h/t Patti Jo
As Canada prepares to accept more Chinese-made electric vehicles into the country, a U.S. senator is warning that although Canada-U.S. ties are strained, Canadian officials should be cautious when making agreements with China’s government.
“I understand that Canada is looking elsewhere and trying to diversify,” Michigan Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin said in an interview on Rosemary Barton Live that aired Sunday morning.
“I think the point that I would make and did make to Canadian leaders is, just because we have become more difficult doesn’t mean the Chinese are always the straightest shooters when it comes to national security,” Slotkin told host Rosemary Barton.
NEW YORK — A six-story glass-clad building in Manhattan’s Chinatown — wedged between a hotel, a spicy Fuzhou noodle shop and a business billed as a high-end private spa — became this week the unlikely center of one of the most revealing federal trials yet of how Beijing’s security apparatus has allegedly embedded itself inside American society.
WASHINGTON — For nearly four decades, I have advocated for justice and human rights for the Uyghur people in the face of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) oppression. Its record of gross human rights violations is well documented, despite an extensive propaganda apparatus designed to obscure it. China’s use of economic leverage to expand its political influence is also widely recognized, with overt examples across the globe. What is often less visible is the breadth and depth of what the CCP is willing to do, and the lengths it will go, to sustain control and project power.
VANCOUVER — Kennedy Stewart, the former mayor of Vancouver, said in a broadcast interview Monday that British Columbia Premier David Eby is aware of an active RCMP investigation into a sitting cabinet minister suspected of collaborating with the Chinese government — and that senior NDP officials have been alerted to the matter with no apparent action taken.
Chinese consular officials met with a Vancouver city hall employee last month and urged her to cancel an arts event that highlighted communist party repression, sources told Global News.
At the meeting, representatives of China’s consulate told a staff member of the city’s civic theatres branch that they wanted a series of performances by the Shen Yun dance group to be stopped, the sources said.
Canada’s auto sector is raising alarm bells over Ottawa’s decision to open the door to Chinese electric vehicles, warning the move could undercut domestic manufacturing and cost jobs.
Blacklock’s Reporter says executives from General Motors Canada told MPs that new federal concessions allowing thousands of low-tariff Chinese electric vehicles into the country risk weakening Canada’s industrial base and “hollowing out” its skilled workforce.
We were likely to lost auto manufacturing anyway, this will accelerate it.
They certainly didn’t waste any time …
Chinese EVs were spotted in Toronto, here’s what you need to know ahead of their Canadian release
h/t Mauser (Incognito)
It’s alarming that Prime Minister Mark Carney, citing China as a “strategic partner,” has agreed to a secret deal on co-operating with Chinese police, given the highly controversial nature of these agreements in the past.
Since the details can’t be disclosed without China’s permission, all we know about it is the brief description the Prime Minister’s Office released when Carney announced his EV-canola deal with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing in January.
