China is moving to consolidate and exploit its position as world leader in solar power technologies, by restricting the export of key components. The move could deliver a severe blow to the European and American solar industries and is a stark warning about the dangers of over-dependence on Beijing for critical technologies of the future. It also illustrates the impact of China’s industrial-scale cyber theft.
I’ll never forget July 18, 1983.
It was my first day on the job at the Communications Security Establishment, Canada’s signals intelligence (SIGINT) agency. I was all of 22 years old, days out of an MA from Western University and ready to start my first full-time job as a translator at the Department of National Defence (at least that is what I had been told). Now I was getting my indoctrination into what I was really being asked to do: Read sensitive intercepted signals and extract intelligence to be forwarded to senior government officials to help keep Canada safe.
"Justin Trudeau knew about this interference and he covered it up because he benefitted from it,” Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre tells reporters in Calgary when asked about a recent news report on alleged Chinese interference in the 2021 Canadian federal election.#cdnpoli pic.twitter.com/QLpjk5kErh
— CPAC (@CPAC_TV) February 17, 2023
Former Steveston Richmond-East MP Kenny Chiu wasn’t surprised by new reports that the 2021 election campaign that unseated him was subject to covert interference from the China’s former consul in Vancouver.
He remains concerned, however, that Canada’s lack of response to increasing evidence that Beijing seeks to influence its diaspora communities with social-media disinformation campaigns sends the message to authoritarian regimes, such as China, “that we are weak, that we will take no action to protect ourselves,” Chiu said Friday.
What level of interference in Canada’s elections would China have to commit before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government tells us about it?
According to reporting by Robert Fife and Steven Chase on Friday, CSIS documents seen by the Globe and Mail outline a highly organized campaign of interference in Canada’s 2021 election, where Beijing’s dictators had two goals — a Liberal minority government and defeating Conservative candidates viewed as anti-China.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre praised the “courageous whistleblowers” in Canada’s security apparatus for leaking top-secret documents on China’s interference in the 2021 federal election, as he levelled criticism at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for “covering up the interference of the authoritarian regime in Beijing.”
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre accused Justin Trudeau on Friday of ignoring Chinese interference in the most recent federal election because Beijing’s efforts were aimed at helping the Liberals — but Trudeau said his government is taking the threat seriously.
The Globe and Mail reported Friday that secret and top-secret documents from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) said Beijing sought to ensure a Liberal minority government and the defeat of several Conservative candidates in the 2021 federal election. A former Chinese consul-general in Vancouver bragged about her efforts in helping to defeat two Conservative MPs, according to the reports detailed in the Globe story.
Chinese diplomats quietly issued warnings to “friendly” influential Canadians in early 2022, advising them to reduce their contact with federal politicians to avoid being caught up in foreign-interference investigations by Canada’s spy agency.
Secret and top-secret Canadian Security Intelligence Service documents viewed by The Globe and Mail reveal how China sought to protect its network of “Canadian friends” – a community it relies on to build relations, influence and covertly gather information from MPs and senators.
Canadians cannot trust the Liberal Party. They are loyal only to power & corruption.
This explains a lot today. pic.twitter.com/Wf5PMdvvsv
— Pierre Poilievre (@PierrePoilievre) February 17, 2023
OTTAWA – Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Canadian voters alone decided the last federal election as he played down a report Friday that China tried to unduly sway the outcome.
The Toronto-based Globe and Mail newspaper, citing classified Canadian Security Intelligence Service records, said China worked to help ensure a Liberal minority victory in the 2021 general election as well as defeat Conservative politicians considered unfriendly to Beijing.
On January 28, the Subaru-Asahi Star Camera, which livestreams images from the Subaru Telescope on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea, caught images of a shower of green laser beams lasting just seconds.
The beams were not, as originally thought, from a NASA satellite. They could have come from only one source: China’s Daqi-1/AEMS satellite.
Why was China lasering a dormant volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii?
China employed a sophisticated strategy to disrupt Canada’s democracy in the 2021 federal election campaign as Chinese diplomats and their proxies backed the re-election of Justin Trudeau’s Liberals – but only to another minority government – and worked to defeat Conservative politicians considered to be unfriendly to Beijing.
The full extent of the Chinese interference operation is laid bare in both secret and top-secret Canadian Security Intelligence Service documents viewed by The Globe and Mail that cover the period before and after the September, 2021, election that returned the Liberals to office.
No wonder Junior has been lying about about being briefed on CCP skullduggery, he was likely in on the plot. The LPC is a criminal organization that has reduced Canada to Banana Republic status.
h/t DM
The threat to our nation’s defense from Chinese spy balloons may be the least of it.
In the 19th Century, the British military confronted and defeated Chinese forces, allowing British drug dealers to reap fortunes selling addictive opium to the Chinese population. So powerful was the poppy that Chinese society, for all intents and purposes, collapsed. The destructive force of opium would ensure that the Chinese would suffer centuries of occupation, civil war, economic collapse, and the loss of empire.
The Chinese have never forgotten their humiliation by Western forces. Nor have they forgotten the role of illicit drugs in destroying a once mighty kingdom.
The federal government has banned all research funding with Chinese military and state security institutions and urged the provinces and universities to adopt similar guidelines.
Innovation Minister François-Phillipe Champagne announced late Tuesday the government has instructed the Canada Foundation for Innovation and Canada’s federal research granting councils, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, as well as the Canadian Institutes of Health Research to screen funding requests from China and other hostile states.
The large Chinese surveillance device that flew across Alaska and the continental United States may have been diverted on an errant path caused by unusual weather conditions
By the time a Chinese spy balloon crossed into American airspace late last month, U.S. military and intelligence agencies had been tracking it for nearly a week, watching as it lifted off from its home base near China’s south coast, an earlier sighting of the balloon than has been previously known.
As for the rest of them… OOPS!
White House Says Mystery Objects Likely Private Craft Not Tied to Spying
“The intelligence community’s considering as a leading explanation that these could just be balloons tied to some commercial or benign purpose,” John Kirby, a spokesperson for the White House’s National Security Council, told multiple news outlets on Tuesday. Kirby further asserted that unidentified objects that were downed in Alaska, the Yukon, and over Lake Huron were not tied to spying efforts, unlike the high-altitude balloon that was shot down earlier this month over the Atlantic Ocean.
What if the Balloon people came in peace? With a cure for cancer?
The sensors from the first suspected Chinese spy balloon shot down over the US have been recovered from the Atlantic Ocean, the US military says.
Search crews found “significant debris from the site, including all of the priority sensor and electronics pieces identified”, said US Northern Command.
The FBI is examining the items, which the US says were used to spy on sensitive military sites.
An online post by a local police bureau in China lists a shopping mall location in Richmond, B.C., as one of the bureau’s affiliated Chinese overseas police service centres. The phone number of the centre matches the contact number of the B.C.-based Canadian Association of Nantong Merchants Abroad.
The post by the Nantong Public Security Bureau, which is being first reported in English by The Epoch Times, was published in July 2020. Nantong is a city in China’s eastern coastal province of Jiangsu.
