An unredacted 2020 national security document alleges that Beijing used an extensive network of community groups to conceal the flow of funds between Chinese officials and Canadian members of an election interference network, all in an effort to advance its own political agenda in the 2019 federal contest.
I’m getting awfully sick of all the diversity Justin has unleashed upon us.
Nothing better illustrates the utter ineptitude of the Biden administration’s dealings with the Middle East than Saudi Arabia’s decision to forge a strategic alliance with China.
This is a time when Washington should be working overtime to strengthen its ties with long-standing allies like the Saudis to combat the mounting threat Iran poses to the region’s security.
Apart from the deeply alarming progress the ayatollahs are said to be making with their efforts to produce nuclear weapons.
For the past five and a half years, the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) has been using communications equipment and technology from the controversial Chinese firm Hytera Communications — a company the United States government has blacklisted as a national security threat.
In response to CBC’s questions about CBSA’s use of Hytera equipment and technology, Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino said he’s asked all departments across his portfolio to review any procurement contracts linked to Hytera or its subsidiaries in the wake of a controversy over a similar RCMP contract with one of Hytera’s subsidiaries.
“I have instructed my department to do a portfolio-wide scan and review of any other potential similar contracts which may have been awarded, so that we can take whatever steps are necessary to mitigate any against any risks that may exist,” Mendicino said Monday.
Has anyone looked into the possibility of connections between these suppliers and the Liberal Party? That should include individual and corporate donations.
While becoming more autocratic at home during Xi Jinping’s rule, Beijing has become much more willing, over the past decade, to throw its weight around inside other states. It is increasingly trying, for the first time since Mao’s days, to intervene in the domestic politics, media, information environments, and societies of other countries. Beijing’s campaigns today reflect a departure from the more limited and defensive Chinese foreign policy of the late Cold War and early post–Cold War eras. China in many ways has supplanted Russia as the authoritarian foreign power most dedicated to meddling inside other countries.
Many of the thousands of demonstrators who lined Lions Gate Bridge last month to oppose Iran’s brutal regime expressed anxiety in the presence of photographers and videographers.
Some Iranian Canadians in Vancouver’s Human Life Chain, who were joining worldwide protests against the death of teenager Mahsa Amini after she was detained by Iran’s morality police, pointed fingers at strangers recording their public defiance.
Government documents released earlier this week confirm that the Privy Council Office, the nerve centre of the federal bureaucracy which supports Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, had signs of Beijing’s alleged attempts to interfere with the 2019 general election.
Emergency Preparedness Minister Bill Blair acknowledged having seen the 2020 memo while he was public safety minister to reporters on Friday, adding that its determinations “certainly” played a role in shaping increased government focus on electoral interference.
Japan has approved its biggest military buildup since the second world war, warning that China poses the “greatest strategic challenge ever” and outlining plans to develop a counterstrike capability funded by record defence spending.
The plans, announced by the government on Friday, reflect growing alarm over a more assertive Chinese military and a North Korean regime that continues to improve its nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities.
But the changes have also triggered criticism that Japan is abandoning more than seven decades of pacifism under its postwar constitution.
Senator @YuenPauWoo claims anti-China witch hunt, demands feds counter “irresponsible speculation” by #cdnmedia over Communist interference in elections. https://t.co/nVTDcQ4uXS #cdnpoli @ScooperCooper pic.twitter.com/mH8D28FrwY
— Blacklock’s Reporter (@mindingottawa) December 16, 2022
h/t OntarioJohn
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau responded today to questions about a 2020 briefing document from the Privy Council Office (PCO) that mentioned an “active foreign interference network,” which was linked to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during Canada’s 2019 federal election.
Trudeau told reporters in Ottawa that the federal government has been aware of foreign interference attempts in Canadian society “for a long time.”
“Foreign interference is a real thing, against our institutions, against communities, against Canadians,” he said on Dec. 14.
He would know, his handlers placed them there.
Xi Jinping’s Covid restrictions have stunted his country’s progress
With the benefit of hindsight, we can be certain that futurologists are often wrong. Contrary to the expectations of earlier decades, no one is living on Mars, nor do many of us commute to work in a flying car.
The issue of foreign interference in elections was examined in a Commons committee on Dec. 13, with Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs Dominic Leblanc addressing China’s role in Canadian society at large.
“The Chinese government regularly attempts to interfere in various aspects of Canadian society, elections would not be excluded from some of their efforts to interfere,” Leblanc told the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs.
The threats to American power are both subtle and extraordinary.
Tensions between Beijing and Washington have been steadily increasing for years. Some of the competition has been plain to see: New Chinese aircraft carriers, fifth-generation fighter planes and airstrips in the South China Sea that are facing off against U.S. megabases in places like Guam and deepening military partnerships with Australia and Taiwan.
But other aspects of China’s quest for power are much more subtle. Beijing is also playing a quieter game, using non-military means to propel its push for influence and dominance across the Indo-Pacific and beyond.
The fighting began early on a bright autumn morning 60 years ago.
On 23 October 1962 Chinese solders entered and engaged in intense artillery fire in what was then a far-flung Himalayan region in north-eastern India called North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA), bordering China and Bhutan.
Today it is Arunachal Pradesh, an Indian state with more than a million people that China continues to claim as its territory, and where the latest flare-up between the two sides in more than a year took place.
“Explosions lit up the sky and echoed between the mountains,” Indian army personnel told Bertil Lintner, a Swedish journalist and author of the China’s India War: Collision Course on the Roof of the World.
A friendship society in Richmond, B.C., has become a focus in an RCMP investigation into allegations of secret Chinese “police” stations operating in Canada.
Officers visited the Canada Wenzhou Friendship Society on Saturday and conducted interviews with people who live nearby in the suburb south of Vancouver.
CBC spoke with neighbours who confirmed RCMP officers spoke with them, asking if they’d seen anything suspicious, and a marked cruiser was still parked outside the building on Tuesday.
Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly testified during a Monday afternoon committee meeting that she has no idea about the names of the 11 Liberal MPs allegedly targeted by an election interference attempt by the Chinese government during the 2019 election.
