
OTTAWA — An intelligence expert said the federal government’s decision not to conduct a formal national security review on the takeover of a Canadian lithium mining company by a Chinese state-owned company was a “mistake.”
The government misjudged the takeover’s significance to Canada’s economic and national security both in the present and future, said Wesley Wark, a visiting professor at the University of Ottawa who specializes in international affairs and intelligence gathering.
“The kinds of explanations that have been offered by the government to date I find wholly unsatisfactory and very narrowly focused,” he told a House of Commons committee Wednesday.





Early in January, China’s state news agency Xinhua posted a video reminding young Chinese men born in the year 2000 that they were eligible to get married. “Post 00s have reached legal marriage age,” it declared.



An army of western social media influencers, each with hundreds of thousands of followers on TikTok, Instagram or Twitch, is set to spread positive stories about China throughout next month’s Winter Olympics.


