VANCOUVER — A Canadian court ruling ends in an anti-SLAPP win for a journalist who reported on a China-connected wealth and spiritual group that first raised alarms with videos of military-style training on Vancouver Island, and has since drawn headlines from India to France, where Le Monde also reported on the murder of one of the group’s employees in Vancouver and its efforts to embed itself in French society.
American and Israeli strikes have severely degraded Iran’s ability to wage war.
Perhaps more important, they are finishing off Xi Jinping’s most cherished narrative of the “China Dream” of national rejuvenation and dominance. In Beijing these days, just about everyone knows China’s arrogant leader was wrong about the long-term direction of the United States.
The 21st century is more likely to belong to Beijing than to Washington — at least that’s the view from four key U.S. allies.
Swaths of the public in Canada, Germany, France and the U.K. have soured on the U.S., driven by President Donald Trump’s foreign policy decisions, according to recent results from The POLITICO Poll.
In the rugged interior of Newfoundland, an hour’s drive west from the Canadian Forces Base in Gander, sits a dormant mine with profound implications for the nation’s security and prosperity. Beaver Brook could be the largest North American producer of antimony — a critical mineral threaded through the entire spectrum of modern military hardware, from small arms and artillery shells to advanced missile seekers and night-vision goggles.
We are barely into March 2026, yet President Donald Trump’s bold foreign policy has already delivered a series of body blows to Xi Jinping’s grand vision for China’s global dominance.
Since assuming power in 2012, Xi has promoted the “China Dream” — a nationalist narrative of national rejuvenation that envisions China supplanting the United States as the world’s preeminent superpower. Central to this is his conviction that the “East is rising and the West is declining,” a belief that has shaped over a decade of CCP propaganda, military buildup, and assertive diplomacy. Xi discarded Deng Xiaoping’s prudent “hide your strength, bide your time” approach in favor of an assertive foreign policy posture, such as militarizing the South China Sea, coercing neighbors like the Philippines and Vietnam, and expanding arms exports to build influence in the Global South.
There is a comforting idea making the rounds in Canada: stay neutral, keep everyone calm, and we will be fine. We can distance ourselves from the United States (US) without losing the benefits of the alliance and let markets and multilateral forums do the heavy lifting.
It sounds smart. It is also risky.
China scholar and former Canadian diplomat Charles Burton says Beijing expects that its strategic partnership with Ottawa means Canada will refrain from disrupting its espionage and foreign interference operations.
The partnership suggests Canada “won’t disrupt China’s operations in Canada, and espionage and influence operations, so that they can continue to expand their influence in Canada for the future when, from their point of view, China becomes the dominant power on the planet,” Burton said.
Carney will do whatever Xi says.
U.S. investigators believe hackers affiliated with the Chinese government are responsible for a cyber intrusion on an internal Federal Bureau of Investigation computer network that holds information related to some domestic surveillance orders, according to people familiar with the matter.
The scope and severity of the intrusion are not known, and the investigation is in its early stages, the people said. Any preliminary conclusions could change as investigators gather more information.
If China is confirmed to be responsible for the breach, it would signal the latest intrusion by Beijing’s hackers of computer systems related to law-enforcement surveillance orders, which contain highly sensitive material.
When Prime Minister Mark Carney stood in Beijing last month to announce a new “Strategic Partnership,” he spoke of stability and pragmatism. But for those of us watching the fine print, one document stands out as a glaring threat to Canadian sovereignty: the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on cooperation between the RCMP and China’s Ministry of Public Security (MPS).
A former Labour adviser who is married to a Labour MP is among three men who have been arrested on suspicion of spying for China.
David Taylor, the husband of the Labour MP Joani Reid, was arrested by detectives from counter-terrorism police in London on suspicion of assisting a foreign intelligence service, and as part of a wider investigation into national security offences related to China.
The question of whether America is fighting Israel’s war is perhaps the least interesting one. Strip away the noise, and a more consequential picture emerges. The United States has used overwhelming force to dismantle what had quietly become the most significant Chinese forward position outside East Asia.
Over the past half-decade, Tehran transformed itself from a regional irritant into a structural component of Chinese strategic architecture. Roughly 90 per cent of Iran’s crude exports flowed to Chinese refineries operating beyond the reach of American sanctions enforcement. That revenue funded approximately a quarter of the Iranian state budget, including the military forces that Washington now considers a direct threat. China, for its part, was not being philanthropic. Cheap Iranian crude helped Beijing accumulate a strategic petroleum reserve reportedly exceeding a billion barrels – enough to sustain the Chinese economy for roughly a hundred days in the event of a Pacific naval blockade. Iran was a hedge against American sea power, and a lucrative one at that.
It took only a minute to change the world.
Within the first 60 seconds of Operation Epic Fury, Israeli officials claimed, Iran’s supreme leader and his principal henchmen were dead.
But the precision-guided missiles that struck central Tehran in the opening salvo of the war did not merely kill Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and upend half a century of Iranian history. They also underscored a more basic reality – where true power still lies in the world.
Ottawa’s agreements and “strategic partnership” with Beijing may not benefit Canada and could instead put pressure on Ottawa not to “displease” Beijing, China watchers told MPs.
China scholar and former diplomat Charles Burton, who is also a senior fellow at global China-focused think tank Sinopsis, testified before the House of Commons Standing Committee on International Trade on Feb. 26. The committee is studying recent developments in Canada’s trade relations with China and Qatar.
China’s premier gifted Carney an ‘action camera.’ Security experts suggest: ‘dump it’
OTTAWA — China’s second most powerful politician gifted Prime Minister Mark Carney a high-end “action camera” with a selfie stick during his visit last month. Security experts recommend Carney dump it immediately.
Carney didn’t just leave Beijing in January with the promise of lower tariffs on Canadian canola and a commitment to lower Canadian border levies on some Chinese electric vehicles.
TORONTO — A Chinese-language website named in federal documents at Canada’s Foreign Interference Commission — in connection with a disinformation campaign that targeted Conservative MP Kenny Chiu in the days before the 2021 federal election — has published an anonymous op-ed circulating speculation that Prime Minister Mark Carney is preparing to appoint floor-crossing MP Michael Ma as Canada’s next ambassador to China.
