The reclining armchairs and plush leather sofas coming off the production line at Man Wah Furniture’s factory in Monterrey are 100% “Made in Mexico”.
They’re destined for large retailers in the US, like Costco and Walmart. But the company is from China, its Mexican manufacturing plant built with Chinese capital.
The triangular relationship between the US, China and Mexico is behind the buzzword in Mexican business: nearshoring.
MARKHAM, Ont.—The Toronto-area private school whose name came up prominently during the foreign interference inquiry for busing international students to the Liberal nomination vote of MP Han Dong in 2019 was invited to celebrate the Chinese New Year with the prime minister two years later.
The invitation was issued even as the prime minister and Liberal party organizers had been made aware of “irregularities” at the nomination vote by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) in 2019. The cited issues included international students being told to support Mr. Dong under “veiled threats” by the Chinese consulate.
After learning that samples of deadly Ebola and Nipah viruses had been sent from Canada’s top-security lab in Winnipeg to China, Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc said his reaction was similar to that of an MP who expressed incredulity upon learning of the move.
“I’m really concerned about the March 2019 incident where [Winnipeg lab scientists Xiangguo Qiu and Keding Cheng] were implicated in a shipment of live Ebola in Hanipah [Nipah] viruses on a commercial Air Canada flight. How the hell did that happen?” NDP MP Charlie Angus asked during a House of Commons Canada-China committee meeting on April 15.
The foreign interference inquiry concluded its core public hearings phase on April 12 and a clearer picture has emerged of the threat Canada faces and what the government is doing about it.
The Liberal government had initially resisted holding the inquiry but eventually folded amid political pressure following a steady stream of intelligence leaks in the media about interference from the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
“I literally worked on a project that gave U.S. data to China,” former TikTok senior data scientist Evan Turner revealed on Monday in a Fortune report. According to Turner, his efforts went far beyond what social media apps usually do, which is to upload every scrap of data they can get hold of to the parent company’s servers.
There is much to take away from all the recent analysis and counter-analysis of foreign interference in Canada’s elections — and none of it is good.
In summary, our government minimized the threat to our electoral process, admitting that while there “may” have been “some minor” efforts to sway voter intention, when all was said and done the results were not affected. (I am waiting for someone to explain how this conclusion was drawn: does the government know the reasons individual Canadians voted and the reasons for their choice of party/candidate?)
If it benefits the LPC then Justin approves.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s national security adviser sent him a briefing in 2017, warning about unwarranted investigations by Chinese police in Canada, according to a declassified document.
The warning came at a time when Ottawa was pursuing closer relations with the communist regime, including a potential free trade agreement. A year earlier, as part of preliminary talks toward a free trade agreement, Canada had also agreed to negotiate a possible extradition treaty with Beijing.
Earlier this week in Ottawa, I sat in the beautiful Bambrick Room of the Library and Archives Canada building and witnessed the Prime Minister of Canada along with his key ministers give sworn evidence to the Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference in Federal Electoral Processes and Democratic Institutions (PIFI).
When Russian President Vladimir Putin was reelected in 2018, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau rushed to the nearest microphone to express his worry that foreign actors might disrupt his nation’s future elections.
“We have been very much focused over the past years on strengthening our democratic institutions,” Trudeau said. “We need to make sure that they are kept up to date in holding off foreign meddling and interference.”
If one thing from the public inquiry into foreign interference is clear, it’s that China attempted to meddle in the 2019 and 2021 elections.
But the evidence is hazy on whether or not it succeeded. Here’s what we learned over the past 10 days of fact-finding hearings, which ended Friday and included testimony from politicians, bureaucrats and representatives from several intelligence and security agencies …
British authorities have accused China of attempting to flood the country with fake postage stamps, a form of industrial sabotage and “economic warfare” often associated with the days of the Second World War.
OTTAWA – CSIS director David Vigneault told an inquiry Friday that he’s been warning the Liberal government for years that Canada has been slow to respond to foreign interference and is ill-equipped to combat it.
He also confirmed that had not verbally discussed the contents of three important briefing documents directly with the prime minister and his senior staff, although he had shared similar information with them on previous occassions.
I get the feeling that Trudeau and Vigneault are scamming us.
The head of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service appeared before the foreign interference inquiry Friday to defend his agency’s work, after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau suggested he sometimes doubts the reliability of CSIS reports.
‘”There’s been a lot of comments made about the intelligence in the media and in commission,” CSIS Director David Vigneault told the inquiry Friday morning.
“Intelligence is a little like a puzzle. Sometimes we have a very clear picture of the puzzle. Sometimes, through the use of raw intelligence and assessed intelligence, we are building that picture, but what is important to remember is that this is done by professional, trained intelligence analysts and professionals that are bringing this together.
There are two peculiar and paradoxical things about the disturbing revelations that have emerged over the past few days from Justice Marie-Josée Hogue’s public inquiry into foreign interference in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections.
The first is that the most disturbing evidence entered into the record isn’t even really news. Pretty well all the bombshell revelations coming out of Justice Hogue’s commission hearings have been the subject of headline stories, one after the other, over the past five years.
The plausible explanation is that the prime minister does not want a light shone on his party’s mutually beneficial association with China
The crux of the foreign interference inquiry is to discover whether Justin Trudeau danced with the devil in the pale moonlight.
In other words, did the prime minister put partisan interest ahead of the national interest by turning a blind eye — or worse, encouraging — China’s meddling in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections to benefit the Liberal party’s electoral fortunes.
