The Chinese consulate in Manhattan has mobilized community groups to defeat candidates who don’t fall in line with the authoritarian state.
In New York City, social clubs backed by China undermined a congressional candidate who once challenged the regime on Chinese television.
They helped unseat a state senator for attending a banquet with the president of Taiwan.
And they condemned a City Council candidate on social media for supporting Hong Kong democracy.
OTTAWA — Canada is celebrated abroad as a safe, prosperous, and open society. But beneath the surface, a far more precarious reality is taking shape. The pillars of our economy — land, real estate, natural resources, and immigration — have been left vulnerable to foreign manipulation, criminal exploitation, and political negligence. The result is what can only be described as a sandcastle economy — striking at first glance, but fragile. Like the parable of the house built on sand, it is a foundation vulnerable to give way when the storm comes.
It would be tolerable – though just barely – if Gary Anandasangaree was, say, minister of Fisheries, or minister of Artificial Intelligence. One does not need to know about gun licensing, for example, to work on a transition plan away from open net-pen salmon farming on the West coast; a firewall preventing a minister from weighing in on matters involving listed terrorist organizations would not affect approvals for AI data centres. One requires good judgment to serve as any member of Cabinet, to be sure, but the stakes are decidedly higher when we’re talking about the safety and security of the country, as opposed to the safety and security of the Rocky Mountain ridged mussel.
WASHINGTON — A socialist billionaire with deep ties to Beijing’s foreign influence system and American leftist networks is behind the funding and messaging driving pro‑Hamas campaigns among American youth, a new report from George Washington University’s Program on Extremism asserts.
At the heart of this operation, the report states, is Neville Roy Singham—a U.S. tech mogul turned Shanghai-based political influencer whose transnational network is linked to Chinese state entities. Singham funnels financial and infrastructural resources through nonprofits, media outlets, and social platforms to mobilize anti-Israel activism on U.S. campuses and to target Jewish businesses and American politicians, the GWU report says.
The Gathering Storm: Where Organized Crime Meets Espionage
From my earliest days in the RCMP through years embedded with global financial intelligence units, one reality has remained consistent—and it’s now accelerating: Canada is a soft target.
In Undercover in the Shady World of Organized Crime, I chronicled how criminal empires—from Italian syndicates to Asian Triads—operated in the shadows, laundering vast fortunes through our banks, casinos, and real estate. Back then, the fight was tactical. Today, it’s existential.
NEW YORK — The upcoming trial of Linda Sun — also known as Wen Sun — may prove to be the most sophisticated and high-level political infiltration operation in the United States publicly tied to Beijing’s United Front system. A youthful, naturalized immigrant from China, Sun rose through New York State’s bureaucracy to become a senior diversity official. Now, she stands accused of secretly manipulating two Democratic governors — effectively scripting Andrew Cuomo’s praise of Chinese pandemic mask shipments, while blocking Governor Kathy Hochul from meeting Taiwanese officials and ensuring her silence on the Chinese Communist Party’s mass detention of Uyghurs.
One basic prerequisite for becoming public safety minister should be a lack of perceived conflicts of interest with terror organizations. Heck, it should be a requirement for candidacy as an MP, long before cabinet enters the conversation.
But no such requirement formally exists, which is why we have Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree, who remains in his office despite recusing himself from all files involving two Tamil terrorist groups, and who, Canadians learned Tuesday, wrote letters of support to assist a former Tamil Tiger member’s immigration efforts.
Toronto resident Daniel was not in Iran’s good books even before Israel and the United States showered the country with missiles and bombs last month.
While working as a telecommunications supplier in Iran, he says he deliberately sabotaged schemes to evade sanctions and import equipment for military use, earning the regime’s ire. A member of Iran’s tiny Jewish community, he eventually fled the Islamic Republic and ended up in Canada a decade ago.
Many of us who have been involved in the fight against foreign interference and in establishing a foreign transparency registry are frustrated by the new government’s apparent lack of concern on this issue. Foreign interference by hostile regimes was not mentioned in the Speech from the Throne read by King Charles, nor in Prime Minister Mark Carney’s mandate letter to cabinet.
Canada is dangerously unprepared to identify and counter foreign extremist threats operating just outside — or increasingly within — our borders.
As Western allies sharpen their legal tools to confront modern paramilitary networks, Canada remains behind. For example, a bipartisan bill introduced June 23 in the U.S. House of Representatives calls for the designation of the Polisario Front as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO,) citing its alleged ties to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Hezbollah, and the PKK. That debate may seem uniquely American — but the question it raises is not.
Canada’s elections commissioner says she has no evidence the result of the federal election in April was affected by foreign interference, disinformation or voter intimidation.
In a preliminary report Wednesday, Commissioner Caroline Simard says her office received more than 16,000 complaints about the spring campaign which ended on April 28.
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s decision to invite Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Canada for the G7 has generated a lot of chatter. Unfortunately, there’s a lot that has been missing in the conversation.
For starters, the Indian government’s belief that Canada is soft on extremists seeking to establish an independent Sikh state known as Khalistan isn’t exactly new. In fact, despite the fact I have now entered middle age, it’s about as old as I am. But as India-Canada relations appear to be entering a new phase under Prime Minister Carney, it’s worth considering what we are giving up by welcoming the Modi government back into our good graces.
We are a nation of Fifth Columns forever divided without hope of regaining a unifying identity.
Foreign governments are using crime groups to go after political opponents in Canada, the country’s intelligence service said in its annual report released Wednesday.
The Canadian Security Intelligence Service said it had detected “a concerning trend of states leveraging organized crime networks to conduct threat activity.”
Underworld syndicates are being tasked with conducting “transnational repression of legitimate speech in Canada, among other malign activities,” the report said.
When Parliament passed a sweeping national security bill last June, the Liberal government promised to establish a foreign influence transparency registry to convict proxies trying to meddle in Canadian politics.
But nearly a year later, it remains unclear how soon the office will be up and running
“I think it’s a huge vulnerability that needs to be addressed and needs to be fixed,” said Dennis Molinaro, a former national security analyst with the federal government who now teaches at Ontario Tech University.
Carney’s cronies won’t want that.
Canada Has Raised ‘Strong Concerns’ With Beijing for Targeting of Tory Candidate Joe Tay: Global Affairs
Ottawa says it has reached out to Chinese and Hong Kong authorities to express concerns over the targeting of Conservative candidate and Hong Kong pro-democracy advocate Joe Tay, and that it is monitoring the situation closely after Tay’s relatives were taken in for questioning last week.
