Chinese Military,Political and Social Superthread
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Terry Glavin from The Real Story <therealstory@substack.com>
Go ahead, Liberals. Rag the puck, drag it out.The more you do this, Beijing's "elite capture" operations in Canada will just keep coming into sharper focus.
At the news of Johnston’s appointment, all the usual press gallery yes-persons broke out in convulsions of curtseying, cap-doffing and forelock-tugging and otherwise beclowned themselves about Trudeau’s “inspired choice” for the job. It only took a couple of hours for certain awkward facts to be heard in loud whispers from the cheap seats. And those whispers soon became a dull roar, and it’s not going to go away, which pretty well proves the point I was making in my column, in print today, which was this: With all their filibustering and obstructionist “rapporteur” manoeuvres to draw attention away from the interference operations Beijing ran on their behalf during the 2019 and 2021 elections, the Trudeau Liberals might think they’re being clever. But they’re being too clever by half. The longer this drags out, the more light gets shed on the squalid and intimate relationship between the Liberals’ political base in this country’s wealthy and well-connected Mandarin-bloc hierarchy and the Ferrari-driving consiglieri of Beijing’s strong-arming and influence-peddling network in Canada. It’s the same circle of power. As Real Story subscribers will see, the nice Mr. Johnston is hopelessly entangled in that same circle. Meanwhile, Steve Chase and Bob Fife over at the Globe and Mail have some bombshell front-page revelations from CSIS today about the icy hands from that same circle has been around the throats of municipal politicians in Vancouver. And you should read it once you’re done here. Before we even touch on the innumerably sketchy and compromising entries in David Johnston’s curriculum vitae, I should straightaway admit that I come to this from a particularly jaundiced perspective. It goes back to July 13, 2017. I remember it like it was yesterday, because it was probably the only time in my life that I was genuinely ashamed to be Canadian, and Johnston was the reason why. First, you need to know something about Liu Xiaobo. It’s likely a name you’re not familiar with. His memory in China has been obliterated by the tens of thousands of official snitches and censors employed by Beijing’s vast surveillance state apparatus. In Canada it’s the height of bad manners to mention his name in polite company. So I will bloody well mention his name here.
Liu Xiaobo was China’s Nelson Mandela. A writer, philosopher and human rights activist, Liu had already spent years in and out of jails and forced-labour camps for his leadership in China’s non-violent democracy movement when he was sentenced to 11 years in prison, on charges of suspicion of subversion, on December 8, 2008. After Liu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, Beijing punished the Nobel Committee’s host country Norway by shutting down all diplomatic relations and trade exchanges. Just one of the trade shocks: Norway’s share of China’s salmon imports quickly plummeted from 92 per cent to 29 per cent. In 2017, Liu’s monthly “checkups” at the Jinzhou Prison in Liaoning strangely failed to detect the advanced stages of liver cancer he was suffering, until May 31. In the following weeks, the European Union and the U.S. State Department pleaded with Xi Jinping to allow Liu to leave China for proper treatment. Xi said no. When Liu died on July 13 that year, it was the first time a Nobel laureate had died in prison since the death of the pacifist Carl von Ossietzky in a Nazi concentration camp in 1938. Said Reporters Without Borders Secretary General Christophe Deloire: “We can clearly state that Liu Xiaobo was murdered by lack of care.” The very moment Liu Xiaobo breathed his last breath in this world, David Johnston was stuffing his face and smiling for the cameras with Xi Jinping at a banquet in Beijing. And no, I will not forget this because I can’t, because I remember it like it was yesterday. After you’ve finished here, if you like, here’s some backstory on all this I wrote for the Ottawa Citizen back in 2017, and for Maclean’s magazine, where I dug a little deeper. I will let other people cavil about how deucedly impolite it is to doubt the nice Mister Johnston’s integrity. They can bang on as they choose about how after all, Conservatives and Liberals alike have admired Johnston and appreciated his probity and rectitude. I don’t care. Leave me out of it. Can we please at least remember what is going on here? This country is in the midst on an unprecedented national-security scandal. CSIS has revealed that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been the happily compliant object of an elaborate influence operation run out of Beijing since 2013, and his family was already notoriously beguiled by China going back to papa and Mao Zedong, and it was a neurotic and messianic family obsession that never let up. The Trudeau Liberals have employed every sleazy tactic in the book to prevent the House of Commons from voting on a resolution calling for a public inquiry into China’s election-interference operations on the Liberals’ behalf in 2019 and 2021. Just one of those tactics is Trudeau’s invention of a job called “Independent Special Rapporteur” to advise him on whether or not to permit a public inquiry into what the hell has been going on here. Johnston’s job is to run interference for Justin Trudeau in this scandal. That’s all there is to it. Johnston is beholden to Trudeau, Trudeau is beholden to Johnston, and they are both deeply compromised by their relationships with Beijing’s emissaries and bagmen in Canada, and by their associations with the Montreal-centred corporate China lobby. And putting on the mask of an “independent” interlocutor is not the first time Johnston has scratched Justin Trudeau’s back, and not the first time Johnston has carried Xi Jinping’s water in Canada. It’s way worse than you think. Johnston’s most brazen intervention to help Trudeau avoid any scrutiny of his official policy of kowtowing to Xi Jinping was during the 2019 federal elections. A Munk leaders debate on foreign policy had to be cancelled because Trudeau simply refused to show up. Trudeau appointed Johnston as commissioner of the official debates, and Johnston then saw to it that foreign policy would not be discussed in the English-language leaders debate at all. There is nothing “independent” about Johnston in his capacity as Trudeau’s Special Independent Rapporteur. A key element of the scandal that has erupted surrounding the relationship between the Trudeaus and the Beijing regime is that clandestine donation to the Trudeau Foundation that’s been in the news lately. Johnston is a senior member of the Trudeau Foundation. The Johnstons and the Trudeau’s were friends and neighbours at their summer retreats in the Laurentians when Justin was a boy. Both have fondly remembered the days when Johnston’s daughters and the Trudeau boys went on ski trips in the winter months. Three of Johnston’s daughters later enrolled at Zhejiang University and at Nanjing University, at Hangzhou University, and at Fudan University in Shanghai. Johnston has been a full-on comprador from well before he was appointed Governor-General by the Harper government, and he has boasted about it. During his presidency of Waterloo University in 2006, Johnston was pleased to sign an agreement establishing a Confucius Institute on campus. Human Rights Watch calls Confucius Institutes “effectively international outposts of China’s Ministry of Education.” As a “parting gift” to Johnston when he’d done his time as G-G, Trudeau granted Johnston $3 million up front and $7 million in matching funds over 10 years to allow Johnston to set up his own little Trudeau Foundation replica - the Rideau Hall Foundation. Among its board of directors: The irredeemably compromised Dominic Barton, who served as Beijing’s leading palm-greaser in the G20, Trudeau’s “economic growth” svengali in 2017 and later ambassador to China after John McCallum’s pro-Beijing zealotries became so embarrassing he had to be fired in 2019; John Manley, the Telus Huawei enthusiast who disgraced himself during the abduction of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor by suggesting the Canada Border Services Agency should have tricked the Americans and let Huawei heiress Meng Wanzhou pass through Customs, evading the U.S. Justice Department’s extradition request; Beverly McLachlin, the judge who has refused to step away from her plum posting on Hong Kong’s highest court despite Beijing’s sadistic destruction of Hong Kong’s last vestiges of civil liberties. One of the Rideau Hall Foundation’s “directors emeriti” is Paul Desmarais III, the fabulously wealthy scion of the Desmarais family, founders of the Canada-China Business Council and the epicentre of Beijing’s circle of compradors in Canada. I could go on. But I’m done here. I won’t behave as though these people are our betters and it is above our station to give them any backchat. I am not going to bow and scrape before any of this crowd, least of all David Johnston. I consider them riffraff, and I wouldn’t have any of them in my house. |
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China’s Vancouver consulate interfered in 2022 municipal election, according to CSIS
Senior Chinese diplomat sought to groom and cultivate politicians for city council and higher office
www.theglobeandmail.com
China’s Vancouver consulate interfered in 2022 municipal election, according to CSIS
ROBERT FIFEOTTAWA BUREAU CHIEFSTEVEN CHASESENIOR PARLIAMENTARY REPORTER
NATHAN VANDERKLIPPEINTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT
OTTAWA, VANCOUVER
PUBLISHED 11 HOURS AGOUPDATED 7 HOURS AGO
China’s diplomatic mission in Vancouver has actively interfered in the city’s politics, using proxies in diaspora community organizations and grooming politicians to run in last fall’s municipal election, according to Canada’s spy agency.
A Jan. 10, 2022, Canadian Security and Intelligence Service report viewed by The Globe and Mail outlines how China’s then-consul-general, Tong Xiaoling, discussed mentoring – or as the report quoted her, “grooming” – Chinese-Canadian municipal politicians for higher office to advance Beijing’s interests.
Ms. Tong sought to elect pro-Beijing politicians to city council in the October, 2022, municipal election in which incumbent mayor Kennedy Stewart lost to Ken Sim by margin of nearly 37,000 votes.
During his term as mayor, Mr. Stewart drew criticism from the Chinese government for suspending meetings with its diplomats after it put sanctions on Canadian MP Michael Chong, a friend of his and critic of Beijing, and strengthening ties with Taiwan, a self-ruled province that Beijing wants to annex.
Mr. Stewart said he was briefed in late May, 2022, by CSIS’s regional director and one of the agency’s China specialists about foreign interference in municipal politics. They asked a lot of questions about the attacks levelled at him by Ms. Tong and some Chinese-language media, partly owned by China’s government, he said.
Mr. Sim, a businessman and the first Chinese-Canadian mayor of Vancouver, said during the campaign that Mr. Stewart was paying too much attention to foreign issues. “We don’t have to worry about what’s been happening in other countries. We should be leaving that to the Prime Minister,” Mr. Sim was quoted as saying on Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong-based TV station majority-owned by the Chinese state.
Some Chinese-language media denounced Mr. Stewart as a “Cold War mayor” and accused him of “spreading conspiracy theories to divide the Chinese community.”
People who are ethnically Chinese make up a fifth of the Metro Vancouver population, but views on immigration, China’s role in the world and how Ottawa should relate to Beijing are widely divergent across a community that spans a range of generations and places of origin.
A former NDP MP who became mayor in 2018, Mr. Stewart told The Globe that he believes he was a target of Chinese government interference in the municipal election.
Mr. Stewart said he had tense relations with Ms. Tong because of his pro-democracy position, opposition to the Chinese government’s human-rights violations and support for Taiwan’s independence. He would like to see Ottawa expand its inquiry into Beijing’s interference in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections to municipal and provincial politics as well.
The CSIS documents explain how in mid-November, 2021, Ms. Tong talked about orchestrating the Chinese diaspora to help elect a new mayor and a favoured city councillor.
“With regards to the 2022 City of Vancouver mayoral election, CG Tong stated that they need to do all they could to increase the ethnic voting percentage. They needed to get all eligible voters to come out and elect a specific Chinese-Canadian candidate,” according to the document.
“CG Tong emphasized this work was necessary, as the candidate will rely on those votes,” the document said. “In parallel, CG Tong indicated they needed someone within the Vancouver City Council.”
The document was marked secret and shared with senior officials at Global Affairs, Public Safety, Communications Security Establishment, National Defence, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada and the Privy Council Office, which reports directly to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
CSIS said Ms. Tong had her eye on one individual who was not named in the document but who she saw as a candidate for council and, perhaps later, provincial or federal politics.
Ms. Tong passed information on this individual to someone who she hoped “could become acquainted with them” and assess if they were worth “grooming,” the document said. The aim was to discover if the individual was a “good sapling to cultivate.”
“CG Tong saw great promise,” in this individual, saying she hoped they “could join a political party that had a long-term strategy regarding their policy towards the PRC,” CSIS reported, referring to the People’s Republic of China.
Mr. Sim was elected alongside Lenny Zhou, who came to Canada from Beijing as a graduate student. Mr. Zhou has said he ran for council in part out of concern over what he called a rise in racism. In January, he made headlines by speaking in Mandarin in the Vancouver council chamber.
Louis Huang, a former Shanghai pediatrician who moved to Vancouver in 2002 and an outspoken critic of China, recalls Mr. Zhou coming to a meeting of the Alliance of the Guard of Canadian Values roughly half a decade ago. He was at the time “absolutely in support of the Chinese government,” Mr. Huang said.
Mr. Huang believes no other country has been “so comprehensively” influenced by China.
Mr. Zhou said he has no recollection of attending that meeting. After last year’s election, he tweeted in support of oppressed groups in China, including Uyghurs, Tibetans and those harmed by the country’s zero-COVID policy.
“I am a Canadian citizen. Canada is my country, it has been my home for almost 20 years. This is the country where I have built my life and I’m raising my family. I am a strong believer in free speech and democracy,” he said.
Mr. Sim declined an interview request, and spokesman Taylor Verrall said the mayor could not comment on any interactions with the national-security apparatus. Mr. Sim has not met with the consulate since becoming mayor, the spokesman added.
CSIS said Ms. Tong’s involvement in the electoral process was “consistent with efforts to cultivate relationships with municipal-level politicians and help them ascend to higher levels of office over a period of many years.”
“The activity is also consistent with PRC efforts to have more ethnic Chinese individuals enter politics in Western countries, as they are seen to be easier to influence and access, particularly by leveraging community proxies,” CSIS added.
Chinese diplomats can influence networks of Chinese associations in Canada, said Ronald Leung, who helped the federal Conservative Party with community outreach while Stephen Harper was prime minister. He is now a commentator and interviewer in the Vancouver area and it was clear, he said, that local Chinese associations supported ABC Vancouver, the party to which both Mr. Sim and Mr. Zhou belong, in 2022.
“They wanted to see a Chinese face as the mayor of Vancouver,” he said. But, he added, that is not necessarily an indication of foreign interference.
None of the city councillors during Mr. Stewart’s time as mayor had Chinese roots.
It’s common, Mr. Leung said, for Chinese seniors to be organized in support of certain candidates. Some of them live in Canada but owe their financial well-being to Beijing. “There are so many retired mainland Chinese in Vancouver, and they are getting their pension from the Chinese government,” he said.
“When they are rallied to do something for their motherland, how can you refuse to do it?”
Ms. Tong, the former consul-general who left Canada in late July, 2022, had accused Mr. Stewart of holding anti-China attitudes. In November, 2021, the Chinese consulate in Vancouver released a statement warning the City of Vancouver against forging a special relationship with the Taiwanese city of Kaohsiung, an objection in line with continuing efforts by Beijing to diplomatically isolate and intimidate the self-governing island.
In August, 2022, the consulate criticized Mr. Stewart for backing U.S. Speaker Nancy’s Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan – a visit that sparked Chinese military exercises around the self-ruled island – calling his comments “ridiculous and unacceptable” and warned the mayor: “Those who play with fire will definitely get burned.”
As the election approached, Mr. Stewart said he noticed his invitations to Chinese-Canadian community events petered out – and certainly none where Ms. Tong was a participant.
“I have gone to many rallies and events but I noticed on the ground there was a bit of a local chill and in fact I was warned by some other councillors who are no longer sitting that I was really playing a dangerous game,” he said. “They would definitely invite her and not me.”
About three weeks before the vote, Mr. Stewart said donations to the campaign also dried up.
“It is pretty common for the development community to have a little breakfast or lunch and have 25 people come and they’d buy their tickets for $1,200. Then it just stopped and part of my suspicion is that much of the financing for development in the city comes from China,” he said.
“It is Chinese investors who are financing different projects, especially luxury buildings downtown. And all of a sudden the folks that I had worked with for four years … the money wasn’t coming in.”
Ms. Tong’s political activities were blatant interference and should not have been tolerated by the federal government, which should have expelled her from Canada, Mr. Stewart said. “I mean if it was in the U.S., you would get kicked out of the country for that.”
Mr. Stewart would not go so far as to say he lost the election because of Beijing interference efforts. His own vote total remained virtually unchanged between his loss in 2022 and his election four years earlier, which he narrowly won. Mr. Sim, however, added nearly 37,000 votes in his blowout victory last year.
Former Vancouver city councillor Kerry Jang has been critical of CSIS for raising concern about political interference in Canada without accompanying action, saying it can lead to unwarranted suspicion of people based solely on ethnicity. What the document describes about Ms. Tong “is really bad if it’s true,” he said. But “if you’ve got the evidence, then arrest somebody. Expel somebody. Do something about it.”
Mr. Jang endorsed Mr. Stewart for mayor in 2018, but dismissed the idea that foreign interference contributed to his loss last year. “I think Kennedy lost because he was a lousy mayor. It was that simple,” Mr. Jang said.
In a Nov. 30, 2021, CSIS report, seen by The Globe, Ms. Tong discussed the recent defeat of a Conservative MP in the September, 2021, federal election whom she called a “vocal detractor of the Chinese government.” She said this loss “proved their strategy and tactics were good and contributed to achieving their goals while still adhering to the local political customs.”
A national-security source in The Globe story based on that report said the MP was former Conservative member of Parliament Kenny Chiu. The Globe is not identifying the source who risks prosecution under the Security of Information Act.
In that same report, CSIS quoted Ms. Tong as saying “they would be pioneers” if they were able to elect a mayor of Chinese descent. “In the past, they had expended great efforts, they had not been successful,” she said. CSIS said it was unclear whether Ms. Tong’s use of the word “they” was alluding to the consulate and/or the Chinese-Canadian community.
The Prime Minister asked two closed-door panels to investigate China’s election interference after The Globe reported that Beijing employed a sophisticated strategy to disrupt Canada’s democracy in the 2021 federal election campaign.
Secret and top-secret CSIS documents outlined how Chinese diplomats and their proxies backed the re-election of Mr. Trudeau’s Liberals – but only to another minority government – and worked to defeat Conservative politicians considered to be unfriendly to Beijing. CSIS reports also said China interfered in the 2019 federal campaign.
The National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians, which reports to Mr. Trudeau, will investigate election interference in the 2019 and 2021 elections. The National Security and Intelligence Review Agency, which oversees national-security agencies and the RCMP, will examine how authorities handled investigations into Beijing interference operations.
The two panel reports will be reviewed by former governor-general David Johnston, who was named special rapporteur Wednesday by the Prime Minister. Mr. Johnston will make recommendations, including if there is a need for a public inquiry. Mr. Trudeau has so far said that a public inquiry is unwarranted, but all three main opposition leaders say it is.
“I would think the rapporteur should think of broadening the scope,” Mr. Stewart said. “It is going to be hard not to move to some sort of inquiry. … So they should definitely look at the country as a whole.”
New Léger Poll.What?
If the CPC wants to avoid having the LPC survive yet another scandal the last thing they should do is attack DJ.
But if they want to shoot themselves in the foot and then wonder why people might not vote for them or at least against the LPC then by all means, attack David Johnson’s credibility and see what sort of traction that gets.
Wow, pretty damning background info on, not only Johnston, but some of the other usual and not-so-usual suspects. It’s as if they all attended one giant orgy and thought word wouldn’t get out. But what really surprised me is that Johnston’s daughtersTerry Glavin from The Real Story <therealstory@substack.com>
Go ahead, Liberals. Rag the puck, drag it out.
The more you do this, Beijing's "elite capture" operations in Canada will just keep coming into sharper focus.
Within a couple of hours of filing this piece to the National Post yesterday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced the appointment of David Johnston as the “rapporteur” he’s chosen to run interference for him in the matter of what he knew, when he knew it and why he didn’t say or do anything about Beijing’s interference operations in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections.
MAR 16
At the news of Johnston’s appointment, all the usual press gallery yes-persons broke out in convulsions of curtseying, cap-doffing and forelock-tugging and otherwise beclowned themselves about Trudeau’s “inspired choice” for the job. It only took a couple of hours for certain awkward facts to be heard in loud whispers from the cheap seats. And those whispers soon became a dull roar, and it’s not going to go away, which pretty well proves the point I was making in my column, in print today, which was this:
With all their filibustering and obstructionist “rapporteur” manoeuvres to draw attention away from the interference operations Beijing ran on their behalf during the 2019 and 2021 elections, the Trudeau Liberals might think they’re being clever. But they’re being too clever by half.
The longer this drags out, the more light gets shed on the squalid and intimate relationship between the Liberals’ political base in this country’s wealthy and well-connected Mandarin-bloc hierarchy and the Ferrari-driving consiglieri of Beijing’s strong-arming and influence-peddling network in Canada. It’s the same circle of power.
As Real Story subscribers will see, the nice Mr. Johnston is hopelessly entangled in that same circle.
Meanwhile, Steve Chase and Bob Fife over at the Globe and Mail have some bombshell front-page revelations from CSIS today about the icy hands from that same circle has been around the throats of municipal politicians in Vancouver. And you should read it once you’re done here.
Before we even touch on the innumerably sketchy and compromising entries in David Johnston’s curriculum vitae, I should straightaway admit that I come to this from a particularly jaundiced perspective. It goes back to July 13, 2017. I remember it like it was yesterday, because it was probably the only time in my life that I was genuinely ashamed to be Canadian, and Johnston was the reason why.
First, you need to know something about Liu Xiaobo. It’s likely a name you’re not familiar with. His memory in China has been obliterated by the tens of thousands of official snitches and censors employed by Beijing’s vast surveillance state apparatus. In Canada it’s the height of bad manners to mention his name in polite company. So I will bloody well mention his name here.
The “eminent Canadian” David Johnston smiling and shaking hands with the genocidal megalomaniac Xi Jinping. Such a nice man, Mr. Johnston is. Such integrity.
Liu Xiaobo was China’s Nelson Mandela. A writer, philosopher and human rights activist, Liu had already spent years in and out of jails and forced-labour camps for his leadership in China’s non-violent democracy movement when he was sentenced to 11 years in prison, on charges of suspicion of subversion, on December 8, 2008.
After Liu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, Beijing punished the Nobel Committee’s host country Norway by shutting down all diplomatic relations and trade exchanges. Just one of the trade shocks: Norway’s share of China’s salmon imports quickly plummeted from 92 per cent to 29 per cent.
In 2017, Liu’s monthly “checkups” at the Jinzhou Prison in Liaoning strangely failed to detect the advanced stages of liver cancer he was suffering, until May 31. In the following weeks, the European Union and the U.S. State Department pleaded with Xi Jinping to allow Liu to leave China for proper treatment. Xi said no.
When Liu died on July 13 that year, it was the first time a Nobel laureate had died in prison since the death of the pacifist Carl von Ossietzky in a Nazi concentration camp in 1938. Said Reporters Without Borders Secretary General Christophe Deloire: “We can clearly state that Liu Xiaobo was murdered by lack of care.”
The very moment Liu Xiaobo breathed his last breath in this world, David Johnston was stuffing his face and smiling for the cameras with Xi Jinping at a banquet in Beijing. And no, I will not forget this because I can’t, because I remember it like it was yesterday.
After you’ve finished here, if you like, here’s some backstory on all this I wrote for the Ottawa Citizen back in 2017, and for Maclean’s magazine, where I dug a little deeper. I will let other people cavil about how deucedly impolite it is to doubt the nice Mister Johnston’s integrity. They can bang on as they choose about how after all, Conservatives and Liberals alike have admired Johnston and appreciated his probity and rectitude. I don’t care. Leave me out of it.
Can we please at least remember what is going on here?
This country is in the midst on an unprecedented national-security scandal. CSIS has revealed that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been the happily compliant object of an elaborate influence operation run out of Beijing since 2013, and his family was already notoriously beguiled by China going back to papa and Mao Zedong, and it was a neurotic and messianic family obsession that never let up.
The Trudeau Liberals have employed every sleazy tactic in the book to prevent the House of Commons from voting on a resolution calling for a public inquiry into China’s election-interference operations on the Liberals’ behalf in 2019 and 2021. Just one of those tactics is Trudeau’s invention of a job called “Independent Special Rapporteur” to advise him on whether or not to permit a public inquiry into what the hell has been going on here.
Johnston’s job is to run interference for Justin Trudeau in this scandal. That’s all there is to it. Johnston is beholden to Trudeau, Trudeau is beholden to Johnston, and they are both deeply compromised by their relationships with Beijing’s emissaries and bagmen in Canada, and by their associations with the Montreal-centred corporate China lobby. And putting on the mask of an “independent” interlocutor is not the first time Johnston has scratched Justin Trudeau’s back, and not the first time Johnston has carried Xi Jinping’s water in Canada.
It’s way worse than you think.
Johnston’s most brazen intervention to help Trudeau avoid any scrutiny of his official policy of kowtowing to Xi Jinping was during the 2019 federal elections. A Munk leaders debate on foreign policy had to be cancelled because Trudeau simply refused to show up. Trudeau appointed Johnston as commissioner of the official debates, and Johnston then saw to it that foreign policy would not be discussed in the English-language leaders debate at all.
There is nothing “independent” about Johnston in his capacity as Trudeau’s Special Independent Rapporteur. A key element of the scandal that has erupted surrounding the relationship between the Trudeaus and the Beijing regime is that clandestine donation to the Trudeau Foundation that’s been in the news lately. Johnston is a senior member of the Trudeau Foundation.
The Johnstons and the Trudeau’s were friends and neighbours at their summer retreats in the Laurentians when Justin was a boy. Both have fondly remembered the days when Johnston’s daughters and the Trudeau boys went on ski trips in the winter months. Three of Johnston’s daughters later enrolled at Zhejiang University and at Nanjing University, at Hangzhou University, and at Fudan University in Shanghai.
Johnston has been a full-on comprador from well before he was appointed Governor-General by the Harper government, and he has boasted about it.
During his presidency of Waterloo University in 2006, Johnston was pleased to sign an agreement establishing a Confucius Institute on campus. Human Rights Watch calls Confucius Institutes “effectively international outposts of China’s Ministry of Education.”
As a “parting gift” to Johnston when he’d done his time as G-G, Trudeau granted Johnston $3 million up front and $7 million in matching funds over 10 years to allow Johnston to set up his own little Trudeau Foundation replica - the Rideau Hall Foundation.
Among its board of directors: The irredeemably compromised Dominic Barton, who served as Beijing’s leading palm-greaser in the G20, Trudeau’s “economic growth” svengali in 2017 and later ambassador to China after John McCallum’s pro-Beijing zealotries became so embarrassing he had to be fired in 2019; John Manley, the Telus Huawei enthusiast who disgraced himself during the abduction of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor by suggesting the Canada Border Services Agency should have tricked the Americans and let Huawei heiress Meng Wanzhou pass through Customs, evading the U.S. Justice Department’s extradition request; Beverly McLachlin, the judge who has refused to step away from her plum posting on Hong Kong’s highest court despite Beijing’s sadistic destruction of Hong Kong’s last vestiges of civil liberties. One of the Rideau Hall Foundation’s “directors emeriti” is Paul Desmarais III, the fabulously wealthy scion of the Desmarais family, founders of the Canada-China Business Council and the epicentre of Beijing’s circle of compradors in Canada.
I could go on. But I’m done here. I won’t behave as though these people are our betters and it is above our station to give them any backchat. I am not going to bow and scrape before any of this crowd, least of all David Johnston.
I consider them riffraff, and I wouldn’t have any of them in my house.
attended the Chinese universitis. Although the daughters have a right to study where they want, it strongly suggests that Johnston has a conflict of interest.
Rex Murphy
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Jarnhamar
Army.ca Myth
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If someone all of a sudden decides to vote Liberal solely based on the CPC not supporting a glaringly obvious conflict of interest appointment then they were going to vote Liberal regardless.
There is a difference between identifying a conflict of interest and attacking his credibility; the Liberals are pushing a narrative that the former attacks the latter. When judges recuse themselves due to conflict of interest no one questions their credibility, they're just following the rules. This whole setup is an example that the government still doesn't understand not only the spirit of conflict of interest but the physical side of it.
And chances are a lot of people in the GTA and Vancouver area who are Chinese Canadians are still going to vote Liberal because they're terrified of pissing off China. Especially since Canada hasn't did shit about Chinese intimidation and interference for the last 20 years. These agents have operated with impunity.
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Heh! DILLIGAS right enough!
Halifax Tar
Army.ca Fixture
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This just further supports the belief that a certain segment of the population (30% +/-) will vote LPC no matter what. The country be damned.
I've said this before, one doesn't need to vote CPC, but a voter who will still mark for the Liberals is a party before country voter.
Vancouver’s mayor is still fairly new in his job, but some of the things I’m reading make me wonder if he may be “bent” instead of an innocent victim in Beijing’s political intrigue.China’s Vancouver consulate interfered in 2022 municipal election, according to CSIS
Senior Chinese diplomat sought to groom and cultivate politicians for city council and higher office
China’s Vancouver consulate interfered in 2022 municipal election, according to CSIS
ROBERT FIFEOTTAWA BUREAU CHIEF
STEVEN CHASESENIOR PARLIAMENTARY REPORTER
NATHAN VANDERKLIPPEINTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT
OTTAWA, VANCOUVER
PUBLISHED 11 HOURS AGOUPDATED 7 HOURS AGO
China’s diplomatic mission in Vancouver has actively interfered in the city’s politics, using proxies in diaspora community organizations and grooming politicians to run in last fall’s municipal election, according to Canada’s spy agency.
A Jan. 10, 2022, Canadian Security and Intelligence Service report viewed by The Globe and Mail outlines how China’s then-consul-general, Tong Xiaoling, discussed mentoring – or as the report quoted her, “grooming” – Chinese-Canadian municipal politicians for higher office to advance Beijing’s interests.
Ms. Tong sought to elect pro-Beijing politicians to city council in the October, 2022, municipal election in which incumbent mayor Kennedy Stewart lost to Ken Sim by margin of nearly 37,000 votes.
During his term as mayor, Mr. Stewart drew criticism from the Chinese government for suspending meetings with its diplomats after it put sanctions on Canadian MP Michael Chong, a friend of his and critic of Beijing, and strengthening ties with Taiwan, a self-ruled province that Beijing wants to annex.
Mr. Stewart said he was briefed in late May, 2022, by CSIS’s regional director and one of the agency’s China specialists about foreign interference in municipal politics. They asked a lot of questions about the attacks levelled at him by Ms. Tong and some Chinese-language media, partly owned by China’s government, he said.
Mr. Sim, a businessman and the first Chinese-Canadian mayor of Vancouver, said during the campaign that Mr. Stewart was paying too much attention to foreign issues. “We don’t have to worry about what’s been happening in other countries. We should be leaving that to the Prime Minister,” Mr. Sim was quoted as saying on Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong-based TV station majority-owned by the Chinese state.
Some Chinese-language media denounced Mr. Stewart as a “Cold War mayor” and accused him of “spreading conspiracy theories to divide the Chinese community.”
People who are ethnically Chinese make up a fifth of the Metro Vancouver population, but views on immigration, China’s role in the world and how Ottawa should relate to Beijing are widely divergent across a community that spans a range of generations and places of origin.
A former NDP MP who became mayor in 2018, Mr. Stewart told The Globe that he believes he was a target of Chinese government interference in the municipal election.
Mr. Stewart said he had tense relations with Ms. Tong because of his pro-democracy position, opposition to the Chinese government’s human-rights violations and support for Taiwan’s independence. He would like to see Ottawa expand its inquiry into Beijing’s interference in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections to municipal and provincial politics as well.
The CSIS documents explain how in mid-November, 2021, Ms. Tong talked about orchestrating the Chinese diaspora to help elect a new mayor and a favoured city councillor.
“With regards to the 2022 City of Vancouver mayoral election, CG Tong stated that they need to do all they could to increase the ethnic voting percentage. They needed to get all eligible voters to come out and elect a specific Chinese-Canadian candidate,” according to the document.
“CG Tong emphasized this work was necessary, as the candidate will rely on those votes,” the document said. “In parallel, CG Tong indicated they needed someone within the Vancouver City Council.”
The document was marked secret and shared with senior officials at Global Affairs, Public Safety, Communications Security Establishment, National Defence, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada and the Privy Council Office, which reports directly to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
CSIS said Ms. Tong had her eye on one individual who was not named in the document but who she saw as a candidate for council and, perhaps later, provincial or federal politics.
Ms. Tong passed information on this individual to someone who she hoped “could become acquainted with them” and assess if they were worth “grooming,” the document said. The aim was to discover if the individual was a “good sapling to cultivate.”
“CG Tong saw great promise,” in this individual, saying she hoped they “could join a political party that had a long-term strategy regarding their policy towards the PRC,” CSIS reported, referring to the People’s Republic of China.
Mr. Sim was elected alongside Lenny Zhou, who came to Canada from Beijing as a graduate student. Mr. Zhou has said he ran for council in part out of concern over what he called a rise in racism. In January, he made headlines by speaking in Mandarin in the Vancouver council chamber.
Louis Huang, a former Shanghai pediatrician who moved to Vancouver in 2002 and an outspoken critic of China, recalls Mr. Zhou coming to a meeting of the Alliance of the Guard of Canadian Values roughly half a decade ago. He was at the time “absolutely in support of the Chinese government,” Mr. Huang said.
Mr. Huang believes no other country has been “so comprehensively” influenced by China.
Mr. Zhou said he has no recollection of attending that meeting. After last year’s election, he tweeted in support of oppressed groups in China, including Uyghurs, Tibetans and those harmed by the country’s zero-COVID policy.
“I am a Canadian citizen. Canada is my country, it has been my home for almost 20 years. This is the country where I have built my life and I’m raising my family. I am a strong believer in free speech and democracy,” he said.
Mr. Sim declined an interview request, and spokesman Taylor Verrall said the mayor could not comment on any interactions with the national-security apparatus. Mr. Sim has not met with the consulate since becoming mayor, the spokesman added.
CSIS said Ms. Tong’s involvement in the electoral process was “consistent with efforts to cultivate relationships with municipal-level politicians and help them ascend to higher levels of office over a period of many years.”
“The activity is also consistent with PRC efforts to have more ethnic Chinese individuals enter politics in Western countries, as they are seen to be easier to influence and access, particularly by leveraging community proxies,” CSIS added.
Chinese diplomats can influence networks of Chinese associations in Canada, said Ronald Leung, who helped the federal Conservative Party with community outreach while Stephen Harper was prime minister. He is now a commentator and interviewer in the Vancouver area and it was clear, he said, that local Chinese associations supported ABC Vancouver, the party to which both Mr. Sim and Mr. Zhou belong, in 2022.
“They wanted to see a Chinese face as the mayor of Vancouver,” he said. But, he added, that is not necessarily an indication of foreign interference.
None of the city councillors during Mr. Stewart’s time as mayor had Chinese roots.
It’s common, Mr. Leung said, for Chinese seniors to be organized in support of certain candidates. Some of them live in Canada but owe their financial well-being to Beijing. “There are so many retired mainland Chinese in Vancouver, and they are getting their pension from the Chinese government,” he said.
“When they are rallied to do something for their motherland, how can you refuse to do it?”
Ms. Tong, the former consul-general who left Canada in late July, 2022, had accused Mr. Stewart of holding anti-China attitudes. In November, 2021, the Chinese consulate in Vancouver released a statement warning the City of Vancouver against forging a special relationship with the Taiwanese city of Kaohsiung, an objection in line with continuing efforts by Beijing to diplomatically isolate and intimidate the self-governing island.
In August, 2022, the consulate criticized Mr. Stewart for backing U.S. Speaker Nancy’s Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan – a visit that sparked Chinese military exercises around the self-ruled island – calling his comments “ridiculous and unacceptable” and warned the mayor: “Those who play with fire will definitely get burned.”
As the election approached, Mr. Stewart said he noticed his invitations to Chinese-Canadian community events petered out – and certainly none where Ms. Tong was a participant.
“I have gone to many rallies and events but I noticed on the ground there was a bit of a local chill and in fact I was warned by some other councillors who are no longer sitting that I was really playing a dangerous game,” he said. “They would definitely invite her and not me.”
About three weeks before the vote, Mr. Stewart said donations to the campaign also dried up.
“It is pretty common for the development community to have a little breakfast or lunch and have 25 people come and they’d buy their tickets for $1,200. Then it just stopped and part of my suspicion is that much of the financing for development in the city comes from China,” he said.
“It is Chinese investors who are financing different projects, especially luxury buildings downtown. And all of a sudden the folks that I had worked with for four years … the money wasn’t coming in.”
Ms. Tong’s political activities were blatant interference and should not have been tolerated by the federal government, which should have expelled her from Canada, Mr. Stewart said. “I mean if it was in the U.S., you would get kicked out of the country for that.”
Mr. Stewart would not go so far as to say he lost the election because of Beijing interference efforts. His own vote total remained virtually unchanged between his loss in 2022 and his election four years earlier, which he narrowly won. Mr. Sim, however, added nearly 37,000 votes in his blowout victory last year.
Former Vancouver city councillor Kerry Jang has been critical of CSIS for raising concern about political interference in Canada without accompanying action, saying it can lead to unwarranted suspicion of people based solely on ethnicity. What the document describes about Ms. Tong “is really bad if it’s true,” he said. But “if you’ve got the evidence, then arrest somebody. Expel somebody. Do something about it.”
Mr. Jang endorsed Mr. Stewart for mayor in 2018, but dismissed the idea that foreign interference contributed to his loss last year. “I think Kennedy lost because he was a lousy mayor. It was that simple,” Mr. Jang said.
In a Nov. 30, 2021, CSIS report, seen by The Globe, Ms. Tong discussed the recent defeat of a Conservative MP in the September, 2021, federal election whom she called a “vocal detractor of the Chinese government.” She said this loss “proved their strategy and tactics were good and contributed to achieving their goals while still adhering to the local political customs.”
A national-security source in The Globe story based on that report said the MP was former Conservative member of Parliament Kenny Chiu. The Globe is not identifying the source who risks prosecution under the Security of Information Act.
In that same report, CSIS quoted Ms. Tong as saying “they would be pioneers” if they were able to elect a mayor of Chinese descent. “In the past, they had expended great efforts, they had not been successful,” she said. CSIS said it was unclear whether Ms. Tong’s use of the word “they” was alluding to the consulate and/or the Chinese-Canadian community.
The Prime Minister asked two closed-door panels to investigate China’s election interference after The Globe reported that Beijing employed a sophisticated strategy to disrupt Canada’s democracy in the 2021 federal election campaign.
Secret and top-secret CSIS documents outlined how Chinese diplomats and their proxies backed the re-election of Mr. Trudeau’s Liberals – but only to another minority government – and worked to defeat Conservative politicians considered to be unfriendly to Beijing. CSIS reports also said China interfered in the 2019 federal campaign.
The National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians, which reports to Mr. Trudeau, will investigate election interference in the 2019 and 2021 elections. The National Security and Intelligence Review Agency, which oversees national-security agencies and the RCMP, will examine how authorities handled investigations into Beijing interference operations.
The two panel reports will be reviewed by former governor-general David Johnston, who was named special rapporteur Wednesday by the Prime Minister. Mr. Johnston will make recommendations, including if there is a need for a public inquiry. Mr. Trudeau has so far said that a public inquiry is unwarranted, but all three main opposition leaders say it is.
“I would think the rapporteur should think of broadening the scope,” Mr. Stewart said. “It is going to be hard not to move to some sort of inquiry. … So they should definitely look at the country as a whole.”
RangerRay
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What I am seeing is not one of the opposition parties is making the case why they should be given the keys to the magic kingdom. The results are basically the partisans dug in, no one moving beyond their bases.
I would be interested in seeing how many answered “Don’t know” and “None of the above”. I suspect there might be a lot of “a pox on all of your houses” right now.
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I also wonder how many people polled were targeted by demographic. Polls are often a red herring.
RangerRay
Army.ca Veteran
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At the time I was thinking how good this was for Vancouver. Sim did make a good point about how a mayor should be focused on city issues, not foreign affairs, and Stewart was doing a terrible job in terms of crime, disorder and livability. I hope Sim was an unwitting person in all this, but the BC Liberals were big China boosters when they were in power, and Gordon Campbell was incensed when Richard Fadden suggested that there may be compromised ministers in his cabinet.
RangerRay
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I just found the answer to my question. It was about 20% that said “don’t know”/“none of the above” or some variation thereof.
One of my biggest fears is that a lot of totally innocent Chinese-Canadians may get caught up in this. As we all know, especially during the height of the Covid crisis, quite a number of Asians were targeted and sometimes physically attacked by thugs who blamed them for causing the pandemic. Also, let’s not forget how innocent Japanese-Canadians and Japanese-Americans were rounded up and put in internment (aka concentration) camps merely for having Japanese blood in their veins. A good friend of mine, now in his early 80s, spent the formative years of his life in such a camp despite the fact that he was born in Canada of parents who had emigrated from Japan.
Still, it sure as hell seems to me that there are many Chinese-Canadians who have worked deliberately with the Chinese government to compromise our political system so that it benefits Beijing. Any such person should, in my opinion, face legal prosecution for what they have done unless, of course, they were used unwittingly or coerced.
And then there are those who have no Chinese heritage or blood in them at all but facilitated the sabotage of our social, economic and political freedom in favour of the interest of China and who have turned a blind eye to what was happening. Those people number probably not in the hundreds but in the thousands and include politicians at all levels and from all parties, with some being more guilty than others. I think we need to press for—correction—DEMAND an investigation of anyone involved in anything that compromised us, whether it involved elections, economic treaties, trade agreements, allowing certain researchers access to highly sensitive industrial and military secrets and more.
Those politicians who sold us down the river should definitely be voted out of office at the very least. One thing I do not believe in is using violence to get one’s way as it only makes us more like the kind of countries we are opposed to (e.g. China). The ballot box (ok, the voting booth) should be considered a sacred thing. And in some countries it’s possibly more precious than water. All of us have a lot of work to do to keep this country safe, free and prosperous.
Sorry if I went on a bit of a rant. I just want to make sure that we stay focussed and make positive changes in this country.
RangerRay
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100% I also fear that if all levels of government don’t get this shit sorted out, this will lead to more anti-Asian hate. Listen to the activists in those communities. They want a foreign agent registry, they want authorities to be able to go after the agents that harass and intimidate them. They don’t want this crap pinned on them either.
Our government is not protecting these citizens.
Jarnhamar
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The CCP and LPC would certainly benefit from that.
daftandbarmy
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A great reason for why we probably need a bigger Navy....
news.sky.com
Aukus: How will China respond to nuclear-powered submarine deal?
The announcement from Rishi Sunak, Joe Biden and Anthony Albanese comes at a time of growing concerns over Chinese activities within the region. The plan will deliver nuclear-powered submarines to Australia as it seeks to counter Chinese activities in the Pacific Ocean.
Aukus: How will China respond to nuclear-powered submarine deal?
The announcement from Rishi Sunak, Joe Biden and Anthony Albanese comes at a time of growing concerns over Chinese activities within the region. The plan will deliver nuclear-powered submarines to Australia as it seeks to counter Chinese activities in the Pacific Ocean.
news.sky.com
RangerRay
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Andrew Coyne isn’t impressed with the choice of “rapporteur”.
/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/tgam/CP4Z7TIVWFNV5J7C5KWJ5XKB6A.jpg)
www.theglobeandmail.com
Opinion: David Johnston is a man of high integrity. But as rapporteur? We should be in high dudgeon
The Liberal government’s appointment of the former governor-general invites reasonable doubt to creep into the highly sensitive foreign-interference probe
www.theglobeandmail.com
daftandbarmy
Army.ca Dinosaur
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He won by more than 37,000 votes... I'm thinking that more voters were tired of putting up with years of Kennedy Stewart than were influenced by China
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