Canadian politicians who expose and criticize China’s totalitarian policies are being targeted by agents of the Chinese government, sometimes successfully. It is one of the many ways that China is “increas[ing] its reach in diaspora communities,” according to lengthy July 2023 article by Norimitsu Onishi in The New York Times (the headline of which is quoted above).
Kenny Chiu, a critic of China’s chronic violations of human rights, is a former member of the Canadian Parliament whose once strong bid for reelection almost instantly evaporated. Formerly enthusiastic supporters started giving him the cold shoulder. Chinese news outlets stopped reporting on his campaign. “And he was facing an onslaught of attacks—from untraceable sources—on the local community’s most popular social networking app, the Chinese-owned WeChat. The sudden collapse of Mr. Chiu’s campaign—in the last federal election, in 2021—is now drawing renewed scrutiny amid mounting evidence of China’s interference in Canadian politics.”
Michael Chong effectively championed a legislative effort to designate China’s assault on the Uyghurs in China a genocide. Next thing he knew, he being was targeted by a Chinese diplomat whom the Canadian government ended up expelling for “conspiring to intimidate” Chong.
Chinese state interference and its threat to Canada’s democracy have become national issues after an extraordinary series of leaks in recent months of intelligence reports to The Globe and Mail newspaper by a national security official who said that government officials were not taking the threat seriously enough.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who has been criticized for not doing enough to combat reported interference by China, is under increasing pressure to call for a public inquiry.
Current and former elected officials interviewed by national security agents said some of the intelligence appeared to stem from wiretaps of Chinese diplomats based in Canada. The Globe has said that it has based its reporting on secret and top-secret intelligence reports it has viewed….
A spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Ottawa did not reply to questions about the consulate’s alleged actions in Vancouver, saying only that “China never interferes in other countries’ internal affairs” and that accusations of interference were an “out-and-out smear of China.”
But China’s former consul general in Vancouver, Tong Xiaoling, boasted in 2021, according to The Globe, about helping defeat two Conservative lawmakers, including one she described as a “vocal distractor” of the Chinese government: Kenny Chiu.
The policies of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau are among the things that make one wonder whether Canada is, quite on its own, descending into totalitarian fascism. So perhaps it’s not too surprising that, having been alerted to the problem of Chinese infiltrations and incursions in Canada, he doesn’t seem too eager to do anything about. We have a similar problem with the current top minister of the United States.
