Real problem of Beijing influence and intimidation isn’t in elections

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What gets my goat is that after 50 years of willfully ignoring the Chinese Communist Party’s widespread campaign of influence and intimidation in Canada, it’s only after allegations of Beijing tampering in national elections that Parliament has roused itself and got excited.

The irony of this is that Parliament and the political parties have done far more in the last few decades than Beijing could ever hope to accomplish to infantilize themselves and make the Canadian democratic process increasingly irrelevant.

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Public opinion polls show consistently and persistently that about 60 per cent of Canadians don’t trust politicians and around a third of Canadians thinks politicians are only in it for personal gain.

At any one time, around half of Canadians don’t trust government in all its forms.

But all that is in my next book, On Canadian Democracy, to be published in June.

Today, the real problem of Beijing’s campaign of influence and intimidation in Canadian life isn’t in Parliament and national elections. It’s among the communities of Canadians of ethnic Chinese heritage and the many minority people subjugated by Beijing. And it’s in the culture of self-delusion among our politicians, senior officials, business people and academics who continue to believe that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) holds a special affection for Canada.

But the mandate of the Foreign Interference Commission headed by Justice Marie-Josée Hogue, whose first report was released on May 3, has been tightly drawn so that she is restricted to examining only foreign attempts to distort the outcome of Canadian elections. One must assume this is purposeful.

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So what are the real problems of CCP interference in Canada?

As I set out in Claws of the Panda: Beijing’s Campaign of Influence and Intimidation in Canada, it started in China in the 1940s when the CCP came across Canadian missionaries and diplomats. The party quickly realized that many of them were influential back home, but were naïve in the extreme. They could be cultivated and give the People’s Republic of China (PRC) access to the industrialized world and to Canada’s neighbour, the U.S.

And so it was. In the 1960s and onwards the PRC gained almost unfettered access to Canadian industrial and military technology through universities and academic institutes, to the country’s natural and agricultural resources, and an almost iron-cast guarantee of Canadian diplomatic support for Beijing on the international stage.

Ever the opportunist, the CCP used the Canadian establishment’s self-inflicted befuddlement to establish a threatening presence among the ethnic Chinese-Canadian communities here. The message was and is: So far as the CCP is concerned you will always be Chinese. You may think you are Canadian, but blood is thicker than water. The CCP remains your master and will take revenge on you and your family if you defy us.

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The era of self-delusion for the Canadian establishment should have come to a screeching halt in December 2018 when the chief financial officer of Huawei Technologies, Meng Wanzhou, was detained at the Vancouver airport on a U.S. extradition warrant.

Beijing immediately kidnapped, detained and later brought spurious espionage charges against two Canadians in China, Michael Kovrig, the representative of the International Crisis Group, and businessman Michael Spavor.

There couldn’t have been a clearer lesson. Canada can’t have a normal relationship with a regime whose first instinct when there is a problem is to take hostages. Canada and the CCP regime in Beijing don’t share enough civic values to sustain a relationship beyond simple transactional trade in goods.

But that message, even though it knocked the rats off the rafters for most Canadians, doesn’t seem to have got through to our mesmerized elites.

As I set out in the new edition of Claws of the Panda, which examines all that has happened in the five years since the start of the Huawei affair, the fantasy persists among Canada’s political, administrative, business and academic establishments that the CCP has a soft spot for Canada.

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It is too much to ask a public inquiry to examine an ephemeral character flaw like terminal self-delusion? But there are several other more tangible problems that must be confronted.

Top of the list must be overturning the influence and intimidation Beijing exerts over some Canadians of Chinese heritage.

Using its political warfare organization, the United Front Works Department, Beijing has taken control of many established Chinese-Canadian community organizations, and now dictates their political activities. These groups have become a fifth column to promote Beijing’s political aims on the streets of Canada, even engaging in setting up Chinese police stations in Vancouver and Toronto, according to Canadian police.

There is an argument to be made that the United Front’s activities are such an affront to Canadian sovereignty that it should be outlawed, and its agents in Beijing’s embassy and consulates expelled.

Another venomous CCP activity is its control of almost all Chinese-language media in Canada. The result of this is most contemptible among new Canadians from Mainland China. This stranglehold blocks their exposure to Canadian society and values, and sustains CCP control over their lives.

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The other major area of activity by the CCP in Canada in urgent need of exposure is in our universities, colleges and research institutes.

From the start of diplomatic relations in 1970, students from the PRC came to harvest Canada’s technological expertise. Initially, Canada gave willingly to aid the PRC’s economic development, but it has become a campaign by Beijing to pillage Canada’s intellectual property.

On Monday, Canadian Security Intelligence Service chief David Vigneault told a House of Commons committee that the PRC’s assault on this country’s government institutions, private sector and academia to steal technology is “mind-boggling.”

Most concerning now is the People’s Liberation Army sending military scientists masquerading as graduate students to vacuum up every bit of weapons technology available. Canada has become an inadvertent agent of weapons proliferation.

We don’t need a public inquiry. We have mountains of evidence of the CCP’s campaign to turn Canada into a vassal state.

What we need is political will, and that, unforgivably, is absent.

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Jonathan Manthorpe is an author and international affairs commentator.

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