Biden was getting hostages released from Iran, not cozying up to it.
Anyhow,
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/09/23/ca ... espionage/
Why Did Trudeau Dawdle on Chinese Election Meddling?
A new inquiry may expose Beijing’s reach in Ottawa.
Really long. From September 23rd
Excerpts:
1. Canadian intelligence consistently ignored by the politicians.
After months of resisting the idea, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has announced a major public inquiry tasked with investigating how China has meddled in Canadian politics.
Canada’s intelligence agencies have been warning for decades that China is running covert affairs inside Canada. And, for just as long, there has been a dogged rejection of those warnings from politicians who see China as key to Canada’s economic future—or who fear alienating ethnically Chinese voters.
There was a 1997 report from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS)—responsible for espionage and counterespionage efforts in the country—and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, warning that a confluence of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials, organized crime bosses, and business tycoons were cooperating to infiltrate Canadian businesses and steal intellectual property and “interfere in the management of the country.”
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But Ottawa didn’t want to hear it. A final version of that 1997 report was sanitized, and the direct allegations against Beijing were removed.
...in 2010, the head of CSIS tried to raise those concerns again, teasing that there were sitting politicians “who we think are under at least the general influence of a foreign government.” For that, he was excoriated.
In the years that followed, evidence of Chinese operations mounted. There were accusations that Chinese state news agency Xinhua was trying to spy on the Dalai Lama’s trip to Ottawa and a suggestion it directed the seduction of one member of parliament. There is a credible allegation that Chinese spies bugged the offices of former telecommunications giant Nortel, using the ill-gotten technology to launch Huawei. There was a Beijing-backed hack of a government research facility, and an espionage effort run out of Vancouver to steal F-35 fighter jet secrets.
He may not have acknowledged it publicly, but Trudeau and his government were being briefed consistently about the threat posed by Chinese meddling.
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“When I first became aware of the significance of the threat posed by outside interference to our democratic institutions,” an anonymous national security official wrote in the pages of the Globe and Mail in March this year, “I worked—as have many unnamed and tireless colleagues—to equip our leaders with the knowledge and the tools needed to take action against it.”
Two elections came and went, the official wrote, and it became “increasingly clear that no serious action was being considered. Worse still, evidence of senior public officials ignoring interference was beginning to mount.”
The official provided ample documentation to the Globe highlighting the contours of this plot. Complimentary revelations appeared in the Global News. Broadly, the two news outlets reported a concerted and clandestine effort by the Chinese government to help politicians friendly to Beijing and hurt those who were more skeptical.
2. Trudeaus' record with China:
China and Canada have been friendly since then-Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau established relations with Beijing in 1970—two years before then-U.S. President Richard Nixon went to China.
Question - if Canada had ties with China, did they do so via Pakistan? Why did Nixon use Yahya Khan as his go-between with China if he could have used Canada?
By the 1990s, about two percent of Canadians were either Chinese-born or descended from Chinese immigrants. (That percentage would more than double by the 2000s.)
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Trudeau was up for reelection for the first time in 2019 and came out ahead—albeit with a severely reduced majority and a hung Parliament. He went back to the electorate two years later, in 2021, and got almost exactly the same result. Over the course of the two elections, Trudeau continued to take a softer line on China, at least in contrast to the hawkish Conservative Party. In the first election, the Conservatives wanted a “reset” on Canada’s China policy, refocused on human rights and fighting unfair trade practices. In the next race, they proposed a more complete decoupling. And in two successive elections, the Conservative vote declined in jurisdictions with large Chinese Canadian populations. “When you keep attacking China, it sometimes translates as attacking the Chinese community,” Joe Li, a municipal politician, told the National Post at the time.
So like the vote-bank with Khalistanis, vote back with Chinese-origin.
... when Trudeau first ran for high office, he did so on a plan to deepen trade ties with Beijing—in contrast to his predecessor, who had taken a more cautious approach. Trudeau fixed his gaze on an elusive project: becoming the first country in the G-7 to sign a full free-trade deal with Beijing.
Trudeau made his first visit to China in 2016, less than a year after his election. There, he gifted Chinese President Xi Jinping a medallion of Norman Bethune, a Canadian surgeon and personal friend of CCP leader Mao Zedong. It was identical to a medallion that Trudeau’s father, as prime minister, gifted Mao himself in 1973.
His government began negotiating an extradition deal to deport alleged money launderers back to China. In 2017, Trudeau sent a junior minister to Beijing to attend the first-ever Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation. And Ottawa purchased 1 percent of the shares in the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, set up to finance much of the Belt and Road Initiative’s work. (Ottawa has committed itself to about $1 billion, but has only paid in around $200 million.)
...Chinese firms moved to acquire a port in Churchill, Manitoba, and a gold mine in Hope Bay, Nunavut, which sits right along the Northwest Passage, soon to be navigable year-round.
For advice on how to get these deals done, Trudeau turned to groups such as the Canada China Business Council (CCBC), helmed by the powerful Desmarais family, owners of the Power Corporation of Canada—a major energy business that is also a minority shareholder in one of China’s largest mutual funds. The council itself is made up of Chinese companies such as Huawei and Canadian firms such as Teck Resources, which once boasted a member of China’s National People’s Congress on its board.
Trudeau appointed the CCBC head, Peter Harder, to the Senate of Canada in 2016. Both he and CCBC informed Ottawa’s China policies throughout Trudeau’s time in power.
Trudeau’s first mandate was a flurry of negotiations and relations-building exercises, meant to position Canada as China’s key ally in the West. Washington’s hawkish tone on Beijing did little to dissuade Ottawa, as diversifying Canada’s economy away from the United States was explicitly part of the reason for cozying up to China.
Right up until December 2018, it seemed that Canada was managing to thread the needle with China. The United States was taking a cautious approach, informed by waves of intellectual property theft, trade grievances, and security fears in the Indo-Pacific; and Europe was a jumble of competing interests. Ottawa had the natural resources to sell, and a nearly limitless desire for investment capital.
But then the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, on a warrant from U.S. officials, arrested Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou. The daughter of the company’s founder, and herself its chief financial officer, Wanzhou was accused of violating U.S. sanctions on Iran.
Nine days later, China arrested two Canadian citizens: Michael Kovrig, a former diplomat; and Michael Spavor, an entrepreneur. Beijing accused them of espionage.
The ensuing diplomatic spat—which lasted until Meng’s case was dismissed in 2021, precipitating Kovrig and Spavor’s release not long after—put much of the Canada-China relationship building on ice.
Talking points prepared for government ministers shifted from lauding the economic opportunity of better ties to Beijing to highlighting the “unprecedented crisis.” The extradition deal, once a priority, became a “challenge.” Publicly, Ottawa began calling out what had become a well-documented genocide in Xinjiang. The free trade deal was off the table, for now.
At the G-7 summit, Trudeau proposed that the world’s richest countries ought to form a bulwark against this kind of foreign meddling. Under the plan, each country would set up its own “rapid response mechanism,” creating a mesh network designed to identify and expose those interference efforts before they could do real damage.
The mechanism would be, a joint communique boasted, “strong action in response to foreign actors who seek to undermine our democratic societies and institutions, our electoral processes, and our sovereignty.”
At home, Trudeau took it a step further: He created the Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections (SITE) task force, a team of senior bureaucratic and intelligence officials tasked with identifying foreign meddling efforts and alerting the public.
Yet from the outset, it seemed Ottawa’s focus was almost exclusively on Russian interference.
Since SIGINT came up with respect to India - see the detail here compared to the total non-information with respect to allegations about India:
But the leaks revealed that CSIS had, in fact, intercepted a conversation between Zhang and Chinese diplomats discussing a plan to make the donation and to have the Chinese government repay that hefty sum, according to a security source who spoke to the Globe.
What’s more, CSIS had obtained intelligence suggesting that Chinese operatives, including diplomat Zhao Wei, were collecting information on at least two members of parliament, including Conservative Michael Chong and Jenny Kwan, a member of the New Democratic Party. The aim, CSIS believed, was to threaten those members’ families in China in order to cow the members into silence on matters regarding Beijing’s human rights record.
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The spies felt they had identified the threat but were being held back from tackling it.
But Ottawa still has a fundamental problem: China has spent decades intimidating Canada’s citizens, stealing its intellectual property, and meddling in its politics. That campaign reached feverish new heights over the past few years. Today, even after a national panic over it, Ottawa seems bewildered as to how it could thwart such efforts in the future.
Some of the best advice came from Johnston. “One of the most important ways to counter foreign interference is for the public to understand what it looks like and how to be resilient against it,” he wrote in the report. “The public is often on the ‘front lines’ of foreign interference activities, as private citizens and the public at large can be the targets of foreign interference activities.”
Yet that is the opposite approach from the one taken by Ottawa. Rather than alerting the public to this meddling effort, it kept it secret. And despite knowing the culprits, Canada has been slow and reticent to lay criminal charges: It laid its first-ever criminal case for economic espionage just last year, against a researcher accused of stealing secrets from a state energy company. The FBI, for the United States’ part, has charged dozens of alleged Chinese agents with harassment, intellectual property theft, and spying.
