Has China Damaged Canadian Democracy?

By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

I’m guessing that most Canadians, if they’re not ostriches, now realize that the Chinese government has for quite a long time been interfering, in ways big and small, in Canada’s politics. This has included trying to help certain candidates win, and others lose, their seats in recent Canadian federal elections. That cat is now out of the bag.

As it happens, one of the people who has contributed to this awareness is Michel Juneau-Katsuya, who spoke to two of my classes March 14 about foreign interference in Canada and the current public inquiry looking into it. He was a senior intelligence officer and manager with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) in counter-intelligence, as head of its Asia Pacific operations.

Juneau-Katsuya was on PEI because of his contribution to the launch of two newly published books, “The Mosaic Effect: How the Chinese Communist Party Started a Hybrid War in America’s Backyard” and “Under Cover: Inside the Shady World of Organized Crime and the RCMP.”

He has long been critical of the Canadian government’s failure to recognize the threat of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in Canada. “Regrettably, throughout my 40-year career I’ve encountered these attitudes from our Canadian political elite,” he stated. In 2010 he co-authored “Nest of Spies: The Startling Truth About Foreign Agents at Work Within Canada’s Borders.”

Testifying last May before a House of Commons committee studying foreign interference, he told them that CSIS had known since the 1990s that Conservative and Liberal governments, as well as political parties have been compromised by China. 

The Chinese were of course not equal-opportunity obstructionists: they were mostly helping Liberals. Why? The Liberals have long had a love affair with China’s political system, going all the way back to Pierre Trudeau. More recently, Trudeau’s longtime political ally Jean Chretien, and Trudeau’s own son, Justin, have carried on this tradition.

While rumors of Beijing’s ever-expanding influence, interference and infiltration operations have long circulated, the Trudeau government was successful in keeping them contained. Ever since coming to power in 2015, the Liberals have chosen to hide the scope and extent of Beijing’s role.

That year was also, as it happens, that Chinese president Xi Jinping began pouring immense resources into the Chinese Communist Party’s overseas operations, via the “United Front” strategy. The Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department, the superstructure devoted to enforcing compliance with the regime’s policies among overseas Chinese, and under the control of the party’s Central Committee, was seemingly no issue with Trudeau. Anyhow, why stop it? After all, they were doing the job of helping his party!

Meanwhile, various Chinese community centres were accused of acting as hubs hosting illegal “police stations” on behalf of the PRC to harass and intimidate members of the large Chinese diaspora in Canada.

By 2018 these tactics of harassment, infiltration and “elite capture” were well under way. And they got worse during the 2019 and 2021 federal elections, in order to tilt support towards the Liberals in ridings with large numbers of ethnic Chinese voters. At least eleven constituencies in the greater Toronto and Vancouver regions were affected.

As well, CSIS said former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole was specifically targeted for defeat by Chinese diplomats and by Beijing’s Canadian proxies during the 2021 federal election.

Yet warnings from CSIS and other agencies were largely kept under wraps. Trudeau also ignored it, confident that it would never be revealed. After all, a joint report into Chinese interference in Canada drawn from an RCMP and CSIS investigation, Project Sidewinder, which found evidence of foreign agents working in this country to influence important leaders and “neutralize” criticism of China, was written 26 years ago! But it was never made public.

“We have not taken this seriously,” Juneau-Katsuya declared. “There was a lack of political will to work on these issues. We do not have a culture of national security. We have national insecurity. Even when we have the evidence, the elite doesn’t want to know it.” Politicians, even cabinet ministers, had “become addicted to Chinese money” and could be “seduced” to help China. It has taken 10 years to even begin to act to craft a law to define what foreign interference entails.

But this whole bubble has now burst. Last September, the government finally appointed Quebec Court of Appeal Justice Marie-Josee Hogue to lead a public inquiry into alleged election interference. This was a victory for Conservative politicians who have accused the Trudeau government of failing to adequately respond to the allegations.

Trudeau had previously assigned former Governor General David Johnston to look into the allegations, but he stepped down last June after saying that a “highly partisan atmosphere” had made it impossible to complete his task.

Canada was considered a “high-priority” target for Chinese interference ahead of the September 2021 election, according to a top-secret July 2021 CSIS intelligence assessment viewed by the Hogue commission inquiry Feb. 21.

Another declassified document, dated Feb. 24, 2023, titled “Briefing to the Minister of Democratic Institutions on Foreign Interference,” called China “by far the most significant threat.”

Justice Hogue is tasked with submitting an interim report by May 3. So there’s been progress – though, as Juneau-Katsuya told my students, “Canadian democracy is in trouble.”