Monday, March 13, 2023

Don't Look Where I'm Pointing!

The infiltration of Canada by China has gone long before  Justin was installed in his dad's former office.

It certainly has been ramped up since then:

But Michael Chan, a former Ontario Liberal cabinet minister and current deputy mayor of Markham, Ont., used an open letter the same day to level a blistering attack on CSIS itself, accusing the agency of persecuting him for 13 years, among other ills.

“I’m writing to respectfully request that you immediately convene a full public inquiry into the profoundly disturbing activities of CSIS, its leaders and employees,” he said in the message directed at Trudeau. “Canadians deserve clear answers and reject the notion that CSIS’s secretive veil shields them from the highest standards of integrity, transparency and accountability.”

Posted initially on Twitter, the missive has been covered widely in Chinese-language media this week.

 

What Mr. Chan expects is that Justin will quash any and all investigations into foreign intervention.

I will ask who Mr. Chan serves.

**

The extremely annoying habit he has of rattling off whatever string of words he has stored up for when he’s questioned — regardless of the actual question asked — was on full and embarrassing display. This habit is even more annoying when he indulges in multiple repeats of the same string of words. As he did so often this week, when Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre — as trenchant a presence in question period as we have seen in a while — put him under the laser beam.

The glum faces of some cabinet ministers when Poilievre was whirring the rhetorical Veg-O-Matic suggested that some of them were thinking of calling 911 before their leader utterly cratered. Poilievre, on the other hand, looked like a man having a grand old time.

 

But Justin and his dad have always had a fondness for dictators.

** 

Evidence of China’s alleged influence in the 2021 federal election might be found as much in what didn’t happen as what did — namely, the significant number of previous Conservative voters who did not show up to cast a ballot in ridings in British Columbia and Ontario. ...

The National Post reviewed voting tallies from ridings identified as areas of concern by various reports and by Conservative campaign officials. The ridings are all home to large populations of Chinese Canadians.

Across multiple ridings, a similar pattern emerged: Conservative candidates saw significantly fewer supporters coming to the polls, however the Liberals did not see large gains, indicating not that large numbers of voters switched allegiances, but that for some reason, large numbers of voters did not vote at all. ...

The victorious Liberal MP, Paul Chiang, put on a strong campaign garnering nearly 22,000 votes. It was Chiang’s first election, and on doorsteps he emphasized his strong local roots in the riding and his decades of work as a police officer. Trudeau visited the riding several times. But Chiang only received 1,500 more votes than the previous Liberal candidate did. Far more important to the election result was the steep drop in support for Saroya.

Chiang has shown no evident favouritism to China since being elected, voting for a motion condemning the Chinese government for their treatment of the Uyghur genocide just last month.

In B.C., former Conservative MP Alice Wong won the seat for Richmond Centre in 2015 with more than 17,000 votes and in 2019 with more than 19,000 votes. But in 2021, her vote count sank by almost 6,000 votes, to 13,440. She lost to a Liberal, despite the Liberal vote increasing only by about 2,000.

Several other ridings around Toronto and Vancouver with large Chinese Canadian populations saw declines in Conservative support, without the bulk of that support switching to other parties.

Former Conservative MP Kenny Chiu lost his Steveston-Richmond East riding after 4,400 fewer Conservative supporters voted for him in 2021 than in 2019. He has alleged a misinformation campaign was spread on Chinese social media apps, including WeChat, about his party and his positions, including that the Conservatives were going to ban WeChat.

However, Chiu also said many of his constituents were extremely cautious of COVID and Trudeau’s decision to run an election during a pandemic hurt his campaign.

“It’s understandable right in the middle of the pandemic, that people not only would not open their door, let alone go out to the ballot and vote,” Chiu said.

Chiu’s riding has been hotly contested in the past. He won fairly narrowly in 2019 after losing in 2015. He said he is still convinced there was outside interference, because the time between the 2019 and 2021 elections had been so short, and most of the news about the Liberals during that time was negative.

 

 

Working hard at being arrogant:

Canada's minister for international trade says she never considered resigning after the federal ethics commissioner found she broke rules by awarding a contract to a friend.

"I failed to recuse myself from any dealings that ultimately led to the awarding of that contract, and for that I regret and it was a mistake and I apologize for that," Mary Ng told host of CTV's Question Period Vassy Kapelos on Sunday.

"Canadians expect me to continue to keep working hard, I've committed to continue to do that."

 

This Mary Ng:

Trade Minister Mary Ng will not comment on her association with a group one parliamentary witness on Friday named as a Communist Party front. Ng is one of four Liberal MPs to publicly endorse the Confederation of Toronto Chinese Canadian Organizations: “This is but the tip of the iceberg.”

 

Expertise handed to China:

Beijing is using a “workaround strategy” for postgraduate researchers to study cutting-edge technology at Canadian and U.S. universities after Washington began denying visas for some Chinese students on the grounds that they might steal intellectual property with military uses, according to a Canadian Security Intelligence Service report.
The Dec. 21, 2021, report, labelled secret and viewed by The Globe and Mail, said the strategy sends some scholarship students to Canada from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) with the aim of gaining access to critical high tech.
The Chinese government’s game plan includes training these Chinese citizens on how to avoid drawing too much attention when studying abroad.
The CSIS report lays out how China is using students to obtain technology that could be of benefit to the Chinese military, such as quantum computing, big data and artificial intelligence. The report was shared across key government departments and with the CIA, FBI and Britain’s domestic intelligence service, M15, as well as Australian and New Zealand authorities.
“Since the United States is blocking the People’s Republic of China’s access to high-end critical technologies, Chinese students are switching their majors to non-sensitive fields that employ related technologies,” according to the CSIS intelligence report.
It said Chinese citizens are also switching their majors when moving to Canada so they end up studying in less-sensitive fields where their work would not attract scrutiny. The report gave an example of an unnamed student sponsored to study in Canada by the China Scholarship Council.
“For example, one student majored in remote sensing in the People’s Republic of China. In Canada, the same student’s major is forestry, which utilizes similar technology to remote sensing,” CSIS said in the report.
Remote sensing includes using satellites or airplanes to gather data from a great distance. The military employs it to determine enemy locations and movements, and this information is crucial for planning and operations.
CSIS has publicly warned that Beijing is threatening Canada’s national security and intellectual property in five sensitive areas of research and development, including quantum theory, photonics, artificial intelligence, biopharmaceuticals and aerospace.
The spy agency said in the December, 2021, report that Chinese graduate students funded by the China Scholarship Fund are required to pledge loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party. They received two weeks of training before they come to Canada on how to keep a low profile to avoid attracting the attention of security services, CSIS said.
The instruction included “how to be careful, avoid talking too much and to ‘just listen,’ ” CSIS said. The students are taught to “avoid individuals who attempt to build friendships, and limit discussions about past and current studies and hobbies.”

 

 

Investigating?

Hardly.

Sitting on:

Quebec RCMP is investigating two locations suspected to be secret Chinese police service stations, adding to several such police outposts previously identified in Ontario and British Columbia.
The RCMP has confirmed that the two locations under investigation are in Montreal and Brossard, a suburb just south of the city.
The probe was first reported by Le Journal du Montreal on March 8, citing the locations under investigation as the Chinese Family Service of Greater Montreal (SFCGM), in the city’s Chinatown neighbourhood, and the South Shore Sino-Québec Center (CSQRS), a community organization in Brossard.

 

Remember the haste with which the RCMP trampled on actual Canadian citizens and seized their property simply because they showed up on Parliament Hill?

Who in these illegal Chinese police stations have been deported?  What of the material therein?

I think we know.

 

Also:

A Montreal area city councillor who oversees two organizations suspected by the RCMP of hosting Chinese police stations has been asked to step aside during a police probe of the issue.
Brossard Mayor Doreen Assaad said she asked councillor Xixi Li to recuse herself from her role during the RCMP investigation, reported the Journal de Montréal on March 10.
Separately, Assaad said she also made a complaint against Li, who’s aligned with an opposition party, to the province’s director of elections regarding the 2021 municipal elections.
The mayor alleges that Li used the logo of the Director General of Elections in her political communications in Chinese during the campaign.
Li is the director of the Centre Sino-Québec de la Rive-Sud (CSQRS) in Brossard and the Service à la famille chinoise du Grand Montréal (SFCGM).
Both entities have been identified by the RCMP as being the subjects of investigations for allegedly hosting Chinese police stations.

 


Yes, Mr. Norman.

We know:

Canada’s former vice chief of defence staff Mark Norman says that Canadians’ “way of life is in jeopardy” because successive federal governments failed to take defence and security issues “seriously” for years.

Speaking to the annual Conference of Defence Associations Institute in Ottawa on Friday, Norman lambasted federal politicians of all stripes for the “irresponsible” and “dangerous” politicization of the country’s security and defence.

“We are not taking defence and security seriously in this country and our way of life is in jeopardy as a result,” Norman said during an opening statement for a panel he was hosting on “gauging China’s ambitions, strategy and ability to project power in the Indo-Pacific.”

“This conference is an important platform for the discussion of national defence and security issues, a much-needed contribution to what is a woefully inadequate, arguably non-existent, national security culture here in Canada,” he added.

 

Also:

How prepared is Canada to defend our northern frontier?

“We’re naked,” declares David Harries, the perfect military insider, now mostly on the outside. ...

“You heard what General Eyre (Chief of Defence Staff) said,” Harries responds. “When asked … are the Canadian forces ready for what’s happening, he said ‘No, I lose sleep at night about them not being ready.’” We have a country that has given Ukraine more military resources in a year than it’s given the Canadian forces in the last decade.

The world has changed a lot, we agree. And the balloons that so captured our attention a few weeks back are a signal to us, to wake up.

Harries leans into his screen with one last story: “I was at RMC yesterday having a meeting with Athletics about rugby issues. God. The new dress rules. There are no dress rules. You can wear what you want. If you are a male, you can wear a RMC skirt if you want. If you want to colour your hair, you can colour your hair. There are no rules on hair anymore. If you want tattoos on your face, you can tattoo your face. This is all in the interest of diversity and human rights. I can tell you what our allies think of this.”

Canada may not prepared for what’s next, but we’re woke.

 


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