We Don't Have to Trade With China

(head shake)

 

Conservative member of Parliament Michael Chong says Ottawa should have informed him about potential threats to his family made by China’s government.

Chong released a statement after the Globe and Mail reported, citing a top-secret document and an anonymous national security source, that China’s intelligence service sought to target the MP and his family.

 

And why would Justin do a thing like that?

 

Examples of Justin's complete disregard for human life:

A sister of Robert Hall, one of two Canadian hostages beheaded in the Philippines earlier this year, is demanding an inquiry into how the Trudeau Liberals handled the high-profile kidnapping case—saying government officials “literally did the least they possibly could” to help rescue her 66-year-old brother.

Abducted by terrorists from a luxury marina one year ago today—along with his Filipina girlfriend Marites Flor, fellow Canadian John Ridsdel, and Norwegian Kjartan Sekkingstad—Robert Hall was executed on June 13, less than two months after Ridsdel met the same gruesome fate. Their kidnappers, members of the ISIS-linked Abu Sayyaf organization, murdered both men after repeated ransom deadlines passed without payment.

In a Wednesday Facebook post marking the anniversary of her brother’s abduction, Bonice Thomas says Ottawa should be “held accountable for their inaction and apathy toward two Canadians in extreme peril,” and urged others to join her call for an inquiry. “In the last video that we saw of Robert—alive—he brokenheartedly said that he felt he had been abandoned by his government,” Thomas writes. “He was right. And it broke my heart too.”

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Both sources said Dong allegedly suggested to Han Tao, China’s consul general in Toronto, that if Beijing released the “Two Michaels,” whom China accused of espionage, the Opposition Conservatives would benefit.

At the time, the two Canadians had been in Chinese custody for over two years. However, it was widely perceived that they were jailed in retribution for Canada’s detention of Meng Wanzhou, the Huawei executive facing extradition to the United States.

Dong also allegedly recommended that Beijing show some progress in the Kovrig and Spavor cases, the two sources said. Such a move would help the ruling Liberal Party, which was facing an uproar over China’s inhumane treatment of Kovrig and Spavor.

 

The Americans already shut down Chinese secret police stations:

Two Montreal-area community groups under investigation for allegedly hosting secret Chinese government police stations say they continue to operate normally, contradicting claims by the public safety minister that all the clandestine stations in Canada have been shut.

The two groups -- Service a la Famille Chinoise du Grand Montreal, based in the city's Chinatown district, and Centre Sino-Quebec de la Rive-Sud, in the Montreal suburb of Brossard, Que. -- say the RCMP has taken no action against them.

"We have not received any closure requests from the RCMP," they said Friday in a joint statement. "Our activities are proceeding normally." They added that they had lost funding, however, following media coverage of the RCMP allegations.

Meanwhile, Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino told a parliamentary committee last Thursday, "the RCMP have taken decisive action to shut down the so-called police stations."

Mendicino's office did not respond to a request for comment on Monday.

In mid-March the RCMP announced they were investigating the two Montreal-area groups -- along with alleged Chinese police stations in Vancouver and Toronto. At the time, RCMP Sgt. Charles Poirier said the Chinese government used the stations to put pressure on members of the Chinese community in Canada, sometimes by threatening friends or relatives living in China.

China bars citizens from leaving:

China is increasingly barring people, including foreign executives, from leaving the country, according to a report and research.

Scores of Chinese nationals and foreigners have been ensnared by exit bans, according to the report from the rights group Safeguard Defenders, while a Reuters analysis has found an apparent surge in court cases involving such bans in recent years.

Foreign business lobby groups are voicing concern about the trend, calling it a jarring message as the authorities say the country is open for business after three years of tight Covid-19 restrictions.

“Since Xi Jinping took power in 2012, China has expanded the legal landscape for exit bans and increasingly used them, sometimes outside legal justification,” the Safeguard Defenders report says.

The group estimates “tens of thousands” of Chinese citizens are banned from leaving at any one time. It also cites a 2022 academic paper that found 128 cases of foreigners being exit-banned between 1995 and 2019, including 29 Americans and 44 Canadians.

Focus on the exit bans comes as China-US tensions have risen over trade and security disputes and contrasts with China’s message that it is opening up to overseas investment and travel after the isolation of its Covid curbs.

The Reuters analysis of records on exit bans, from China’s supreme court database, shows an eightfold increase in cases mentioning bans between 2016 and 2022.

 

 

Why would anyone give China complete access to its ports?:

Beijing’s ownership of communications networks, harbours and shipping is being viewed with increasing alarm by western security services in their assessment of the threat posed by China and Russia to Europe’s critical infrastructure, a Nato official has warned.

In the aftermath of the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipeline last autumn, Nato has set up a special military unit to investigate the security of critical undersea infrastructure.

While the focus has been on the direct threat posed by Russia to undersea cables and pipelines, the alliance has additionally identified risks posed by Chinese ownership of key infrastructure, particularly telecommunications and ports.

  

Everything runs through the Chinese communist government:

A scholar on China has warned that affording more scrutiny to Chinese state-owned enterprises with regard to foreign takeovers of Canadian companies won’t entirely remove the risk of losing strategically to the communist regime.

“All Chinese global enterprises are fully integrated into the PRC [People’s Republic of China] party-state, corporate, military, and security apparatus, because as party General Secretary Xi Jinping has put it … ‘the party leads everything,’” said Charles Burton before the House of Commons industry and technology committee on May 1.

“There are no Chinese industrial enterprises existing independently from China’s party-state,” added Burton, a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

Burton and other experts and stakeholders were testifying with regard to the committee’s study of Bill C-34, which seeks to amend the Investment Canada Act.

Burton was reacting to comments made by Minister of Innovation François-Philippe Champagne, who testified before the committee on April 26.

Champagne said that only in exceptional circumstances would state-owned enterprises be allowed to invest in the sector of critical minerals.

Burton said that any foreign investment from China should be subjected to the “most stringent” national security test regardless of the sector.

He said that any intellectual property that a Chinese company becomes privy to through an investment in a Canadian partner “is as a matter of course going to be covertly transferred through Chinese Communist Party channels.” The regime will then use the technology to further its own interests, he said.

In making the case about Chinese corporations being under the control of the regime, Burton gave the example of telecommunications giant Huawei.

He said it “does not self-identify as a Chinese state-owned enterprise, but like all PRC institutions, its org chart suggests that Huawei’s Chinese Communist Party branch takes precedent over the Huawei board of directors in corporate decision-making.”

The federal government announced in May last year it was banning Huawei equipment from the country’s 5G wireless infrastructure over security concerns, but it allowed companies who had installed it already until June 2024 to remove it.

Bill C-34, sponsored by Champagne, seeks to strengthen the Investment Canada Act to better protect Canada’s economic security.

 

What Champagne is actually doing is making it easier for China to take Canadian resources.