Tuesday, March 12, 2024

We Don't Have to Trade With China

This China:


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The proof is out, and the jig is up: China’s government interfered in two Canadian federal elections. It did so aggressively and with tangible results.

According to CSIS documents obtained by the Globe and Mail, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) operatives orchestrated cash donations to political campaigns, had business owners hire “volunteers” for specific election campaigns and boasted that it’s “easy to influence Chinese immigrants to agree with the PRC’s stance.”

The goal: to install a minority Liberal government. In the words of one Chinese consular official, Beijing “likes it when the parties in Parliament are fighting with each other, whereas if there is a majority, the party in power can easily implement policies that do not favour the PRC.”

This information builds on previous revelations by Global News journalist Sam Cooper and Postmedia reporter Tom Blackwell. Cooper reported last December that the Privy Council had issued a national security memo in February 2020 documenting China’s “subtle but effective foreign interference networks” in the 2019 election.

Blackwell reported in November about a group called the Chinese Council for Western Ontario Elections, whose stated goal is to incubate candidates who support the Chinese community’s interests, but whose address is the same as that of a Chinese “police service station” used to intimidate Chinese expatriates in Canada.

Last June, former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole stated that the Tories lost eight or nine seats in 2021 due to foreign interference. The CSIS documents reveal that China’s former consul general in Vancouver, Tong Xiaoling, bragged that she helped defeat two Conservative candidates in 2021.

One of those is believed to be former Conservative MP Kenny Chiu, who was the subject of a disinformation campaign. Voters were told the Conservatives would ban WeChat, a popular Chinese social media network, and that his proposed foreign agents registry would target all Canadian citizens of Chinese origin.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau downplayed the CSIS reports and said the leaked documents are a sign that the organization needs to review its internal security measures.

To say this is pathetic is an understatement. Unless Trudeau takes immediate and decisive action to stop this interference, he will not only fail to rebuild his tattered credibility on national security, he will undermine the very democracy he purports to serve.


(Sidebar: I don't think he cares about that.)

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And now:

The document also shows that Ms. Qiu was advised she should conceal her project with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) from her management at the National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) in Winnipeg, as the WIV had asked for virus samples from the Canadian lab.
The document, compiled by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), is part of a 600-page package on the firing of the two scientists that was recently released after years of requests by MPs.

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Ever since coming to power in 2015, the Liberals have chosen to hide the scope and extent of Beijing’s ever-expanding influence, interference and infiltration operations in Canada. By acts of obstruction, distraction and filibuster, the pattern is by now easily predictable. There’s nothing surprising about it anymore. The pattern played out exactly as you would imagine in the Winnipeg lab case.
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In their zeal to keep the public in the dark about the goings-on at the top-security national infections diseases laboratory, the Liberals went to extraordinary lengths, not least an historic defiance of the convention of Parliamentary supremacy to the point of mounting a court challenge to thwart an order from the Speaker of the House of Commons to release documents relating to the affair.
It was only because a panel of judges eventually found that contrary to the Trudeau government’s claims about the too-sensitive nature of the documents — 600 pages in all — the barricade it built was mostly to protect itself from public embarrassment. ...
You’d think the Trudeau government would want the public to be well aware of this scandal, illustrating as it does the extreme national-security peril involved in any collaboration with the shadowy world of Chinese state agencies. These collaborations pose a threat to Canada’s national interests that Ottawa claims it wants Canadians — particularly Canadian scientists and university researchers — to better understand, and to guard against.
Instead, the Liberal government persists even now in keeping the public in the dark, by way of teaming with the New Democrats to roadblock an ethics committee probe into the Winnipeg lab affair.
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It was only because of its minority position in the House of Commons back in 2019 that the Liberals failed in their efforts to block the establishment of a special standing committee to inquire into the weirdly opaque Canada-China relationship that Trudeau had cultivated and nurtured in the lead-up to Beijing’s hostage-diplomacy abduction of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor.
Until then, the matter of Beijing’s vastly expanding shadow over Liberal fundraising, candidate-selection, trade policy and diplomatic priorities was held to be best left to the “experts” from Dominic Barton’s disgraced McKinsey empire and the palm-greasers at the Canada-China Business Council. The pattern seemed to break, but the Canada-China relations committee quickly found itself mired in gridlocks by Liberal members determined to turn the subject back to more parochial matters, and to make excuses based on the presumed implications for the Kovrig-Spavor kidnapping, and to level insinuations that it was “racist” merely to inquire too closely into Beijing’s proxies and their rumoured election shenanigans.
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It took years of Liberal ambuscades and transparently bogus pretexts before Canada’s Five Eyes partners finally managed to arm-twist Ottawa to get with the program and at least bar China’s “national champion” telecom Huawei from the core structure of Canada’s fifth-generation (5G) internet rollout.
It took several months of explosive revelations about warnings from CSIS and other agencies to the effect that Beijing really was actively involved in monkey wrenching the 2019 and 2021 federal elections to the Liberals’ benefit before Trudeau decided for appearances’ sake to conjure something to impede calls for a public inquiry. The gambit was a “independent special rapporteur” whitewash undertaken by David Johnston, an old Trudeau family friend, and an especially solicitous and high-profile Canadian friend of China.
When that didn’t work, faced with the demands of several majority votes in the House of Commons, Team Trudeau managed to construct a public inquiry that so far shows every sign that it will extend as much in the way of protection to Beijing’s Liberal-friendly mandarin bloc proxies in Canada as to the Uyghurs, Hong Kongers, expatriate Chinese democrats and Falun Gong practitioners those same well-to-do proxies have been bullying, browbeating and intimidating all these years.
So best of luck to any Parliamentarians who would want an Ethics Committee probe or any other such open inquiry into how the hell the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg ended up a sieve of intellectual-property patents for Beijing’s benefit, and an open buffet for Beijing’s ravenous appetite for top-secret information about infectious diseases.
Any such initiative would allow Canadians to know things the Liberal government does not want any of us to know, and the pattern with these things is so predictable it’s becoming downright boring.
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It's called hush money:

Justin needed to make that disappear fast.

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Chinese-made cargo cranes that have been flagged as a security concern by an ongoing congressional probe in the United States are widely deployed throughout Canada’s ports.

A House of Representatives’ joint committee said its investigation turned up evidence of cellular modems on the Chinese-made port cranes that “do not appear in any way to contribute to the operation … raising significant questions as to their intended applications.”

The cranes in question were manufactured by Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industries Co. Ltd. (ZPMC), and the U.S. House probe noted the company manufactures its cranes at a site adjacent to a shipyard where the Chinese Communist Party’s Navy builds its “most advanced” warships.

“This proximity to … (the) main shipyard provides malicious CCP entities, including its intelligence agencies and security services, with ample opportunity to modify U.S.-bound maritime equipment, exploit it to malfunction, or otherwise facilitate cyber espionage thereby compromising U.S. maritime critical infrastructure,” the U.S. House committee said in a Feb 29. letter to ZPMC.

So far, the Canadian government has not voiced similar concerns in public. A spokesman for the Ministry of Public Safety did not provide comment by publication time.



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