We Don't Have to Trade With China

Nor let it rig our elections:

Despite learning of “concerns” of allegations of potential foreign interference in the Don Valley nomination race in 2019, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says he decided not to remove Han Dong as the Liberal candidate because it would have been a “drastic option” based on the available intelligence.

“I didn’t feel that there was sufficient or sufficiently credible information that would justify this very significant step,” Trudeau told Canada’s inquiry into foreign election interference.

 

What did he think about the bussing in of Chinese students?:

A member of Canada’s Parliament testified on Tuesday that high school students from China were transported by bus to vote for him in a party election that is at the center of a federal inquiry into interference in Canadian elections by China and other foreign countries.

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Speaking of interlopers:

Chinese Canadians face new “nativist and xenophobic” discrimination, claims Liberal-appointed Senator Yuen Pau Woo (B.C.). The Senator was granted standing at the China inquiry but did not participate in hearings that exposed illegal activities by Chinese Communist Party agents: “Do you have any ties with the Chinese regime?”

 

I find Chinese communist nativism rather offensive.

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“This could be deemed illegal by Canadian courts,” reads the memo. “Canadians of Chinese ethnicity and those who are publicly critical of People’s Republic of China policies are most frequently subject to such threatening behaviour.”

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Canada’s spy chief David Vigneault testified under oath he repeatedly warned Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and political aides that Chinese agents were targeting Conservative MPs. Vigneault’s testimony contradicted the Prime Minister: “It is indeed something I communicated.”

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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s national security adviser sent him a briefing in 2017, warning about unwarranted investigations by Chinese police in Canada, according to a declassified document.

The warning came at a time when Ottawa was pursuing closer relations with the communist regime, including a potential free trade agreement. A year earlier, as part of preliminary talks toward a free trade agreement, Canada had also agreed to negotiate a possible extradition treaty with Beijing.

The top secret memo, dated June 29, 2017, and titled “People’s Republic of China Political Interference in Canada,” provided a summary to the prime minister. Another stamp on the memo says ”returned from the PM” and is dated July 25, 2017.

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The inquiry heard about a widespread misinformation campaign that circulated mainly among Chinese speakers on social media sites like WeChat.

Several intelligence documents suggest the aim of the campaign was to dissuade the Chinese-Canadian community from voting for the Conservatives.

A briefing note from fall 2023 ties the campaign to China, and says it was “almost certainly” motivated by a perception that the Conservative platform was anti-China.

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Interesting.

Even the Stasi is breaking ranks with the Liberals on this:

A publicly accessible registry to name names of lobbyists acting for China “would be valuable,” says an RCMP briefing note. A federal review of a foreign agents’ registry has been underway for more than a year: “A foreign agent registry would be valuable.”

If Justin wasn't so scared of women and truckers (or women truckers), this could be doable.

One can conclude the following: either Justin is too stupid and lazy to do his job (ie - read intelligence reports) or he so admires China's basic dictatorship that he is willing to have communist agents slip into Canada and do as their government tells them. 

Either way, he should lose his job:

What’s genuinely newsworthy about the proceedings is that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service documents now on file with the commission confirm pretty well all the shocking news reports about Chinese election subterfuge that the Trudeau government, from the beginning, has variously disputed, denied, or dismissed as outbursts of anti-Asian racism or Conservative sour grapes.

The second paradox involves the pathology that the public inquiry has inadvertently allowed Canadians to witness, in real time. It’s the Liberal government’s cynical indifference to Beijing’s orchestration of interference operations across the country, a crippling pathology CSIS has been shouting about for years.

That same indifference fairly oozed from Prime Minister Trudeau and his officials this week at the inquiry — proceedings the Liberals fought tooth and nail, by obstruction and filibuster, in the effort to prevent the commission from even getting off the ground.

In just one of the 34 briefings about foreign interference that CSIS has provided the Prime Minister’s Office, various cabinet ministers and other senior officials in the years since 2018, a briefing note from last February, tabled with Hogue’s commission this week, contained this warning: “Until (foreign interference) is viewed as an existential threat to Canadian democracy and governments forcefully and actively respond, these threats will persist.”

Here’s one newsworthy thing that has emerged from the hearings: either by design or incompetence, the Trudeau government did not forcefully or actively respond to Beijing’s interference operations in the 2019 or the 2021 elections. Not by way of the Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections Task Force, and not by way of the panel of five senior public servants attending to the “Critical Election Incident Public Protocol.”

Another thing: Trudeau, his chief of staff Katie Telford and Jeremy Broadhurst, the Liberals’ national campaign director during the 2019 election, all went out of their way this week to impugn the various CSIS findings about the breadth and scope of Beijing’s subterfuge in Canada as unreliable, implausible and sometimes even inaccurate.

According to CSIS, though, China’s efforts included a slush fund of $250,000 that China’s Toronto consulate funnelled into “a group of known and suspected” Mandarin-bloc “threat actors” in the Greater Toronto Area to “covertly advance PRC interests though Canadian democratic institutions.”

Beijing’s exertions included a campaign targeting former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole, former Conservative MP Kenny Chiu, New Democrat Jenny Kwan and Conservative shadow foreign minister Michael Chong. The operation targeting Chong and his family was so brazen it eventually forced Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly to expel Wei Zhao, a Chinese Ministry of State Security operative working out of the Toronto consulate. CSIS had been warning the Liberals to stay away from the guy for at least three years.

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CSIS surveillance and wiretaps suggest that 11 political candidates and 13 political staff members were “either implicated in or impacted by this group of threat actors,” prior to and during the 2019 election.

As CSIS assessments, independent investigations and open-source evidence have consistently shown, Beijing’s operations in 2019 and 2021 were primarily intended to prevent the Liberals from losing to the Conservatives, leaving the Trudeau government in a minority position. Even so, on Wednesday, Dominic Leblanc, who held senior cabinet posts related to elections and national security in 2019 and 2021, threw his own shade at CSIS. He said he was skeptical that CSIS could discern “the shifting partisan preferences” of the Chinese government.