We Don't Have to Trade With China

No matter how much Mark Carney wants us to:

A month prior to Carney’s trip to China, then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made him chair of the Liberals’ Task Force on Economic Growth.

A report from the Telegraph, entitled Mark Carney meets [Chinese President Xi Jinping] as China woos the West, says Carney met with the People's Bank of China deputy director in October — two weeks later Brookfield secured a $256 million loan from the Chinese state-owned bank.

Carney has repeatedly refused to disclose his holdings in Brookfield. On Monday, he said “screens” have been put up around his investments and they are now in a blind trust. 

(Sidebar: which he can see.)

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Federal election monitors yesterday said they suspect Chinese Communist Party agents are running a media campaign describing Prime Minister Mark Carney as a “rock star.” The Liberal Party was notified Sunday but made no public comment: “Carney has an ambitious economic recovery plan."

Also - don't they normally use threats for this sort of thing?:

Federal authorities say they have detected an information operation linked to the Chinese regime that seeks to influence Chinese Canadians’ perceptions about Prime Minister and Liberal Leader Mark Carney.

The Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections (SITE) Task Force said the information operation was “deliberately amplifying narratives in a coordinated and inauthentic way” on the Chinese social media platform WeChat.

“Specifically, various contrasting narratives were spread on WeChat about Mr. Carney – first amplifying the candidate’s stance with the United States, then targeting his experience and credentials,” authorities said in a statement.

The initial information came from an anonymous blog on WeChat called Youli-Youmian, said to be the most popular news account on the platform. WeChat’s parent company Tencent says its social media platform has 1.3 billion monthly users.

SITE said intelligence reporting has linked the Youli-Youmian account to the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission. This powerful organ oversees the state security apparatus.

The SITE Task Force said it observed “large spikes” of what it believes is “coordinated inauthentic behaviour” in relation to articles posted by the WeChat account on March 10 and March 25. The campaign around the March 25 article was being boosted by 30 smaller WeChat accounts, leading to the articles reaching between 1 million to 3 million views, SITE said, which is much higher than content usually posted by Chinese state media.