Look what happened on June 4th, 1989:
At 1 a.m. on June 4, Chinese soldiers and police stormed Tiananmen Square, firing live rounds into the crowd.
Although thousands of protesters simply tried to escape, others fought back, stoning the attacking troops and setting fire to military vehicles. Reporters and Western diplomats in Beijing that day estimated that hundreds to thousands of protesters were killed in the Tiananmen Square Massacre, and as many as 10,000 were arrested.
Leaders worldwide, including Gorbachev, condemned the military action and, less than a month later, the U.S. Congress voted to impose economic sanctions against China, citing human rights violations.
Well, that didn't last long.
Indeed, people are happy to forget it:
The federal police force indicated in March it’s investigating Centre Sino-Québec de la Rive-Sud (CSQRS) and its sister organization in Montreal, the Service à la famille chinoise du Grand Montréal (SFCGM), two not-for-profits which have been tending to the needs of Chinese immigrants for decades.The issue of the presence of illegal Chinese police stations abroad came to the public’s attention after the Spanish NGO Safeguard Defenders released a report on the matter in September 2022. Seven such suspected stations have been identified in Canada to date.In the case of the two Montreal area locations, apparent formal links to the Chinese regime have been reported online since 2016.The organizations reportedly entered into agreements with the regime’s Overseas Chinese Affairs Office (OCAO) in 2016 to host “Chinese help centres,” with a stated focus to tend to the needs of the diaspora.Canadian immigration and border services view the OCAO as an entity involved in espionage and manipulation.The OCAO was also moved in 2018 under the control of the regime’s United Front Work Department (UFWD). The UFWD’s activities include “co-opting elites, persuasion, and facilitating espionage,” according to CSIS executive Cherie Henderson who testified at a House of Commons committee in January 2022.An article published in March 2016 on the Chinese language website FH Media says that the OCAO and the SFCGM jointly established a Chinese help centre with the help of the Chinese consulate in Montreal. It adds this occurred after centres were opened in Toronto and Vancouver.The director of the SFCGM and CSQRS, Xixi Li, is pictured in the article beside the director of OCAO, Qiu Yuanping.Li, who’s since become a Brossard city councillor in 2021, attended a previous OCAO meeting in China in 2014, according to FH Media.Li has not returned multiple requests for comment from The Epoch Times. The SFCGM and CSQRS have also not replied to inquiries.In 2015, according to an article sourced from the SFCGM and posted on Chinese-language news site Sinoquebec.com, Li attended an OCAO seminar in China for the heads of overseas Chinese services agencies. She is pictured in the article beside the deputy director of OCAO, Tan Tianxing.In 2016, the head of the OCAO, Qiu Yuanping, visited Montreal and offered gifts to the Montreal-area centres. Chinese consul in Montreal Peng Jingtao attended the ceremony with Xixi Li.Sinoquebec.com, with no corporate ties to Centre Sino-Québec, posted an article in January 2017 also sourced from the SFCGM and saying that Xixi Li had attended another meeting in China organized by OCAO with similar overseas Chinese support centres from other countries.The article adds that before the meeting, the OCAO had “specially nominated and invited” Li as the “representative” for North America.“Li Xixi said that the work of the Overseas Chinese Aid Center in Montreal cannot be achieved without the guidance and help of the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office and the Consulate General in Montreal, the concern and trust of the local Chinese community, Chinese and overseas Chinese, and the support of the three Canadian [levels of government] and related organizations,” wrote the SFCGM, according to Sinoquebec.com.Li and other delegates also went to visit the hometown of former Chinese leader Mao Zedong in Shaoshan and laid wreaths before his statue, says the report.An account of the meeting from Chinese state media China News Service also mentions that Xixi Li was in attendance at the meeting and she spoke of the benefit of the “QiaoBao” cellphone application, a platform used by the OCAO to release news to overseas Chinese people.
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A federal registry mandating disclosure of payments to all foreign agents “will provide us with very important tools,” Emergency Preparedness Minister Bill Blair said yesterday. Cabinet has yet to set any deadline for introduction of a bill: “Is there something that gives hesitance or pause?”**
Whatever you do, save Justin's scapegoat:
Liberal and New Democrat MPs last night saved David Johnston from a summons to testify on his dealings with the Trudeau Foundation. The Commons public accounts committee by a 6 to 4 vote adjourned debate on an order compelling Johnston to appear as a hostile witness: “It is like a subpoena from a lawyer. There are legal consequences.”
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Johnston's office has not yet disclosed what this is all costing taxpayers. The ex-vice regal himself is receiving a per diem of between $1,400 and $1,600 per day, and also has staff, travel and "other reasonable expenses" covered. Hockey Canada has admitted that it paid Navigator more than $1.6 million for assistance after it was revealed that the national hockey organization was using player registration fees to cover settlements in sexual abuse allegation cases.
Johnston served as Canada's governor general from 2010 to 2017 after being appointed by Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper. His appointment to the special rapporteur role in March stems from allegations of Chinese efforts to influence Canadian elections.
But Johnston’s appointment to the role has drawn scrutiny from opposition MPs who say he has a conflict of interest. The former governor general has said he has known Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's family for decades and would have first met Trudeau when the Liberal prime minister was still a child. Johnston has also been involved with the charitable Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, which once accepted a $200,000 donation from a Chinese businessman with ties to the Chinese government and has also been at the centre of foreign interference allegations.
Johnston released his initial report on foreign interference last week and ruled out a public inquiry. Citing "serious questions" with his mandate and conclusions, opposition MPs voted for Johnston to "step aside" from his rapporteur role in a non-binding majority vote that both Johnston and the Liberal government have rejected.
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The reason why no one did their jobs is because they are lazy and incompetent. That is the official line that they are running with:
A July 2021 CSIS assessment warning Beijing was targeting a Conservative MP and his relatives in China was sent to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s national-security adviser at the time, as well as three deputy ministers, but it’s unclear if anyone read the top-secret document, MPs heard Thursday.National security adviser Jody Thomas, who was deputy minister of National Defence in 2021, was adamant that Mr. Trudeau was unaware of the threat to the MP, who turned out to be Conservative foreign affairs critic Michael Chong, until The Globe and Mail revealed he was a target on May 1. The Globe report cited the Canadian Security Intelligence Service assessment and a national-security source.“I learned about it in The Globe and Mail. I had not previously seen the report nor had the Prime Minister,” she told the Commons procedure and House affairs committee.But Ms. Thomas testified that the CSIS assessment was sent in July 2021 to her at National Defence and to the deputy ministers of Foreign Affairs and Public Safety, as well as to David Morrison, who was Mr. Trudeau’s acting national-security adviser. He was presented the information in mid-August, she said.Conservative MP Michael Cooper, seeking direction on what happened next to the intelligence after it reached these offices, asked Ms. Thomas: “And it went nowhere?”She replied: “Correct.”Ms. Thomas said she was away on leave and never read the report that explained how Mr. Chong and family members in Hong Kong were targeted by Beijing. She would not speculate on what happened with Mr. Morrison, who has said he never read it either.“We found out who it had been sent to and tried to determine why it had not been briefed up,” she said. “It was incumbent on the deputy ministers to brief their ministers.”That apparently did not happen, but no single official is responsible for the failure to notify Mr. Chong, Ms. Thomas said. “There is no one person. There is no one single point of failure.”
Together, you are all stupid.
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I think we can guess why they are not speaking out:
No one suggests Spavor and Kovrig are obligated to publicly speak.
But some experts, such as Miles Yu, a former China adviser to the U.S. secretary of state, says the government of Canada has an obligation to speak about China’s behaviour, since it was involved in negotiating the Michaels’ release.
Spavor and Kovrig “may still feel the trauma of their torture and choose to refuse to relive those nightmarish memories” — even while it may not be “the most ideal outcome for public policy and public education,” Yu said in an interview.
“Or they might have been threatened by the Chinese Communist government to keep quiet to avoid further torment. So, on a personal level, I respect their choice,” said Yu, a professor of modern China at the U.S. Naval Academy in Maryland.
“But after their return to freedom, the Canadian government bears the responsibility to engender a public disclosure about the two Michaels’ ordeal, because the whole affair is not just about tactical transactions to ensure their release, but a matter of Canada as a sovereign country being blackmailed, and its citizens blatantly tortured with no justification whatsoever. In other words, the two Michaels may have the perfect right to be silent, the Canadian government does not.”
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Through its Belt and Road initiative, China has built infrastructure throughout Africa and established lucrative supply chains to several dozen nations. Over the past two decades, China has invested £123.85 billion in sub-Saharan Africa, research suggests.But this expansion into Africa has not always been positive, despite the vital investment it brings. In Sierra Leone, deception, corruption and intimidation, as with the British in the 1800s, have all been deployed to advance and consolidate the Chinese agenda.A joint investigation by the Telegraph and SourceMaterial explored how Chinese investors – facilitated by corrupt government officials – are plundering the natural resources of Sierra Leone and harming people’s health and causing serious environmental damage in the process. It uncovered:
- Plans to unlawfully mine granite from inside Freetown’s protected national forest and export the rock to the UK and other markets
- Outbreaks of violence between park rangers and Sierra Leonean soldiers tasked with protecting Chinese quarries
- The alleged poisoning of water supplies as a result of Chinese-run quarries
- The planned destruction of a pristine beach to construct a Chinese-funded fishing harbour and “marine park” for training captive dolphins
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