A vehicle passes a sign outside the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) headquarters in Ottawa November 5, 2014. REUTERS/Chris Wattie
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Conservative MPs want an investigation into allegations that China used an elaborate strategy to enable the return of a minority Liberal government in the 2021 federal election.
A Globe and Mail article published Feb. 17 cites secret documents from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) showing how China executed a sophisticated strategy to achieve two goals: ensure the Liberals were returned to office, but only with another minority government to keep their power in check, and the defeat of certain Conservative candidates that Beijing deemed unfriendly to China.
Beijing instructed its diplomats and other proxies—including some Chinese-language media—to propagate the idea that Conservative MPs were too critical of China, and that, once elected, they would follow the lead of former U.S. President Donald Trump and ban Chinese students from certain universities or education programs, the article said.
“This will threaten the future of the voters’ children, as it will limit their education opportunities,” a Chinese Consulate official said, according to the CSIS report as reported by the Globe. “The Liberal Party of Canada is becoming the only party that the PRC can support,” the official added.
Bloc Québécois and Conservative MPs raised the Globe report in Parliament on Feb. 17. Conservative MP Tom Kmiec criticized the Liberal government’s inaction on foreign interference in Canada.
Kmiec said the Globe report contains “information to wage a ground war on our democracy in our elections.”
“They report a Conservative MP was targeted for daring to champion to establish a foreign agent registry to plug a national security hole. This government’s broken, hasn’t done anything. Did the Prime Minister turn a blind eye to foreign interference because he stood to gain from it politically?”
Bloc MP René Villemure said the information from the CSIS documents is “very concerning.”
“The real problem is the facility with which foreign powers could manipulate our elections. We need to take action with transparency,” he said. “But instead, for months the [Liberal] government has been denying everything and hiding the truth. Will this government finally take the threat seriously?”
In response, Liberal MP Jennifer O’Connell, who is the parliamentary secretary to the minister of intergovernmental affairs, infrastructure, and communities, argued that the government has taken action on foreign interference.
“Our government has been clear from the beginning that foreign interference is a serious threat to this country. It’s precisely why we’ve taken action,” she said, citing measures including the creation of the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians and tighter rules on third-party funding.
“We will work to improve our democratic insecure institutions and secure them while Conservatives play politics.”
Minister of Emergency Preparedness Bill Blair also defended his government’s response to foreign threats, saying that he had in December 2020 warned MPs about foreign interference, particularly the threat posed by China.
“This government has been alert to that threat and has taken action to protect our institutions,” Blair said.
Investigation
Conservative MP Raquel Dancho called for an investigation into the allegations in the Globe article.
“Today the Globe & Mail reported that CSIS documents confirm “Chinese diplomats and their proxies backed the re-election of Justin Trudeau’s Liberals,” she wrote on Twitter on Feb. 17.
“Parliament must investigate these reports thoroughly and transparently,” Dancho said. “These documents make it all the more troubling that the PM told Canadians he has not been briefed on the specifics of a deliberate, coordinated campaign to re-elect his government.”
A Nov. 7, 2022, Global News report alleged that CSIS warned Trudeau and several cabinet ministers, in a series of briefings and memos starting January that year, about CCP interference in Canada that included “covert funding to influence election outcomes.” The report said that the briefings alleged that China has provided funding to 11 candidates during the 2019 federal election. Trudeau has said that he wasn’t briefed about “any federal candidates receiving any money from China.”
Dancho’s comments echo that of several other Conservative MPs.
“CSIS documents prove China had influence in Canada’s 2021 election,” MP Leslyn Lewis wrote on social media. “Trudeau knew about this foreign interference 8 weeks before the election, and didn’t act.”
“The most shocking part is that the Prime Minister and his Ministers knew this was ongoing and decided to do nothing,” MP John Williamson said on Facebook, where he posted the Globe article.
“Canadians have now been provided with definitive proof that the Chinese Communist Party influenced the 2021 election to ensure that Justin Trudeau was re-elected.”
Six Conservative, Bloc, and NDP MPs have issued a joint statement calling for an emergency meeting of the Procedure and House Affairs Committee (PROC) to discuss the revelations in the CSIS documents. The statement, which was signed NDP MP Rachel Blaney, Conservative MPs Michael Cooper, Blaine Calkins, John Nater, and Luc Berthold, and the Bloc’s Marie-Hélène Gaudreau, said the reports of Beijing’s interference in Canada’s democracy are “deeply troubling. They are all members of the PROC committee, which is currently studying foreign election interference.
British MP Alicia Kearns, the chair of the UK Parliament’s foreign affairs committee, also weighed in on the Globe article.
“The importance of this cannot be overstated,” she tweeted.
“The Chinese Government orchestrated a substantial campaign to influence the outcome of the Canadian election. Urgent attention needed across democratic nations to protect our systems from abuse.”
Former Tory MP Kenny Chiu said governments “must act (not talk) to safeguard our [people] and interests,” pointing to Beijing’s human rights violations against religious and ethnic groups including Falun Gong adherents, Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Hongkongers, as well as the imprisonment of Canadian citizens like Husseyin Celil and Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig.
China expert Charles Burton recently told the House of Commons Canada-China committee that he believes Chiu, a Conservative candidate for Steveston-Richmond East in B.C., lost his seat in Parliament in the 2021 election due to a Chinese-language media campaign orchestrated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Prior to the campaign, Chiu had been pushing for legislation that would create a foreign agent registry to compel those acting on behalf of foreign entities in Canada to register with the government in order to increase transparency.
Former Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole said last June that interference by Beijing in the 2021 election had cost his party eight or nine parliamentary seats.
Other Revelations
The CSIS documents revealed by the Globe also say that the CCP leadership in Beijing was “pressuring its consulates to create strategies to leverage politically [active] Chinese community members and associations within Canadian society.”
The regime uses Canadian organizations to act on its behalf “while obfuscating links to the People’s Republic of China,” the documents said, according to the Globe.
China’s former consul-general in Vancouver, Tong Xiaoling, bragged in 2021 about how she helped defeat two Conservative MPs, according to the documents.
The Globe cited an anonymous national-security source who said that nine Liberal and two Conservative candidates were favoured by Beijing, and that the two Conservative candidates were viewed as friends of China.
The CSIS documents also said people sympathetic to Beijing’s cause were encouraged to give campaign donations to candidates favoured by China. Political campaigns would then quietly return a portion of the contribution—“the difference between the original donation and the government’s refund”—to the donors, which is illegal.
The Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections (SITE) Task Force set up by the Trudeau government to monitor threats to federal elections never issued any public warning about foreign interference during the 2019 or 2021 campaigns, the Globe reported.
Trudeau said in the House of Commons last November that SITE “determined that the integrity of our elections was not compromised in 2019 or 2021.” He also told reporters that “Canadians can be reassured that our election integrity held” in the two elections.
Walied Soliman, who served as the Conservative Party’s 2021 campaign co-chair and representative to SITE, said the task force had never raised the issue of threats from Beijing during their meetings on election security.
“I can confirm that after extensive security clearances and multiple meetings with our security establishment in Ottawa, these specific threats to our democracy were *never* raised, despite what is now clear evidence of tampering by China in the 2019 election,” Soliman wrote on Twitter on Feb. 17.
“What’s worse: our party was seeing clear signs of tampering in ridings with substantial Chinese diasporas. We made the conscious decision to work through the Task Force and appropriate security channels. Our concerns were never taken seriously.”