Michael Chong, conservative foreign affairs critic, speaking at the Special Committee on Canada-China Relations on OCtober 25, 2022. (Screen shot/ParlVU)
Conservative MP Michael Chong is calling on the Liberal government to identify the 11 candidates who allegedly received funding from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the 2019 federal election.
“It is clear that Beijing interfered in last year’s 2021 election. Beijing’s ambassador to Canada commented critically and publicly during that election campaign and Beijing spread disinformation through proxies on Chinese-language social media platforms,” Chong, who is the shadow minister for foreign affairs, said in Parliament on Nov. 14.
“Last week we found out that Beijing also interfered in the 2019 election. We found out that the Prime Minister was told months ago, in January, about hundreds of thousands of dollars that were illegally funnelled to at least 11 election candidates.”
“My question for the government is very simple: Who are these 11 candidates?
Chong’s question referred to a Global News report, published on Nov. 7, alleging that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) had warned Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and several cabinet ministers, in a series of briefings and memos starting January 2022, about CCP interference in Canada that can include “covert funding to influence election outcomes.”
The report said at least 11 candidates, whose party affiliations were not disclosed, received CCP campaign funding in the 2019 federal election.
“Despite the government knowing about this for at least 10 months, no one has been expelled, no one has been criminally charged and no action has been taken,” Chong said, adding that the primary victim of this interference is the Chinese community in Canada.
“When is the government going to take action to protect Canadians and protect Canadian democracy?” he added.
Addressing the allegations of election interference on Nov. 7, Trudeau condemned China for meddling with Canada’s democratic institutions.
“State actors from around the world, whether it’s China or others, are continuing to play aggressive games with our institutions, with our democracies,” Trudeau said at a press conference.
“We have taken significant measures to strengthen the integrity of our elections processes and our systems,” he said. “We will continue to invest in the fight against election interference—against foreign interference—of our democracies and institutions.”
Operations on Canadian Soil
Chong also pointed to other reports of Beijing’s increased intelligence and influence operations on Canadian soil during the parliamentary debate on Nov. 14.
“Recent reports that Beijing interfered in our democracy are deeply troubling,” Chong said. “It is clear Beijing spread disinformation through proxies in the last 2021 election campaign. It is also clear in recently unsealed indictments in U.S. court that Beijing’s agents are operating freely here on Canadian soil, coercing members of the Chinese community.”
This remark is in relation to recent charges laid by a federal court in New York against seven Chinese nationals who took part in harassing and coercing a U.S. resident to return to China under Beijing’s global extralegal repatriation campaign known as Operation Fox Hunt. The indictment, unsealed by the New York court, shows similar Chinese operations were carried out on Canadian soil.
The U.S. indictment comes after a report from the human rights NGO Safeguard Defenders published in September that found over 50 unofficial Chinese police stations are operating overseas, including three in the Greater Toronto Area—an example that Chong also gave in Parliament citing China’s operations in Canada.
Jennifer O’Connell, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs, responded to Chong’s remarks by accusing his party of disregarding national security by removing their members from the national security and intelligence committee of parliamentarians (NSICOP) last year. Former Tory Leader Erin O’Toole had refused to name his party’s MPs to NSICOP last December to protest the Liberal government’s refusal to release unredacted documents in relation to the firing of two scientists from Canada’s highest security laboratory.
The two scientists, Xiangguo Qiu and her husband Keding Cheng, were escorted by the police from the facilities of the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg in July 2019 and were stripped of their security clearances. Qiu was later found to be in charge of shipping deadly Ebola and Henipah viruses to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China months before her removal from the lab.
“It is the government that allowed People’s Liberation Army scientists of the People’s Republic of China into a top-level lab in this country against the government’s own security protocols and in threat to the Five Eyes alliance,” Chong said on Nov. 14.
“We are talking about payments of hundreds of thousands of dollars to election candidates. We are talking about Beijing putting agents in MPs’ offices. We are talking about an increasingly aggressive campaign to silence Canadian MPs.”
