Terry Glavin: What's it going to take for the Liberals to crack down on Chinese subterfuge?

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God only knows what it’s going to take.

Twelve years ago, the warning came from Richard Fadden, then the director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. At least two provincial cabinet ministers and several municipal politicians were more or less puppets of the People’s Republic of China, he said, initially avoiding mentioning China by name, for the sake of discretion. “I’m making this comment because I think it’s a real danger that people be totally oblivious to this kind of issue,” Fadden said at the time.

For his trouble, Fadden was traduced and roundly denounced as a fear-monger.

Ten years ago, Anthony Campbell, the former head of the Intelligence Assessment Secretariat of the Privy Council Office, put it to me this way: “We’re sitting ducks.” He was talking about Ottawa’s inability to get its collective head around foreign activity, specifically directed by Beijing, that was demonstrably and clearly detrimental to Canada’s national security interests.

Ever since, intelligence agency officials have routinely shouted into the void about foreign interference in federal elections and public policy, and this week, another bombshell, this time from Global News’ investigative reporter Sam Cooper.

We’re sitting ducks

Anthony Campbell, ex head of Intelligence Assessment Secretariat

For several months, the Trudeau government has been sitting on briefing notes from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service setting out how Beijing quietly funded 11 candidates in the 2019 federal election and placed operatives on campaign staff. The $250,000 operation was run from China’s Toronto consulate. The effort went on to place operatives in the offices of several members of Parliament.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has earned international headlines for himself this week by appearing to talk tough, but he referred only to “state actors from around the world, whether it’s China or others,” that are “continuing to play aggressive games with our institutions, with our democracies.” Everything’s under control, Trudeau said Monday. “There are already significant laws and measures that our intelligence and security officials have to go against foreign actors operating on Canadian soil.”

But that’s not what Canada’s national security and intelligence agencies say, and these are not games. Only last week, the House Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs heard that Canada’s intelligence agencies don’t even have “the tools to understand the threat.”

In hearings on foreign election interference, CSIS director-general for Intelligence Assessments Adam Fisher told the committee: “Our act was designed in 1984 and it has not had significant changes or amendments.” What’s necessary is a total “rethink” about how these threats are dealt with, he said.

Beijing doesn’t behave like Moscow in the Cold War days, and its bench strength and impact far exceeds the Kremlin’s contemporary disinformation operations. In Canada, the Chinese Communist Party focuses on “working within the system to corrupt it, compromising officials, elected officials and individuals at all levels of government, within industry, within civil society, using our open and free society for their nefarious purposes.”

And Beijing has enjoyed terrific success in Canada. It’s been so successful that even a modest foreign agents’ registry law remains hung up in the Senate, thanks mainly to Trudeau-appointed senators led by the effusively Beijing-friendly Senator Yuen Pau Woo.

It was owing mainly to sponsorship of that same foreign agents registry law in the House of Commons that Metro Vancouver Conservative MP Kenny Chiu was targeted in an elaborate disinformation campaign during last year’s federal election. Chiu ended up losing the riding of Steveston—Richmond East, home to a large population of Chinese-diaspora voters, to the Liberal candidate. So you could say that what happened was a Beijing-directed influence operation scuttled an effort to defend Canada against Beijing-directed influence operations.

An investigation by the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab found that last year’s Beijing-directed hatchet jobs were countrywide: “China-linked actors took an active role in seeking to influence the Sept. 20, 2021 parliamentary election in Canada, displaying signs of a co-ordinated campaign to influence behaviour among the Chinese diaspora voting in the election.” The Atlantic Council’s findings confirmed the results of a study by Canada’s own DisinfoWatch organization.

Last year’s Beijing-directed hatchet jobs were countrywide

By 2019, Beijing’s influences had become so normalized in Canada that John McCallum, the Chrétien-era cabinet minister and disgraced ambassador to China (he’d been forced to resign for taking Beijing’s side in the detention of Huawei’s Meng Wanzhou on a U.S. extradition warrant) openly admitted to the South China Morning Post that he’d been inviting Chinese officials to influence the outcome of the 2019 federal election to the Liberals’ advantage.

The Conservative party sought a CSIS investigation into McCallum’s conduct, but there was the small problem of the inadequacy of Canada’s foreign-influence laws. At the time, even Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland was obliged to rebuke her former cabinet colleague. Freeland pointed out that it was “highly inappropriate for any Canadian to be offering advice or opinions to any foreign government on how that government ought or ought not to behave to secure any particular election outcome in Canada.” Inappropriate, then. But against no law.

The CSIS briefings revealed by Global News’ Sam Cooper this week were made available to the Prime Minister’s Office in January. Among the briefings’ more disturbing contents was evidence that Beijing sought economic data from the ridings of MPs who voted to adopt a motion in February last year declaring that China’s brutal persecution of the minority Muslim populations of Xinjiang amounted to genocide. Trudeau and his ministers absented themselves from the vote, which passed 266-0.

CSIS briefs were made available to PMO in January

Beijing’s agents were tasked with determining whether the industries and companies in those affirmative-vote ridings had economic links to China, which suggests that consideration was being given to whether the MPs’ constituents could be subjected to retaliatory economic pressure.

The Conservatives were targeted by Beijing-aligned forces in the 2021 elections because party leader Erin O’Toole had authorized the development of a robust China policy, founded on the advancement of human rights and securing Canada’s interests against Xi Jinping’s strong-arm and blackmail tactics. The Trudeau Liberals’ platform mentioned China only once, in passing.

“It’s clear that Beijing spread disinformation in the 2021 federal election campaign through proxies that negatively affected Conservative campaigns in several ridings. … We now find out that CSIS has concluded that Beijing corrupted political financing laws and interfered in the 2019 election,” Conservative foreign affairs critic Michael Chong said Tuesday.

“The biggest victim of these PRC intimidation and interference operations is the Chinese community themselves. The Trudeau government must do more to protect the Chinese community from these threats, and to protect Canadian democracy.”

A faint chance of that. God only knows what it’s going to take.

National Post