GUNTER: China a threat to our democracy and Trudeau is ignoring it

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The federal Liberals and the senior civil service are still failing to take seriously the threat to Canadian democracy posed by China’s Communist government.

Those same politicians and officials are only too quick to see bogeymen on the extreme right, even though white nationalists in Canada are mostly disorganized, loudmouth, backwoods warriors whose battles are fought mainly on social media.

But China’s efforts to get Beijing-friendly MPs planted in the House of Commons and to intimidate Canadian citizens of Chinese heritage into not criticizing the Communist regime are very real.

For crying out loud, China operated unauthorized police stations within Canada, notably in Toronto and Vancouver, from which to bully Chinese Canadians into subservience with threats against their families who remain in China.

The ongoing Commission on Foreign Interference led by Quebec Court of Appeal Justice Marie-Josée Hogue has found plenty of evidence to support the conclusion that Chinese agents were up to their armpits in efforts to manipulate the outcomes of the last two federal elections.

Yet still the Liberals are so enthralled with the idea that China should be Canada’s next great cultural and economic partner, and so fearful of being labelled racist if they blame the Chinese government for anything, that to this day they do not take the threat seriously.

“Was there foreign interference targeting the 2019 and ’21 general elections? Yes, I have no difficulty concluding that there was,” Commissioner Hogue wrote in her first report in May. She added, “People are right to be worried and to want to shine a light on what is going on.” The level of interference by China is “troubling.”

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But not to the Liberals nor to many of the senior civil servants in charge of running this country.

For instance, this week former two-term Toronto-area MP Leona Alleslev swore an affidavit claiming that Elections Canada hired Chinese Communist agents as poll workers in her riding during the 2021 election. Several of Alleslev’s Chinese-Canadian constituents told her that after they noticed the presence of the Communist operatives, they felt too intimidated to vote.

Did Elections Canada knowingly hire Communist agents to work the polls? Almost certainly not. The point is – as it is with so many in the Canadian elite – Elections Canada is insufficiently suspicious of China’s orchestrated efforts to destabilize Canadian democracy, so it did inadequate screening of its hires.

This is consistent with what Justice Hogue has found. She concluded that when CSIS and the RCMP tell the Prime Minister’s staff, the cabinet or senior civil servants about incidents of Chinese interference, people in power within the Liberal government “prefer to refrain from acting when such information is brought to their attention.”

The best example of Liberal indifference to China’s meddling was the whitewash report by special rapporteur and former Governor General David Johnston, a lifelong family friend of the Trudeaus. In May 2023, Johnston basically announced to Canadians, “Move along folks. Nothing to see here.”

While admitting he had not seen all the documents and evidence he had wished to see (the Trudeau government kept some of it secret from him on the pretence that it threatened national security), Johnston nevertheless concluded there was no strong evidence of widespread Chinese duplicity.

This week the online news service, Blacklock’s Reporter, published an internal email circulated last summer among members of a committee on Canada-China relations within Global Affairs Canada and written just weeks after Johnston’s feeble report.

The internal memo reveals that senior government officials were well aware the RCMP had intelligence on “foreign actor threats and interference being carried out in Canada, including the harassment of individuals or groups exercising their fundamental freedoms guaranteed in the Charter.” Yet nothing came of it.

To this day, the Liberals refuse to recognize the threats to our democracy that are right before their eyes.