LILLEY: Chiang is gone and so is any claim that Carney is a leader

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Liberal MP Paul Chiang’s announcement that he would step down as a candidate just before midnight Monday shows a massive failure of leadership by Mark Carney.

It took four days for Chiang to be removed as the Liberal candidate in Markham-Unionville and it came after Carney had spent all morning defending him.

It shouldn’t be hard to distance yourself from someone who advocates for kidnapping a rival and handing them over to China for a bounty, but the Liberals blew this one. The resignation only came after the RCMP confirmed they were investigating Chiang’s comments which may have violated several sections of the law by counselling others to commit a crime.

“Every single day, I served with integrity,” Chiang said in his statement about the resignation.

That comment doesn’t square with what Chiang did, one of the most anti-democratic acts I can think of for an elected official.

The comments Chiang made were in January at a Chinese language media event. They came to light for the English speaking world on Friday after the Toronto Association for Democracy in China put out a statement highlighting Chiang’s words encouraging those present to hand over democracy advocate and Conservative candidate Joe Tay.

“To everyone here, you can claim the $1 million bounty if you bring him to Toronto’s Chinese Consulate,” he said.

Tay had a bounty of $1 million Hong Kong, about $185,000 Canadian, placed on him by Chinese authorities last December. He and other activists for democracy in China, in particular Hong Kong, were singled out with bounties on their heads for anyone who could bring them to the authorities.

This is what Chiang encouraged people to do and it’s what Carney defended on Monday despite being asked at least six times about the suitability of Chiang as a candidate after the comments.

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“Look, this is a person of integrity who served this community, his community, as a police…as a senior police officer for, as I said, more than a quarter century,” Carney said Monday.

Integrity. They keep using that word. It doesn’t mean what they think it means.

The fact that Chiang was a senior police officer for 28 years with York Regional Police isn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card over his comments, it makes the matter worse. A retired cop advocating that people hand over a political rival to Chinese authorities, who would jail or perhaps even kill him, should be unthinkable for a Canadian police officer and elected official.

Gabriel Yiu summed it up well in the initial statement put out on this matter by TADC last Friday.

“This is another example of China exerting undue influence in our election,” Yiu said. “Our political parties are being held hostage in the sense they are afraid to run candidates not favoured by China.”

China’s ongoing political interference in our country is a massive problem that we are still not taking seriously. In the 2019 election, then Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau and his team were briefed by CSIS on concerns about one of their Toronto candidates and China interfering his nomination.

Trudeau took the information and did absolutely nothing with it.

In fact, that candidate — Han Dong, who always has denied any help from China — was allowed to sit in the Liberal caucus, to run again in 2021 and nothing was done until media stories came out in 2023. Now, after a foreign interference inquiry, multiple reports on the matter, we have a Liberal MP and candidate encouraging people in Canada to do Beijing’s bidding.

The reaction from the new Liberal leader is the same as the last one, do nothing until forced to by never ending media stories. As Trudeau’s former cabinet minister Jody Wilson-Raybould commented, it looks like the new guy is a lot like the old guy.

By refusing to act, Carney abdicated leadership. By refusing to act on an issue related to China, it raises real concerns about his positions related to Beijing.