Canadian government doesn’t scale back on Chinese steel in new navy patrol ships
Canada has yet to determine how much Chinese steel and equipment will go into its new naval warships, but it didn’t scale back on such products for its Arctic and offshore patrol vessels even though concerns were raised in 2018.
You have to admit that China and its assets have got very good value for their donations to Trudeau’s foundation and election campaigns.
h/t Mauser
The U.S. military has been prodding Ottawa to buy a privately owned hangar adjacent to a NORAD airbase in the Arctic community of Inuvik, after a Chinese buyer expressed interest in taking over the facility.
For nearly a year, Ottawa resisted American pressure over the property, located near a strategic piece of the continent’s air-defence infrastructure that would make a prime target for foreign surveillance. The Canadian government had previously leased the hangar to shelter military aircraft, but argued it no longer had need of it.
Canadians are split on whether the federal government’s recently-announced probes into allegations of foreign election interference are a sincere effort to get to the truth or an attempt to cover up what is alleged to have happened, a new poll suggests.
The Ipsos poll conducted exclusively for Global News and released Tuesday found 52 per cent of those surveyed think the probes, and the appointment of a special rapporteur to oversee them, are genuine. Forty-eight per cent, meanwhile, think “the investigation is a cover-up.”
An on-line poll with an oversized sample of Beijing Fifth Columnists conducted by a Liberal friendly pollster. That’s my story and I’m stickin to it.
The interim commissioner of the RCMP says he would support additional laws that allow police to further crack down on foreign interference in Canada, as well as ways to further collaborate with intelligence officials on the issue.
But Mike Duheme adds multiple investigations remain underway that he’s confident will lead to criminal charges, though he did not give specifics.
As questions continue to swirl around the issue of other countries’ meddling in Canadian affairs, interim RCMP Commissioner Michael Duheme says he’s “very, very concerned” about foreign interference, and would like to see the national force be able to use intelligence as evidence in its investigations.
In an interview on CTV’s Question Period with Vassy Kapelos airing on Sunday, Duheme was asked if, given all that has recently been alleged regarding China interfering in federal elections and the years of warnings from various national security agencies, he thinks a public inquiry is warranted.
A lawyer for Han Dong has served Global News and its parent company Corus Entertainment with a libel notice after the media outlet published an allegation the Toronto MP spoke to a Chinese diplomat about delaying the release of two Canadians.
Lawyer Mark Polley says he is demanding that Global News make a “full apology and retraction” for publishing what he describes as “false, malicious, irresponsible and defamatory statements” about Dong, now an Independent MP for Don Valley North.
Former CSIS officials say the intelligence agency has been warning successive governments about foreign election interference for decades but all failed to act — and measures outlined in this week’s budget are not enough to address the problem.
“Thirty-two years in national security work, every time we’ve had a crisis, every time we’ve had an incident, that’s what the government’s done. We’ll throw money at the RCMP, we’ll say you folks have got to sort that out. And I don’t think that’s really an appropriate response,” Dan Stanton, former executive manager at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), told a committee of MPs on Friday.
Liberal MP Parm Bains said he won his B.C. riding in the last election “fair and square” after his former opponent told a parliamentary committee foreign interference by Beijing played a role in his victory.
Bains sits on the Commons ethics committee and was sitting across the table when former Conservative MP Kenny Chiu told MPs on the committee Friday he believed Bains was the “beneficiary” of a disinformation campaign he suspects was tied to the Chinese Communist Party during the 2021 election campaign.
The threat from foreign interference, with Beijing as the main culprit, has evolved to become more dangerous to the state than traditional espionage, a former executive with Canada’s spy agency told MPs.
“What we’ve seen, in the last 30 years, is that foreign interference has eclipsed classic espionage as a national security threat, both in terms of its scope and its speed,” said Dan Stanton, a 32-year veteran of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).
Among the various types of outlandish and sinister responses to the recent revelations about Beijing’s emissaries interfering in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections to the purpose of re-electing a Liberal government, the conjuring of bogeymen has been especially destructive to any clear public consensus about what’s at stake here, and what’s really going on.
Two former intelligence officials called for a complete transformation of Canada’s security apparatus to counter expanding foreign interference operations that they say have been essentially ignored by Ottawa since the 1990s.
On Friday the House of Commons standing committee on access to information, privacy and ethics heard recommendations for a new national and independent office with powers to investigate and prosecute acts of foreign interference, and also rapid adoption of counter-interference laws that have already been implemented by Canadian allies such as Australia.
Chinese state media outlets should not be granted broadcasting licences in Canada because their content is meant to feed “misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda” to overseas Chinese, an expert witness told a House committee on March 30.
The Chinese regime has made it clear it wishes to use overseas Chinese to exert influence abroad, and “this becomes interference instead of simple influence,” said Katherine Leung, policy advisor for the non-governmental organization Hong Kong Watch.
A third of Chinese Canadians believe Beijing meddling in elections, pressuring Canadians: poll
Just over a third of Chinese Canadians believe the government of China has tried to interfere in elections here and pressure Canadians in pursuit of its political aims, suggests a new Postmedia-Leger poll of an ethnic group at the centre of the foreign interference affair.
… At the same time, more than half thought suggesting certain Chinese-Canadian politicians are under Beijing’s influence is racist.
As discussion and debate rages over allegations of meddling by Beijing in Canadian affairs, much attention has turned to the country’s 1.7 million or so residents of Chinese descent.
No punches pulled those numbers indicate a clear danger to our society.
Our Politicians have remade Canada into a balkanized 5th Columnist state via mass immigration, multiculturalism and the denigration of our nations values and heritage.
Playing identity politics with Canada’s security is a vile and dangerous practice that all our political parties engage in.
Down with the Uniparty.
The RCMP is not investigating foreign interference in Vancouver’s election last year, despite a Canadian intelligence report that China’s consul-general sought to shape the outcome of that vote.
The report from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service describes Tong Xiaoling, then China’s chief representative to the West Coast city, as saying that “they needed to get all eligible voters to come out and elect a specific Chinese-Canadian candidate,” in the mayoral race, while also assessing a specific person to “groom” as a councillor.
Han Dong has made his position very clear: the former Liberal MP says he never told a Chinese diplomat to put off releasing two imprisoned Canadians to avoid helping the Conservatives. And he announced Monday he’s already hired a lawyer to sue the news outlet that reported the alleged conversation.
