Senator @YuenPauWoo claims anti-China witch hunt, demands feds counter “irresponsible speculation” by #cdnmedia over Communist interference in elections. https://t.co/nVTDcQ4uXS #cdnpoli @ScooperCooper pic.twitter.com/mH8D28FrwY
— Blacklock’s Reporter (@mindingottawa) December 16, 2022
h/t OntarioJohn
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau responded today to questions about a 2020 briefing document from the Privy Council Office (PCO) that mentioned an “active foreign interference network,” which was linked to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during Canada’s 2019 federal election.
Trudeau told reporters in Ottawa that the federal government has been aware of foreign interference attempts in Canadian society “for a long time.”
“Foreign interference is a real thing, against our institutions, against communities, against Canadians,” he said on Dec. 14.
He would know, his handlers placed them there.
Xi Jinping’s Covid restrictions have stunted his country’s progress
With the benefit of hindsight, we can be certain that futurologists are often wrong. Contrary to the expectations of earlier decades, no one is living on Mars, nor do many of us commute to work in a flying car.
The issue of foreign interference in elections was examined in a Commons committee on Dec. 13, with Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs Dominic Leblanc addressing China’s role in Canadian society at large.
“The Chinese government regularly attempts to interfere in various aspects of Canadian society, elections would not be excluded from some of their efforts to interfere,” Leblanc told the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs.
The threats to American power are both subtle and extraordinary.
Tensions between Beijing and Washington have been steadily increasing for years. Some of the competition has been plain to see: New Chinese aircraft carriers, fifth-generation fighter planes and airstrips in the South China Sea that are facing off against U.S. megabases in places like Guam and deepening military partnerships with Australia and Taiwan.
But other aspects of China’s quest for power are much more subtle. Beijing is also playing a quieter game, using non-military means to propel its push for influence and dominance across the Indo-Pacific and beyond.
The fighting began early on a bright autumn morning 60 years ago.
On 23 October 1962 Chinese solders entered and engaged in intense artillery fire in what was then a far-flung Himalayan region in north-eastern India called North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA), bordering China and Bhutan.
Today it is Arunachal Pradesh, an Indian state with more than a million people that China continues to claim as its territory, and where the latest flare-up between the two sides in more than a year took place.
“Explosions lit up the sky and echoed between the mountains,” Indian army personnel told Bertil Lintner, a Swedish journalist and author of the China’s India War: Collision Course on the Roof of the World.
A friendship society in Richmond, B.C., has become a focus in an RCMP investigation into allegations of secret Chinese “police” stations operating in Canada.
Officers visited the Canada Wenzhou Friendship Society on Saturday and conducted interviews with people who live nearby in the suburb south of Vancouver.
CBC spoke with neighbours who confirmed RCMP officers spoke with them, asking if they’d seen anything suspicious, and a marked cruiser was still parked outside the building on Tuesday.
Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly testified during a Monday afternoon committee meeting that she has no idea about the names of the 11 Liberal MPs allegedly targeted by an election interference attempt by the Chinese government during the 2019 election.
Last week, Ottawa was united in shock over revelations that the RCMP entrusted its critical radio communications systems to Sinclair Technologies, a subsidiary of China’s Hytera Communications Corp. A Chinese state-backed firm, Hytera’s record includes everything from lying to U.S. regulators about its Chinese Communist Party ties to criminal corporate espionage charges. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the other party leaders all agreed: The decision was baffling.
But nobody should be surprised. This is not the first time that Canada has found itself with unwanted Chinese surveillance technology. Without a major status quo shift, it won’t be the last.
It’s of course good news that the federal Liberal government has put the brakes on a contract that a firm partially owned by the Chinese government had scored to work on sensitive RCMP technology. But we also need to ask what mindset allowed it to happen in the first place.
Last year, Sinclair Technologies won a contract to provide radio frequency equipment for Canada’s federal police service. Sinclair’s parent company is Norsat International, which is in turn owned by Chinese telecommunications firm Hytera.
According to popular wisdom, Sir Robert Peel created the first modern municipal police force in London in 1829. Yes, there were other law enforcement-type bodies well before that, but the idea of having an organized body of men (they were all men at first) to patrol the streets and investigate/prevent crime was new for the era.
The notion of the “bobby on the beat”—”bobby” is a take-off on Peel’s first name—is well established. For decades in the Western world the sight of a uniformed officer walking through a community, getting to know the inhabitants, and making a very visible sign of law and order (and hence deterrence) was commonplace. That seems to have changed of late, and I’m not so sure it’s for the better.
It seems as if hardly a month goes by without another revelation of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) infiltrating or influencing companies and orders of government within Canada.
This month is no exception. It has been exposed that the RCMP had contracted an Ontario-based company with ties to the CCP to provide equipment related to police radio communications. The security and encryption of communications within a national police force should be rather important considerations. A company providing services related to anything so sensitive should be thoroughly vetted, yet somehow the ties between Sinclair Technologies and the CCP were overlooked when sourcing services.
Zero Covid experiment has ended in catastrophic failure.
In 2020, China was where the world’s Covid lockdowns began – today, they are finally ending there, too. Until recently, China had seemed committed to its draconian Zero Covid approach. In October, President Xi Jinping assured the Chinese Communist Party Congress: ‘We have adhered to the supremacy of the people and the supremacy of life, adhered to dynamic Zero Covid, and achieved major positive results in the overall prevention and control of the epidemic, and economic and social development.’
RCMP foreign interference investigators visit B.C. friendship society
RCMP national security officers investigating China’s foreign interference activities in Canada were at the headquarters of a Richmond, B.C. non-profit group on Saturday.
The RCMP’s Integrated National Security Enforcement Team conducted interviews at the Wenzhou Friendship Society and in the surrounding neighbourhood.
Until recently, China, the world’s most populous nation, was also the world’s last Covid holdout. But in a matter of weeks it will be hit by a wave that a top health official predicts could infect many hundreds of millions of people.
This week, Beijing took its biggest step toward living with Covid, all but abandoning an unpopular and costly “zero Covid” policy of lockdowns and mass quarantines it had hoped would eliminate infections. The abrupt pivot has raised the specter of tremendous strain on a health care system that is overstretched even in normal times. That could get worse in a month, when people travel across the country to see their families during the Lunar New Year holiday.
Good.
