OTTAWA — In this discussion with Jason James, I break down the stunning rise of Liberal floor-crosser Michael Ma — a story The Bureau has led Canadian media on with at least 10 investigative reports since mid-December 2025, culminating in our coverage of his suspicious cross-examination of expert Margaret McCuaig-Johnston.
This is a wide-ranging conversation.
As Canada lowers its tariffs and imports more electric vehicles from China, an upcoming report from New York-based labour rights researchers is making new allegations of forced labour practices at the world’s bestselling EV manufacturer, BYD.
China Labor Watch (CLW) received a complaint last fall from one of the thousands of migrant workers brought to Hungary from China to help build BYD’s first European plant in the city of Szeged — a $6-billion investment intended to supply the European market with around 300,000 vehicles per year.
Canada’s finance minister was in Beijing late last week looking to deepen financial sector ties with China. Francois-Philippe Champagne said he was building on the strategic partnership deal signed between Prime Minister Mark Carney and Chinese President Xi Jinping “with eyes wide open.”
A more appropriate ophthalmological analogy would have been to say that Canada will henceforth turn a blind eye to Beijing’s excesses.
Conservative MP Marc Dalton says he hopes Shen Yun’s remaining Toronto performances can proceed, since police have confirmed that the bomb threats against the show are unfounded.
“These threats have been a tactic worldwide to derail this production in the past couple of years. I have tickets to attend next week in Vancouver and look forward to it,” Dalton said on social media on April 2.
You might have thought that the floor-crossing Liberal MP Michael Ma would have been political kryptonite after his March 26 performance at a parliamentary committee looking into the implications of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s January invitation to China to annually export 49,000 electrical vehicles into Canada.
Ma had badgered the expert witness Margaret McCuaig-Johnston, impugned the credibility of the China Strategic Risk Institute where she serves as a senior advisor, demanded to know whether she had personally witnessed acts of forced labour in China and appeared to suggest that Beijing’s persecution of the Uyghur minority in Xinjiang was merely “hearsay.”
As the war in Iran erupted five weeks ago, social media sleuths across Western and Chinese platforms flagged a wave of viral posts detailing equipment at U.S. bases, the movements of American carrier groups and granular breakdowns of how military aircraft were assembling for strikes on Tehran.
The intelligence came from a fast growing new market: Chinese firms — some with links to the People’s Liberation Army — marrying artificial intelligence with open-source data to market information they claim can “expose” the movements of U.S. forces.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford says “it’s unacceptable” that Stellantis is reportedly in talks with a Chinese automobile manufacturer about the possibility of building Chinese electric vehicles in Canada at its idled Brampton assembly plant.
A report by Bloomberg News says the alleged talks are with Zhejiang Leapmotor Technology, a Chinese automobile manufacturer with headquarters in Hangzhou, China.
Based on what Prime Minister Mark Carney, a Liberal cabinet minister, and a Liberal MP said publicly about China’s use of forced labour, the idea they are fiercely criticizing Chinese President Xi Jinping about it in private is laughable.
Indeed, watching the performance of Carney, Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson, and former Conservative, now Liberal, MP Michael Ma on the issue over the past week, would have been hilarious if their milquetoast responses weren’t so alarming.
FBI officials recently reached out to members of Congress to alert them to a cyber hack classified as a “major incident.”
Fox News is told that China is the culprit and that the breach could pose a threat to national security.
The FBI made this designation last week when notifying several members of Congress.
Prime Minister Mark Carney is not oblivious.
He knows, as any reasonable person would, that it looks terrible for one of his MPs to try to undermine an expert witness on forced labour in China during a parliamentary committee meeting.
Last week, Liberal MP Michael Ma grilled Margaret McCuaig-Johnston, a senior fellow at the University of Ottawa, about whether she has personally seen forced labour practices on the ground in
China. “Have you witnessed forced labour in Xinjiang?” Mr. Ma asked Ms. McCuaig-Johnston, as if foreign nationals are invited to privately interview Uyghurs working on factory floors. “Yes or no? So did you get that from hearsay?”
TORONTO — His dark eyebrows bunched in memory of the shocking pain, Sulayman makes a sharp buzzing sound and jabs his inner wrist with a small cup, demonstrating how he was electrocuted by Chinese gangsters in a slave cyber-scam compound in Cambodia. It is a similar expression — pain, disbelief, disgust — that shapes his face when asked to describe to Prime Minister Mark Carney and Liberal Member of Parliament Michael Ma his prior lived experience, and that of his older relatives, and of Uyghurs across Xinjiang, working in forced labor factories and farms under the yoke of China’s police state.
Stellantis NV is discussing options for building electric vehicles in Canada with its Chinese partner, Zhejiang Leapmotor Technology Co., according to people familiar with the matter, a sign of how quickly the auto industry is being reshaped after Canada opened the door to companies from the world’s largest car market.
The talks are in an early stage, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing information that’s not public. If the companies proceed, it would be the first major Chinese auto investment in Canada since Prime Minister Mark Carney reached an agreement with President Xi Jinping in January to reduce tariffs on Chinese-made EVs.
CCP forced labour is enriching!
Hundreds of robots hum on a factory floor in Ningbo, just south of Shanghai, their long arms swooping and twisting, welding together different models of custom-ordered electric vehicles (EVs).
Robots also move briskly in the corridors delivering parts to different areas of the plant, playing elevator music to alert the few humans who work there to their presence.
This “dark factory” — where the lights don’t need to be on for the work to be completed, such is the extent of its automation — produces Zeekr vehicles, a luxury EV line owned by Geely, which is also the parent company of Volvo and Polestar.
On the one hand you have the CBC shilling for CCP EV’s like it was the Canadian edition of the China Daily pointing out they are almost untouched by human hands.
That unfortunately negates the parallel LPC narrative that our new CCP masters will build vast EV manufacturing plants in Canada employing many grateful Elbow People.
The story of this Great Elbow Forward forgets to mention that the EV supply chain in glorious China is rife with slave labour!
Just in … Mass robotaxi malfunction halts traffic in Chinese city
A mass robotaxi outage in the Chinese city of Wuhan caused at least a hundred self-driving cars to stop mid-traffic, sparking renewed debate around the safety of driverless vehicles.
Local police said initial findings suggested a “system malfunction” caused multiple vehicles to stop in the middle of the road on Tuesday.
Videos on social media have documented the outage, with one appearing to show it resulting in a highway collision, although police said no injuries had been reported and passengers exited their vehicles safely.
OTTAWA — During my years in the RCMP, I dealt with organized crime, national security threats, and foreign actors who sought to exploit Canada’s openness. We understood something fundamental: threats rarely announce themselves plainly. They operate in the grey space—deniable, incremental, and often dismissed until it is too late.
What concerns me today is not just that foreign interference is happening. It is that Canada still seems reluctant to call it what it is—particularly when it involves the Chinese Communist Party.
The US won’t allow Chinese electric cars from Canada to enter its market, President Donald Trump’s ambassador in Ottawa said, after a January deal in which Prime Minister Mark Carney lowered tariffs on those vehicles.
“Those cars can come in from China, come into Canada, but they’re not going to cross the border into the US,” Pete Hoekstra said in an interview with Canada’s Rebel News. “That ain’t gonna happen.”
