Within the next month, Katie Telford will gain a new distinction — she will be the longest serving chief of staff to any Canadian prime minister since the position was created in the late 1970s.
It might not be how Telford would have predicted things would turn out when she first met Justin Trudeau almost 17 years ago in Toronto, but much about their working relationship has hinged on what wasn’t exactly expected.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is criticizing former governor general David Johnston for his previous membership with the Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation, which has received funding from the Chinese regime in the past.
Johnston was recently appointed “independent special rapporteur” by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to investigate Chinese interference in Canada’s elections.
The Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation says it will be launching an independent review of the organization’s acceptance of a donation “with a potential connection to the Chinese government.”
The foundation’s board reached this unanimous decision prior to dissolution, according to board chair Edward Johnson.
“This review will be conducted by an accounting firm instructed by a law firm, neither of which were previously involved with the Foundation,” Johnson said in a statement to CTV News.
Throughout history, more powerful nations have preyed on smaller ones, as is now being demonstrated by Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine. Yet for those outside Europe, China’s economic power makes it a far more formidable threat to democracy than neo-tsarist Russia; Russia’s GDP is smaller than that of Canada or Australia’s, and barely a 10th of China’s.
h/t DM
The taxpayer-backed Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation was plunged into crisis in March, several weeks after the Globe and Mail reported that a major 2016 donation ultimately came from the Chinese state rather than a Beijing billionaire, according to an internal document obtained by La Presse.
Shortly after the Globe story broke, the foundation publicly announced it would return $140,000 to the Chinese benefactor.
Some are expanding in China, reluctant to leave a huge market they need to finance operations back home.
As Washington seeks to throttle economic ties with Beijing, two powerful engines of the German economy, Volkswagen and the chemical company BASF, are broadening their huge Chinese investments.
Volkswagen, which has more than 40 plants in China, announced a new effort to tailor models to Chinese customers’ wishes, with features like in-dash karaoke machines, and will invest billions in local partnerships and production sites. It’s part of a theme unveiled by the German automaker last year: “In China for China.”
The destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines may have kept reluctant ally Germany in line against Russia but provided them the reason needed to cause the break on China. Macron too is a Sinophile signaling a decline in US influence under President Window Licker Joe Biden.
One of the most remarkable people I have ever met is Youqin Wang, a professor of Chinese in the United States. She has dedicated her life to researching and documenting the Cultural Revolution: that spasm of violence that took place in China during the last ten years of Mao Zedong’s life: 1966 to 1976. Many people, including victims, want to sweep this period under the rug. It is too painful, too awful, to think about. It is painful and awful for Youqin Wang, too — but she regards the documenting of the Cultural Revolution as necessary, and she made it her life’s work.
Canada has been rocked in recent weeks by leaks indicating the government knew about Chinese meddling in recent elections. A Feb. 17 report in the Globe and Mail newspaper suggests that Beijing was actively meddling in Canada’s democracy at every level: federal, provincial and municipal. The leaks also reveal that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government has responded to reports of interference with obstruction, obfuscation and only minor concessions.
Citing politicization of a 2016 donation allegedly orchestrated by the Chinese government, the board of directors for the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation has stepped aside.
A statement posted to the foundation’s website early Tuesday morning broke the news, saying President and CEO Pascale Fournier and the board made the decision to jointly resign.
“In recent weeks, the political climate surrounding a donation received by the foundation in 2016 has put a great deal of pressure on the foundation’s management and volunteer board of directors, as well as on our staff and our community,” read the statement.
Is Canada’s China Class starting to sweat?
h/t Clink
Mosque officials call on Ford government to combat Islamophobia after ‘shocking’ hate-motivated attack in Markham, Ont.
The Mohammedans are asking Ford to protect them from the spillover into Ontario of the interfaith Hindu-Muslim conflict currently roiling India.
We also have the India-Khalistan conflict to contend with on our shores, several Hindu temples have been vandalized recently.
And the anti-Israel Jihad is now mainstream in “polite circles.”
And don’t forget the problems with our Communist China sympathizers.
Ain’t multiculturalism grand?
Canada has been reduced to a balkanized state of multiple 5th Columns.
Thank the Uniparty.
… Does not Mr. Johnston see that both the ties of friendship with the family, and his heading an organization exclusively set up to honour the prime minister’s father, are at the very least cause for a perception of conflict of interest?
He knows, he just doesn’t give a shit. Not that it matters as everyone knows it’s a pointless pantomime of transparency.
“We are probably not going to be able to do anything to stop, slow down, disrupt, interdict, or destroy the Chinese nuclear development program that they have projected out over the next 10 to 20 years,” said Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley on March 29 at a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee. “They’re going to do that in accordance with their own plan.”
Milley is wrong about China’s nuclear weapons ambitions. He is, unfortunately, expressing the same pessimism that pervaded the Nixon, Ford and Carter years, when the American foreign policy establishment took the Soviet Union as a given and therefore promoted détente.
From what I can tell, China has done a superb job intimidating emigres in Canada.
Nobody I reached out to in the Alberta business or research community wants to talk about intimidation by Beijing — on the record — except for one. He’s Nima Dorjee, a Tibetan-Canadian who has been raising the alarm bells for decades now on China’s interference. He has an axe to grind, or maybe an axe to hone.
The China interference story has ‘long legs, and some twists and turns.’ The Liberals should be ‘quite concerned because if the current Conservative advantage consolidates and the longer the numbers stay here, it becomes the new normal, and it will require more effort to dislodge the trend line,’ says pollster Nik Nanos.
China is a rival power. They are supplanting the United States on the global stage, both in terms of their economic capability and in terms of their military capability.
They also talk openly about wanting to reorient the world — to move it away from an American‑led Western coalition. They want to create something very different, and everybody essentially recognizes that, with the exception, it seems, of President Joe Biden.
Now, that is a pretty bold statement. If you look at Biden, what he has said publicly and some of the actions he has taken, he is on an island by himself.
No one believes doddering Joe is in charge.
