Ottawa won't disclose threats from "high risk, high harm" PRC proxy
Op/Ed: Other nations have named PRC secret police proxies that allegedly fund Parliamentarians and threaten Diasporas, but Canada won't reveal dangers in "egregious" NSICOP case study
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A few weeks ago I joined a panel of experts on Chinese foreign interference at McGill University with MP Michael Chong.
Along with McGill’s cyber-security researcher Benjamin Fung and Le Journal’s Sarah-Maude Lefebvre we discussed threats to Canada with graduate students from across the nation.
The panel occurred in the wake of NSICOP’s bombshell review of intelligence leaks that I started to report in November 2022, confirming that Canadian election candidates have been wittingly colluding with Beijing in election interference and accepting clandestine fund transfers “from foreign missions or their proxies.”
Some students wanted to know why Canada of all nations seems so heavily targeted by Beijing.
MP Chong got right to the point.
Citing NSICOP, he noted Beijing’s United Front Work Department, an organ charged with maintaining Chinese Communist Party influence in “overseas” diasporas, is funded with an astounding U.S. $2.6-Billion per year.
About $600-million is earmarked for spending in the West.
No other state — Russia, Iran, India — deploys near that amount of cash flooding secret police and disinformation into Western nations.
MP Chong estimated 10 percent of the United Front’s external funding is aimed at Canada alone. The “greater China” diaspora is about 5 percent of our national population. Basically, Chong said, this explains why Beijing is targeting Canada so intensively.
I told the gathered researchers I agreed with MP Chong 100 percent.
The United Front wants to use every Canadian citizen and permanent resident in the Chinese diaspora against Canada’s democracy, by any means necessary, including the corruption of violent gangsters.
I added that Canada borders the world’s top superpower and Xi Jinping has pledged to replace the United States as global leader by 2049.
Beijing sees Canada as a stepping stone in this plan. Our resources and institutions will be very helpful to Xi’s aims, I said.
So we are experiencing a strategic assault on our sovereignty just like they are from Taiwan to New Zealand and Papua New Guinea, Australia, and so on.
But why does this matter right now in Canada? Is it truly an existential threat, as CSIS has reported?
I would argue that threats of violence and subversion of our freedoms are not relegated to a distant future. Chinese secret police are operating brazenly in our cities and attempting to control immigrants as if they still lived in Beijing or Shanghai or Shenzhen.
As my colleague Sarah-Maude Lefebvre shared, her diaspora sources fear living in Montreal. She described a case that appeared to reveal Chinese secret police infiltrating a pro-democracy group.
Lefebvre also found there is no level of political office in Quebec below Beijing’s attention. A library board appeared to be infiltrated, she said, so information disapproved by the Chinese Communist Party wouldn’t appear on Montreal book shelves.
Benjamin Fung, a researcher that identified WeChat attacks on Hong Kong Canadian legislator Kenny Chiu in the 2021 federal election, said he also discovered that pro-Beijing activists once discussed dropping heavy objects from towers in Montreal onto a parade of pro-democracy supporters.
The solution to these clear and present dangers?
Ottawa has just passed a foreign influence act that I identified as a crucial gap in November 2022.
But as NSICOP reported and experts continue to explain Canada’s inability to convert what we know from wiretaps about China’s brazen interference into actual prosecutions is a longstanding legal impediment that seems to be rooted in our Constitution.
In the meantime, MP Chong told the McGill Panel, Canadians deserve to know the harms they face.
His own experience proves it.
CSIS knew MP Chong and his family were targeted by China’s secret police simply because Chong had led the way in 2021, shining a Parliamentary light on Beijing’s genocide in Xinjiang. Our intelligence service wasn’t empowered to fully warn Chong until media reported the threat, NSICOP’s review says.
Sunlight is the remedy recommended by international experts, MP Chong argued.
He said Canada’s default position is to keep shocking information on Chinese interference secret. But that must change in proportion to the incredible risks our citizens are facing.
That brings me to an under-recognized case study in NSICOP’s 2024 review.
Under the section titled “Leveraging relationships with influential Canadians” NSICOP describes how hostile states undermine our democracy by “establishing reciprocal relationships with influential Canadians, using clandestine networks, employing proxies, and covertly buying influence with candidates and elected officials.”
Specific to the People’s Republic, this section says Beijing “relies on a network of proxies, including prominent business people and community leaders, in major urban centres like Greater Vancouver [and] Greater Toronto.”
Redacted paragraphs then point to a completely censored 12 paragraph case study regarding the “PRC proxy considered by the security and intelligence community to be the most egregious case of foreign interference.”
Censorship notes explain this PRC proxy was considered a threat to Canada in all ways under the CSIS Act, including threats of bodily harm.
One aspect of CSIS’s intelligence collection on this particular PRC proxy appears to be so serious that the Service was compelled to share with the RCMP a “high-risk, high-harm threat to some Canadians and permanent residents.”
So what do we have here?
What Canadian officials could be connected to the actions of this “most egregious case of foreign interference” that is detailed under the heading Leveraging relationships with influential Canadians?
Is the PRC proxy involved in clandestine fund transfers to benefit witting or semi-witting federal election candidates?
CSIS and the RCMP will not answer. Nor will Canada’s Parliament.
But are any Canadians facing death threats?
Have any Canadians been assaulted or unlawfully detained and questioned on Canadian soil or things of that nature?
CSIS and the RCMP will not answer. Nor will Canada’s Parliament.
So to inform Canadians on the lengths Chinese secret police and their proxies have gone to in similar democracies, let’s look at some precedents.
In New Zealand two democracy activists named Weiguo Xi and Lecheng Wang were killed when their car crashed in July 2020.
They were travelling to petition a Parliamentary committee on Chinese foreign interference, according to New Zealand United Front scholar Anne-Marie Brady.
Professor Brady and others believe some evidence suggests their vehicle was sabotaged, a recent New Zealand media report says.
Brady herself, world leader in exposing the United Front’s escalating global operations in 2017, experienced an office break-in and “alarming defects” in her own vehicle in 2018.
In Australia, it has just been reported, federal police told activist Drew Pavlou and journalist Vicky Xu — prominent critics of the Chinese Communist Party — that “they were suspected targets of a foreign interference operation, warning them to avoid adopting a predictable daily routine to prevent putting themselves in danger.”
Vicky Xu, a researcher that exposed genocidal abuses in Xinjiang, has also suffered an apparent state-sponsored smearing campaign that amounts to sexual harassment according to transnational repression expert Laura Harth of SafeGuard Defenders.
But in New York — where American law enforcement and intelligence have the capacity to tap phones and collect powerful evidence — there is a prosecution so chilling and detailed, that every Canadian Parliamentarian should take notice.
Department of Justice filings say from September 2021 to March 2022 a Chinese secret police agent named Qiming Li directed proxies including an American PI to target a New York election candidate described only as “a former student leader of the Tiananmen Square protests from 1989, who later escaped to the United States and served in the US military.”
The Ministry of State Security — the KGB-like agency that targeted MP Michael Chong — were so determined to stop the victim from running for office, that they considered sabotaging his car.
In December 2021, Lin allegedly told the American PI: “In the end, violence would be fine too. Huh?”
“Beat him, beat him until he cannot run for election,” Lin was captured saying in a voice mail. “You think about it. Car accident, [he] will be completely wrecked, right? Whatever ways from all different angles. Or, on the day of the election, he cannot make it there himself, right?”
A month prior to that Lin instructed the American investigator to use “cops, or lawyers, or the courts,” to dig up compromising material on the U.S. election candidate who had led students in Tiananmen Square.
“Lin specified that ‘flaws’ could include ‘unreported, unpaid taxes’ or ‘extramarital affairs; uh, sexual harassment; or child porn; eh, [homosexual activity], things of that nature,” DOJ legal filings says.
And when that didn’t work Lin directed his team in New York to entrap the candidate.
“Go find a girl. Or see how he goes for prostitution, take some photos, something of that nature,” he told the PI.
The sexual kompromat plan also included infiltrating the candidate’s campaign.
“The PI participated in a monitored voice call with LIN to discuss strategy related to undermining the Victim’s candidacy,” U.S. filings say. “LIN encouraged the PI to consider using a young member of the Victim’s campaign staff to compromise the Victim. LIN emphasized again that his goal was to ‘cause [the Victim] to not make it in May’ and to ensure that the Victim ‘won’t be elected. Whatever price is fine. As long as you can do it.’”
This plan also included hiring a woman for $40,000 “to volunteer to be part of [the candidate’s] election staff in order to ‘have a relationship with him’ and then ‘record the transaction between the two of them.’”
And according to the U.S. government, the Chinese secret police agent told the American PI to proactively gather information on anyone that spoke against China.
“The people who always speak up, you need to pay attention to them,” Lin said. “If possible to get some information, then this side will hold you in very high regards in the future.”
In an interview Michael Kovrig, the former Canadian diplomat detained by the Ministry of State Security as leverage to secure Meng Wanzhou’s release in Canada, said he believes the “egregious” case study that is censored in NSICOP’s report could involve the same networks and tactics revealed in New York.
“The CCP has the capacity, will, motivation, and lack of ethical standards necessary to conduct such activities,” Kovrig told The Bureau. “If there were a way for the public to know more about the case without compromising the intelligence sources and methods used to identify it, that could probably help in educating the Canadian public about the dangers from foreign interference.”
CSIS spokesman Eric Balsam said he cannot answer whether the NSICOP case study includes plots to harm or kill Canadians, or if any cases of bodily harm have already occurred.
“As we mentioned in our latest Public Report, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has one of the world’s largest and most active security and intelligence systems. Although primarily focused on ensuring the survival of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), PRC Intelligence Services (PRCIS) actively carry out clandestine and covert activities targeting democratic states around the world,” Balsam wrote.
“The Ministry of State Security (MSS), China’s principal civilian human intelligence service, and other PRCIS apply a variety of methods, including leveraging social media platforms and offering financial incentives to recruit individuals to provide the PRC privileged or classified government or proprietary information. They also attempt to recruit individuals to spy on Canadians whose views challenge the narratives promoted by the CCP leadership.”
sam@thebureau.news
You never fail to deliver. Thank you Sam Cooper.
Cowardice from the RCMP and CSIS. Name and shame, otherwise there is little deterrent to this behaviour.