Trudeau's failure to address election interference and diaspora repression could harm Canada for years: 2024 Review
An Ottawa Parliamentary review of election interference allegations in Canada has confirmed The Bureau’s inaugural June 2023 report, chiefly finding that Prime Minister Trudeau’s government has long-ignored urgent intelligence on specific threats from China and India that would likely lead to criminal charges in other nations, including cases of Canadian politicians knowingly accepting funds from foreign diplomats in transfers consistent with money laundering, and the “egregious” actions of a People’s Republic proxy causing “high-risk, high-harm threat to some Canadians.”
The National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP) is a bipartisan panel of Canadian officials tasked with investigating allegations of federal election interference which only came to light after Global News started to report on leaked Canadian intelligence in November 2022.
The Bureau also reported in June 2023, that Trudeau had failed to respond to NSICOP’s recommendations in June 2019, for new laws against Chinese and Indian interference, such as a foreign agent registry that has allowed the United States to prosecute diaspora repression run by proxies in New York City that have official links to Fujian security police and Beijing’s foreign influence and intelligence arm, the United Front Work Department.
The Bureau’s first ever report said “an investigation – including exclusive access to [NSICOP’s] June 2019 document – finds the Trudeau Government has not only failed to counter a stunning scale of interference involving Chinese diplomats in Canada, but also similar alleged election-meddling from Indian officials ‘interfering and influencing voting in favour of … pro-India candidates.’”
In June 2024, NSICOP’s 92-page report, a review of 33,000 pages of Canadian intelligence, affirmed Trudeau’s government has allowed hostile states to run amok in Canada’s democracy and diasporas.
“The slow response to a known threat was a serious failure and one from which Canada may feel the consequences for years to come,” the report tabled Monday in Ottawa says.
“The implications of this inaction include the undermining of the democratic rights and fundamental freedoms of Canadians, the integrity and credibility of Canada’s parliamentary process, and public trust in the policy decisions made by the government.”
Addressing the scale of the threats, which come chiefly from China but increasingly India as well, and seek to gain advantage over Canada by coercing diaspora groups with threats and inducements, NSICOP said it’s “seen considerable evidence that Parliamentarians across all parties and groups are potential targets for interference activities of foreign states and actors because of the roles they play in Parliament, in Cabinet and within the communities they represent.”
The Committee added it has “seen troubling intelligence that some Parliamentarians are, in the words of the intelligence services, ‘semi-witting or witting’ participants in the efforts of foreign states to interfere in our politics.”
Specific examples cited included:
Communicating frequently with foreign missions before or during a political campaign to obtain support from community groups or businesses which the diplomatic missions promise to quietly mobilize in a candidate’s favour;
Accepting knowingly or through willful blindness funds or benefits from foreign missions or their proxies which have been layered or otherwise disguised to conceal their source;
Providing foreign diplomatic officials with privileged information on the work or opinions of fellow Parliamentarians, knowing that such information will be used by those officials to inappropriately pressure Parliamentarians to change their positions;
Responding to the requests or direction of foreign officials to improperly influence Parliamentary colleagues or Parliamentary business to the advantage of a foreign state.
NSICOP concluded some of these cases “may be illegal, but are unlikely to lead to criminal charges, owing to Canada’s failure,” to make legal reforms that would enable the RCMP and Canadian intelligence to work more effectively and forward evidence into prosecutions.
The bipartisan panel’s report added more information to one of the alleged cases of People’s Republic election interference that featured prominently in Ottawa’s Foreign Interference Commission.
In that case, Trudeau was personally warned prior to the 2019 federal election that Chinese diplomats and a known proxy agent in Toronto had allegedly attempted to place Liberal candidate Han Dong in a “safe” local riding with many mainland China migrant voters.
In his testimony Dong denied any knowledge of alleged irregularities, which included China’s bussing of international students to support Dong.
“Many of Mr. Dong’s supporters arrived in busses [redacted] supported by the PRC: between 175 and 200 international Chinese students arrived in several busses,” NSICOP’s 2024 review says. “The (Toronto Chinese) Consulate reportedly told the students that they must vote for Mr. Dong if they want to maintain their student visas.”
This information is similar to the Foreign Interference Commission’s findings, but NSICOP added allegations of intimidation involving the students themselves, who have been linked to a private school for Chinese international students situated in another Toronto riding.
“The Consulate knowingly broke the Liberal Party of Canada’s rule that voters in a nomination process must live in the riding,” the report says before a series of redacted sentences.
Explaining the general content, the censored report says “the sentences noted that the students reportedly: lived outside of the riding; were provided with fraudulent residency paper work; and sought to physically intimidate voters and distribute pro-Dong materials, contrary to Party rules.”
The question of what, if anything, Trudeau did to address intelligence warnings on Dong’s candidacy, remains open.
“On September 28, 2019, CSIS briefed the Liberal Party of Canada’s Secret-cleared representatives on its assessment, who in turn briefed the PM alone the following day,” NSICOP’s review says. “The Liberal Party of Canada allowed Mr. Dong to run in both the 2019 and 2021 federal elections.”
In a section regarding investigations into China’s clandestine election-financing, the report says “intelligence reporting from CSIS and CSE showed that foreign states attempted to covertly buy influence with candidates and elected officials.”
Five censored sentences of “privileged information” generally described “an example of the PRC using intermediaries to provide funds likely to support candidates in the 2019 federal election, including two transfers of funds approximating $250,000 through a prominent community leader.”
The redacted report doesn’t indicate who this community leader is, nor the singular “PRC proxy considered by the security and intelligence community to be the most egregious case of foreign interference.”
Explaining broadly how massively funded United Front Work Department influence operations work in Canada, it says the “PRC also relies on a network of proxies, including prominent businesspeople and community leaders,” in Toronto and Vancouver.
One of these unidentified community leaders is the subject of a 12-paragraph case study which is completely censored.
According to NSICOP censors it describes “CSIS’s assessment that the proxy represented a threat to Canada in every sense of the CSIS Act’s … definition of foreign influence in that their actions over time have been detrimental to the interest of Canada and are clandestine, deceptive and threatening. CSIS further assessed that one aspect of the proxy’s behaviour was a high-risk, high-harm threat to some Canadians and permanent residents. CSIS has shared information on the proxy with the RCMP.”
While the RCMP has been investigating alleged Chinese repression through so-called CCP overseas police stations in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, no charges have resulted, NSICOP’s report says.
“The United States has taken steps to respond to these Overseas Police Stations,” it says. “In April 2023, the Federal Bureau of Investigation charged two Chinese-Americans, both U.S. citizens, with conspiring to act as PRC agents by establishing one of these stations in New York, under an offence that does not exist in Canada because Canada does not have a foreign agent registry.”
[Editor’s note: MP Han Dong has filed an active defamation claim regarding reports in 2023 by Global News, and this reporter, on alleged irregularities in Don Valley North riding.]
Once again- thanks Sam for this work. I fear the politically compromised have already changed so many laws that they have created a type of immunity for their actions. This is really treason and the whole system must be collapsed
Where have I heard what I just read in this morning’s Globe & Mail before? Oh, yeah, ages ago in Sam Cooper’s The Bureau and before that in his work at Global. I hope you feel great being vindicated, Sam.