How China courted, cultivated, and cornered Ottawa: A Canadian political class eager for connections created perfect conditions for foreign interference -

[This is an op-ed by Dennis Molinaro, a former national security analyst and policy adviser for the Canadian government. A frequent media commentator on intelligence and foreign interference issues, he has taught courses on modern espionage, human rights law, and national security at several universities, including the University of Toronto.]

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“Canada is back!” declared the country’s new leader, and so was the Liberal Party. Justin Trudeau was elected prime minister in 2015, and his declaration of Canada’s return might as well have been spoken directly to Beijing. He had campaigned on improving relations with China, making it a “top priority,” according to the Prime Minister’s Office. The next year, he made an official visit to the People’s Republic of China and began exploratory talks on a free trade deal, and—in a move that must have left Canada’s pro-democracy activists in shock—even considered an extradition treaty.

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By the time Trudeau’s Liberals had assumed power, veteran members of Canada’s political class were concerned about the PRC [People's Republic of China]’s level of influence in the country. David Mulroney, Canada’s former ambassador to China, recalled [how] in his dealings with Chinese diplomats during his tenure, he faced a growing arrogance.

“There was a certain pragmatism,” he said, that existed when he’d dealt with China in the past. But by the turn of the century, everything had become “zero sum.”

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“You begin to get this sense of a China that was infallible.” This attitude became exacerbated with President Xi and his consolidation of power. Mulroney noticed a tendency of business leaders to be “overwhelmed” by PRC officials, in that they seemed easily taken in and in awe of them. At Chinese New Year events in Canada, Mulroney witnessed how politicians at multiple levels “would be kissing the ring” of the Chinese official at the event and ceding political space and clout, which struck Mulroney as odd, given they were in Canada.

Other former diplomats ... highlighted how their biggest concerns were not so much the actions of politicians while in office but their actions upon leaving: the acceptance of plum jobs in China, sometimes direct offers of assistance to the PRC government. Others told me how they’d witnessed, during sensitive government discussions, that the PRC was able to pick off members of Canada’s negotiating teams and influence them against Canada’s own interests.

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Once elected, Trudeau immediately went to work detailing how he was going to deal with China differently than Stephen Harper had. At the 2015 G20 meeting in Turkey, Xi remarked that China would never forget how former prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau had welcomed the PRC with official recognition in 1970.

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Trudeau’s trip to the PRC was celebrated in Chinese media with references to him as the “little potato,” as the name “Trudeau” sounds much like the Mandarin word for potato. It was a term of endearment, if not exactly a compliment. Trudeau told Premier Li Qiang how pleased and “very happy” he was to be following in his father’s path with China.

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Trudeau was keen to figure something out. CBSA documents from the time considered the PRC one of the main sources of “irregular migration” to Canada, with substantial fraud taking place in visa applications. A portion of this fraud could likely be attributed to organized crime working with the PRC mission. Even in the absence of an extradition treaty, Canada was willing to permit Chinese police to testify at immigration hearings in Canada, and in 2016, Canada actually allowed PRC Ministry of Public Safety, or MPS, officers to meet with PRC targets to negotiate a “voluntary return.” Despite these concessions, PRC officials also met with targets without supervision and against agreed-upon protocols, pressuring them to return.

According to Global Affairs Canada documents obtained through an access-to-information request, the sky was the limit as Canada filled its cart with items from Beijing’s shopping list. On bilateral relations, Canada wanted annual meetings with PRC leaders, with 2016 slotted for free trade discussions. The Canadian government wanted to expand collaboration on green mining technologies and the development of eco-cities; it was seeking memorandums of understanding between the Canadian Institute of Health Research and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.

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Apparently disregarding what Canada already knew about Confucius Institutes—a series of international schools, including eight in Canada, where what was actually being taught was the CCP’s version of China—the government also wanted to “liaise with provinces and municipalities with respect to enhancing Chinese language and Asian history curricula in Canadian schools.” Global Affairs Canada even sought to “normalize Asia-related content in Government of Canada training”—whatever that meant—as a “long-term initiative.” Then there was the memorandum Global Affairs sought between the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and China’s MPS, the details of which have yet to be revealed, though I anticipate it’s something to do with Fox Hunt.

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Canada [also] wanted to examine the potential for the Department of Defence to allow members of China’s People’s Liberation Army to participate in Canadian “winter training” and “in each other’s military courses.” Global Affairs’ wish list even included a memorandum of understanding between the Supreme Court of Canada and the Supreme People’s Court of China, the subject of which remains unknown. A liberal democratic country like Canada was seeking a memorandum of understanding with the legal system of an authoritarian regime—the same regime that had engaged in hostage diplomacy against Canadians (and soon would again) and wanted to displace the United States as the world’s superpower.

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In November 2016, the Globe and Mail reported that Trudeau had partaken in a Toronto fundraising dinner in May with a group of Chinese billionaires, what the press was calling a “cash for access” event. At $1,525 per person, attendees included a “political adviser” to the PRC government, a man named Zhang Bin, who, along with another wealthy partner, Niu Gensheng, donated a million dollars to the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation in Montreal, a funding program for doctoral students, to honour the “memory and leadership” of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau.

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One of the people behind the event was a man named Richard Zhou, who was an organizer of such funding events for the federal Liberal Party. Another attendee was Shenglin Xian, the founder of Wealth One Bank, a Canadian financial institution that catered to Chinese clients ... Shortly after the dinner, the Globe reported that Wealth One Bank’s application for Schedule I status had been granted, giving it the same status as any other domestic bank in its ability to accept deposits in Canada.

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Trudeau defended the dinner. No ethics breaches were found, and the party claimed the fundraising complied with Elections Canada rules. Nonetheless, news of the dinner likely unsettled researchers in other Five Eyes countries and experienced China watchers. Creating opportunities for people connected to the PRC government to rub shoulders with politicians from nations China was looking to influence was a hallmark of PRC united-front interference and influence operations.

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As experienced China researchers Anne-Marie Brady and Clive Hamilton have shown, community groups in service of the UFWD [China's United Front Work Department] and united-front policies writ large are also instrumental in waging interference on the political level. This interference often begins with seeking to influence important individuals in a targeted country over time before having them engage in interference on China’s behalf. Some degree of influence peddling is acceptable in free societies, when it is overt and transparent. But united-front work very often has a far more nefarious goal, and it is covert for that reason.

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Some democratic states have sought to expose UFWD tactics. While introducing legislative changes, such as foreign interference laws, to counter this activity, former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, for instance, identified this “covert, coercive, or corrupting” behaviour as “the line that separates legitimate influence from unacceptable interference.” It’s a simple distinction. The PRC would attempt to influence individuals and promote their mission abroad, much like any other country, but when China’s influence becomes secret and sustained over time, with incentives such as gifts or blackmail, the PRC could then leverage an individual to engage in interference on their behalf. That interference is a violation of the target country’s sovereignty, and the word that best describes this interference activity is hostile.

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The Hogue Inquiry into foreign interference, established in 2023, revealed that the RCMP suspected that PRC-organized crime in Canada does have links to foreign interference. In fact, the inquiry heard about how money laundering networks were being used in support of foreign interference activity. That should hardly be shocking. In 2023, India was accused of hiring assassins in the US and Canada. The Russian state has widely been known to employ the services of organized crime. That the PRC would also make use of criminal networks just makes sense.

A ProPublica investigation detailed the arrests of Chinese organized crime bosses in Italy. Investigators said the bosses who were arrested do “what the consulate doesn’t do, or [do] it better.” They have “the network, power, resources.” They “know the diaspora,” and the bosses are “feared and respected.” Individuals involved in money laundering in Europe were also behind secret Chinese police stations there, ProPublica reported, and “gangsters help monitor and intimidate immigrant communities for the regime in Beijing, sometimes as leaders of cultural associations that are key players in China’s political influence operations and long-distance repression.”

Emmanuel Jourda, a scholar on Chinese organized crime at France’s Centre for Studies on Modern and Contemporary China, stated that the CCP “takes the most powerful, richest, most successful figures overseas and recognizes them as the nobility of the diaspora. And it doesn’t matter how they made their money. The deal, spoken or not, is: ‘You gather intelligence on the community, we let you do business. Whether legal or illegal.’” In exchange, the CCP protects the gangsters.

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Drawing on this research, we can boil down why a state would use organized criminal elements to do their dirty work to three factors: it allows the foreign state a level of plausible deniability, giving them a degree of separation from the activity; the crime bosses know the local area better than the foreign state does; and the local criminal gangs just do some things better.

Despite what the Hogue foreign interference inquiry found and what Canada’s allies are saying, and although the government publicly named India as a nation that used crime groups to engage in criminal and interference activity in Canada, the Canadian government hasn’t said anything about China.