Liberal candidates’ sympathy for (and outright alliance with) the Chinese Communist Party is just one sign of the CCP’s interference in Canadian politics.
Liberal candidates’ sympathy for (and outright alliance with) the Chinese Communist Party is just one sign of the CCP’s interference in Canadian politics.
C anada’s federal election is on April 28. How leaders might manage an erratic White House is a major campaign theme; repairing the economy after nearly a decade of disastrous mismanagement under Justin Trudeau is another. One issue that deserves more attention, however, is how the next prime minister will deal with China and what is going on in the electoral district of Markham-Unionville, in the Greater Toronto Area.
In January, the sitting Liberal member of Parliament for Markham-Unionville, Paul Chiang, told Chinese-language media that if his Conservative rival Joe Tay were elected, there would be “great controversy.” That’s because Hong Kong police had earlier put an approximately $130,000 bounty on six Canadians, including Tay, a Hong Kong democracy activist and critic of the Chinese government, for violating Hong Kong’s infamous national security law.
Chiang then effectively encouraged people to turn his political opponent and fellow Canadian citizen in to the Chinese government to collect the bounty. “If you can take him to the Chinese Consulate General in Toronto, you can get the million-dollar [Hong Kong] reward,” he said to his audience. While Chiang’s comments initially flew under the radar, the Toronto Association for Democracy in China publicized them in March, raising the issue to the fore.
Astonishingly, Liberal leader Mark Carney refused to fire his candidate. While Carney admitted Chiang’s comments were “deeply offensive” and a “terrible lapse of judgment” (in his own apology, Chiang said his comments were “deplorable”), he affirmed that he had “confidence” in Chiang, calling him a “person of integrity.” Carney told Canadians that Chiang’s comments were a “teachable moment.”
No, Mr. Carney. Canadians already know not to turn fellow citizens in to an oppressive foreign regime, and that encouraging people to do so is a firing offense. The only people who need to be taught this are Carney and Chiang themselves.
While Carney decided to keep Chiang as a candidate, the London-based organization Hong Kong Watch wrote to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police commissioner to investigate Chiang’s comments. Finally, hours after it was reported that the federal police force was investigating whether Chiang’s suggestion of handing over a fellow citizen to Chinese authorities was criminal, Chiang stepped down himself.
Shockingly, showing he learned nothing from the “teachable moment,” Carney selected as Chiang’s replacement in Markham-Unionville another candidate, Peter Yuen, whose softness toward Beijing is no less concerning than Chiang’s. Yuen “attended a massive military parade and show of martial strength in Beijing a decade ago at the invitation of a Chinese agency dedicated to influencing ethnic Chinese in other countries,” as the National Post reported.
Moreover, as the Globe and Mail described, as of the time Carney selected Yuen, he was listed as an honorary director of a Toronto-based organization clearly tied to China’s United Front Work Department, which “answers to the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s central committee and oversees Beijing’s influence, propaganda and intelligence operations inside and outside of China.”
Yuen said his involvement with that organization ended a decade ago. Still, his more recent activities include attending a Chinese consulate celebration in January 2020 that had a photo display of Xinjiang without acknowledging the Uyghur genocide, and last year joining the board of NOIC Academy, a Chinese international school in Markham flagged by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service during the federal government’s investigation into foreign interference in Canada’s 2019 election.
As for Joe Tay, instead of running in Markham-Unionville, he is now running in the neighbouring electoral district of Don Valley North. The exiting member of Parliament for Don Valley North is Han Dong, who, like colleague Paul Chiang, has a less than stellar history on China-related issues. It is alleged that Chinese international students at NOIC Academy were coerced into voting for Dong in the Liberal nomination election in 2019, and that Dong willingly accepted Beijing’s help to win his seat in the general election. Dong left the Liberal caucus to sit as an independent after media reports of those allegations emerged.
Notably, Chinese foreign interference in Canadian elections is not limited to two Toronto-area electoral districts. Earlier this month, Canada’s Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections Task Force discovered that the Chinese government had recently boosted content on WeChat, China’s largest social media network used by perhaps a million Canadians, that was favorable to Mark Carney. And with just a week to go in the election campaign, SITE reported the Chinese government appeared to be behind a repression operation against Joe Tay, forcing the Conservative candidate to pause in-person campaigning on the advice of the RCMP.
And while foreign interference is unlikely to have swayed the overall results in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections, investigations suggest foreign disinformation campaigns (notably, against the Conservative Party) may well have affected the results in a small number of seats. In fact, former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole told the Foreign Interference Commission inquiry last year that foreign misinformation campaigns targeting his party and certain candidates in Ontario and British Columbia likely cost his party up to nine seats out of the 338 in the legislature in the 2021 election.
When asked why the Chinese government wanted to help him in the upcoming federal election, Carney told reporters he had “absolutely no idea, and, well, I’ll leave it at that.”
But as the National Post’s Terry Glavin writes:
Of course it’s impossible to know what Carney was thinking, but no reasonable person could be led to believe that Carney has no idea why Beijing would want him to come out on top in this month’s federal vote.
The Liberal Party’s intimacies with the Chinese Communist Party go back decades. Beijing’s business-class proxies are deeply embedded in the Liberal Party establishment, as the recent Paul Chiang scandal once again made plain.
Indeed. At a Liberal fundraiser in 2013, Justin Trudeau was asked what country he admired most besides Canada. “There’s a level of admiration I actually have for China,” he said. “Their basic dictatorship is actually allowing them to turn their economy around on a dime and say, ‘We need to go green, we want to start investing in solar.’”
His successor, Mark Carney, may be relatively new as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, but his decisions already show that he, too, has a soft spot for the Chinese Communist Party.