Glavin: Carney-China deal full of Trojan Horses on police, propaganda
"While the public’s attention has been focused on its trade components, the new Canada-China concordat contains several core provisions that go far beyond the projected expansion of Chinese electric car imports in exchange for Beijing’s promise to ease tariff barriers on Canadian canola seed and meal and any other trade-related aspects of Canada’s “reset” with China.
“These are all Trojan horses,” Cheuk Kwan, co-chair of the Toronto Association for Democracy and the spokesman for the Canadian Coalition on Human Rights in China, told me this week. Edmund Leung, chair of the Vancouver Society in Support of Democratic Movement (VSSDM), described the dozen or so non-trade deals as “very, very upsetting.”
It’s as though Canadians are expected to simply forget all the national scandals over the past several years involving the efforts by Beijing’s United Front Work Department to monkeywrench the 2019 and 2021 federal elections to the Liberal party’s advantage and to unseat former Conservative party leader Erin O’Toole in 2022. It’s as though Ottawa has decided to be wholly oblivious to the voluminous evidence provided by Canada’s intelligence agencies documenting Beijing’s strongarming of Canada’s Chinese-language media into submission and obedience to Xi Jinping’s party line.
“It is very, very upsetting to me and to our organization,” Leung said. “This is all about expanding the Communist party’s influence and expanding their capabilities in Canada, in all those agreements, for transnational repression, political interference and disinformation.”
The proposed collaborations can be made to seem quite benign. They’re all about “people-to-people ties and cultural exchanges,” investment in museums, support for “digital content creators” and “visual artists,” heritage, education, “travel exchanges and cultural ties” and cooperation in the “creative industries” deep down into the “sub-national” level. But these are precisely the methods Beijing employs to extend the global reach of its “soft-power” operations in targeted countries.
Similarly, it’s all well and good for Canada to seek Beijing’s cooperation to “combat corruption,” cyber fraud and the traffic in illegal synthetic drugs. But last month’s memorandum of understanding between the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and China’s dreaded Ministry of Public Security (MPS) revives a collaboration from 25 years ago that fell apart after a series of scandals involving tortured witnesses and trumped-up corruption charges.
The proposed RCMP-MPS collaboration also effectively airbrushes the more recent revelation, from 2023, that China’s various Public Security divisions were running several clandestine police stations under the cover of various Beijing-affiliated community organizations in Montreal, Toronto and Metro Vancouver. Owing to the inadequacy of Canada’s foreign-interference laws, the RCMP was reduced to a strategy of simply detecting and disrupting the overseas MPS operations in Canada. Bill C-70, the Countering Foreign Interference Act, was tabled in the House of Commons two years ago, and it was only this past week that C-70- emerged from its public consultations stage...
Among other things, the agreements Carney entered into in Beijing will formalize the Canadian operations of two key divisions within the Central Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist Party’s central committee. The arrangements elevate the Canadian opportunities for the senior party ideologist Shen Haixiong, a prominent Propaganda Department deputy minister, and also for another Propaganda Department deputy, Sen Yeli, Bejing’s Minister of Culture and Tourism.
Shen Haixiong is the director and editor-in-chief of the all-powerful China Media Group, the propaganda conglomerate that has radically expanded its control over media in China and overseas Chinese-language news platforms since the CCP’s 20th National Congress in 2022. Shen’s CMG controls China Central Television (CCTV) as well as the overseas operations of CGTN and China Radio International (CRI). He has described the CMG as Beijing’s propaganda “aircraft carrier,” and he has boasted that in 2023 alone, the CMG had landed 12,000 hits favourable to Xi Jinping on 1,188 overseas news platforms in 88 different countries.
In an MOU signed by Shen and Canadian ambassador Jennifer May during Carney’s visit to Beijing last month: “The two sides consented to provide mutual support and convenience for media to work in each other’s countries, and provide greater convenience for two-way travel.” In the Chinese context, “media” should not be understood to mean independent journalists. The CMG’s staff in all its platforms are propaganda officials. According to Reporters Without Borders, China remains the primary jailer of journalists among the United Nations member states. As of this week, at least 114 reporters and media workers were in prison for asking the wrong questions or reporting unflattering news...
Over the past 20 years, Beijing’s Canadian proxies have either directly taken over Canada’s Chinese-language media or they’ve bullied the Chinese language press into submission. According to a Canadian Security Intelligence Service assessment released with the final report of the Hogue Inquiry into foreign interference last year, Beijing-friendly “narratives” have inundated Chinese-language media in Canada. “Censorship (including self-censorship) is pervasive and alternative media voices are few or marginalized . . . this includes traditional media such as newspapers, and in new media provided by online platforms and applications such as WeChat.”
Another direct relationship between Canada’s undertakings and the CCP central committee’s propaganda department is the restoration of the briefly-lived collaboration between the Department of Canadian Heritage and China’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism, headed by Shen’s Central Committee propaganda department colleague Sun Yeli. The point of the joint committee is to “expand people-to-people ties, cultural exchange, and trade in the creative and cultural sectors.”
A typical CCP “soft power” foreign operation, the Canada-China Joint Committee on Culture collapsed after only a few months in December, 2018, when President Xi ordered the kidnapping of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor in a fit of rage over Canada’s detention of Huawei heiress Meng Wanzhou on U.S. charges related to Huawei’s sanctions evasions in Iran.
And now it’s back up and running.
To China experts and Chinese diaspora leaders, the most alarming agreement Carney concluded in Beijing was the restoration of the relationship between the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and China’s dreaded Ministry of Public Security (MPS).
That agreement has its origins in a fairly straightforward police liaison arrangement that had evolved during the Harper years into a joint effort to target the Chinese Communist Party’s wealthy fraudsters and embezzlers who routinely absconded to Canada. But it quickly turned out to be a cover for Beijing to target “political criminals,” often relying on coerced interrogations and blackmail.
During the early months of Justin Trudeau’s government, the collaboration was elevated in priority. Within a week of Trudeau’s first trip to China in September, 2016, Ottawa and Beijing established the “Canada-China High-Level National Security and Rule of Law Dialogue.” Among its objectives were the same commitments to improve cooperation in counter-terrorism, cyber-crime and transnational organized crime, with Canada adding a border-security offer to assist in “the verification of the identity of inadmissible persons . . . to facilitate their return from Canada to China.” The Trudeau government also pledged to “start discussions on an Extradition Treaty and a Transfer of Offenders Treaty.”
Would Carney wind the clock back that far?
“That was my major concern of the whole trip, this deal between the RCMP and China’s public security,” the VSSDM’s Edmund Leung told me. “I’m really fearful that this may evolve into something like the extradition treaty that China wants so badly. That’s what China wants. China wants the return of ‘political’ criminals.”
The China expert, author and former diplomat Charles Burton shares Leung’s concerns about Carney’s RCMP-MPS agreement. “If the Chinese police have the ability to request information from Canada in their ongoing investigations, it’s very bad news. If we feel compelled to share information — names and addresses or whatever — we would simply be enabling China’s transnational repression.”
Another point overlooked in the “new world order” Carney declared during his visits in Beijing: The Chinese Communist Party has already issued arrest warrants and rewards for information that would secure the detention of 19 diaspora Chinese. They include two Canadians: the former Sing Tao B.C. edition editor-in-chief Victor Ho, and Joe Tay, the Conservative candidate in last year’s federal election in Don Valley North.
Ho has chronicled Beijing’s strangulation of the free Chinese-language press in Canada, and Tay was subjected to a crude “joke” at a Beijing-friendly Chinese media press conference: The Markham-Unionville Liberal MP Paul Chiang suggested that Tay should be delivered to the Chinese consulate in Toronto in exchange for the $1 million (HK) reward for his detention."
