Ottawa Has Fallen
What Democrats think happened with our 2016 election with Russia really happened in Canada in 2021 with China – but did anybody in the USA notice?
I hope the clickbait title worked. I riffed on that trio of schlocky action movies in an effort to get Americans to pay attention to something happening in Canada. This is a difficult thing to achieve. Inasmuch as Americans think about our nice northern neighbor, which isn’t much, they notice that Canadians are exceedingly polite, they sound pretty much like us when they talk (except for the ones who mysteriously speak French), plus they enjoy hockey and spending as much of the winter in Florida as they can.
That something important involving peace, democracy, and security is transpiring north of the border is a tough sell for Americans. Years ago, wonky nerds in Washington had a contest to devise the most boring headline imaginable. The winner was: “Worthwhile Canadian Initiative.” Not much has changed since.
Of course, if you subscribe to this newsletter, you are obviously a smart and refined person, and you know that lots of interesting and even troubling things involving espionage and security are going on in Canada, much of it having to do with the People’s Republic of China. Three months ago, I warned about “the serious risk of state capture by Beijing in our northern neighbor and closest ally,” urging Americans to pay attention to disturbing things going on in Canada regarding Chinese Communist Party espionage and illicit influence. We had proof that PRC spies directly interfered in Canada’s 2019 federal elections, including the clandestine funding of at least 11 candidates for Parliament. Worse, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, Ottawa’s domestic intelligence agency, had briefed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau about this threat, yet he had done nothing to stop or mitigate it. As I explained the stakes:
If any future Canadian government wishes to blunt CCP efforts to subvert their democracy, the path forward is clear. First, Canadian intelligence, above all CSIS, needs more money, more personnel, more technology, and above all enhanced legal authorities to combat this twenty-first century menace, since Ottawa remains firmly anchored in obsolete Cold War security paradigms. Just as important as fixing counterintelligence, however, is the pressing need for Canada to implement laws requiring paid agents of foreign governments to register with the authorities. While many Western governments have such laws on the books (in the United States we have the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which compels filing papers with the Department of Justice), Canada does not, a glaring omission. Until this changes, Beijing will continue its subversion of Canadian democracy in its own interests. The clock is ticking.
Moreover, if Canada falls under CCP influence at the federal level, the United States is Beijing’s next target:
The implications of all this are disturbing for America too. Watching our neighbor and closest ally being subverted by the CCP, with minimal pushback by Ottawa against potential state capture by Beijing, is alarming for our national security. What all this means for the Five Eyes family and NATO requires urgent discussion in Washington, while offering whatever support Canada needs to resist China, clandestinely or otherwise. The stakes could not be higher.
As usual, the Washington press corps didn’t pay much attention to this important matter. Now, three months have passed, and it turns out I was insufficiently alarmist and unduly optimistic. The situation in Canada regarding Beijing’s espionage and political influence is worse than it looked late last year. CCP interference in Canada’s 2021 federal election was even more serious than in 2019. Based on leaks of Top Secret CSIS reports, it’s now clear that Chinese intelligence successfully interfered in Canada’s 2021 election, helping to engineer a Liberal minority government while keeping China hawks away from power in Ottawa. The Globe and Mail, Canada’s biggest circulation daily newspaper, has run a series of detailed reports in recent days that reveals what CSIS knew in real time (or close) about CCP interference in the 2021 election.
Since those reports are paywalled, allow me to briefly summarize the story. First, Canadian voters of Chinese birth or heritage played a suspiciously prominent role in the defeat of anti-Beijing candidates, particularly in the Toronto area, so much so that CSIS considered this highly suspect. Much of this was driven by Chinese language social media “fake news” that was, in fact, a disinformation campaign directed by Chinese intelligence to punish candidates who were deemed unfriendly to the CCP. Beijing went to some lengths to conceal its role here, but CSIS wasn’t fooled. Moreover, there was shady Chinese money involved in some of these races that betrayed the hallmarks of a directed influence operation to benefit Beijing. How much these illegal activities impacted the outcome of the 2021 election is difficult to determine, yet China’s secret intelligence operation to keep Trudeau and his Liberals in power clearly worked to some extent.
The good news here – and there is some – exists in the fact that Canadian intelligence had a surprisingly adept handle on Chinese intelligence operations as they unfolded. It’s obvious that CSIS and other agencies enjoyed impressive coverage, through both human agentry and technical surveillance working together. It wasn’t intelligence that was lacking, rather political will in Ottawa.
Which brings us to the bad news, and it’s very bad. At best, Prime Minister Trudeau displayed an alarmingly dismissive attitude towards CSIS and its detailed awareness of Chinese election games. At worst, Trudeau seems not to have minded what Beijing’s spies were up to at all.
Let’s turn again to the indispensable Sam Cooper at Global News, who just dropped another bombshell about how bad things are in Ottawa on the China front. His new report is based on CSIS intelligence and confirms that the prime minister’s attitude towards CCP election interference in his country can be charitably termed cavalier. Per Cooper, just three weeks before the 2019 election, CSIS explicitly warned Trudeau that one of his party’s candidates, Han Dong, was a Chinese intelligence partner whom Beijing wanted to see in parliament. CSIS urged the prime minister to act, rescinding Dong’s candidacy.
Trudeau did nothing and Dong was elected to parliament in 2019, representing a Toronto district that has many Chinese Canadians, then was reelected in 2021. Cooper’s report deserves an extended verbatim quote, given its revelations:
Another reason the service decided to target Dong, an intelligence official said, was his alleged meeting with a senior official from Beijing’s United Front Work Department in New York state, according to sources and documents. This event is alleged to have taken place during the service’s 2019 election interference probe.
This organ of the Chinese Communist Party is facilitating Beijing’s vast political subversion operations in Canada, according to a January 2022 Privy Council Office “Special Report” that summarizes findings from the service’s 2019 investigations. Beijing, however, denies using the United Front to support CCP policy abroad.
“The Liberal Party of Canada is becoming the only party that the People’s Republic of China can support,” says a Dec. 20, 2021, CSIS report reviewed by Global News. It continues to say that after the September 2021 federal election, CSIS collected intelligence that Chinese consulate officials believe “it is easy to influence Chinese immigrants to agree with PRC’s stance.”
The report — which CSIS distributed to the CIA, FBI, as well as Australian, New Zealand and British intelligence services — concludes: “PRC officials anticipate that in the next federal election, voters from Mainland China will show their strength again.”
In response to these damning reports, which are based on leaked Canadian intelligence, Prime Minister Trudeau has argued that it’s no big deal. Opposition Conservatives have demanded answers to what happened in 2019 and 2021 involving Chinese election interference, but Trudeau has ruled out any inquiry, while insisting that the real problem here is the leaking of classified information. Some Liberals have accused the opposition of employing “Trump-like tactics” by asking questions about the legitimacy of recent elections.
Anybody who cares about the integrity of Canadian democracy should want to know what exactly transpired in recent federal elections. Such an inquiry would be almost impossible to conduct in a fully open manner, given the importance of classified CSIS intelligence in understanding PRC espionage and influence operations. Nevertheless, several prominent retired Canadian security officials, including a former CSIS director, have come out in favor of an official inquiry. Trudeau has blocked that investigation so far, but how long he can resist is a key question. Now that Jagmeet Singh, leader of the left-wing New Democratic Party, has called for “a fully independent and non-partisan public inquiry” into Chinese election interference, Trudeau can no longer paint his critics as Trump-like right-wingers.
Regardless of what happens next in Ottawa, the last couple weeks have constituted a shocking turn of events in normally not terribly exciting Canada, where Beijing managed to pull off exactly the sort of election interference that many Americans believe Moscow boosted Republicans in 2016 to put Donald Trump in the White House, yet for which hard evidence remains elusive. Despite that, this explosive story has barely been reported in the United States at all. A quick search for new stories about Chinese election interference in Canada comes up with the following results:
ABC News: Zero, Axios: Zero, CBS News: Zero, CNN: Zero, NBC News (and MSNBC): Zero, NPR: Zero, POLITICO: Zero.
That’s right, Canada’s bombshell election story, which has been reported in considerable detail up north, has been ignored by the American media. The same media that reported for years, not always accurately, about alleged Russian election interference, has nothing to say when the culprit is China and the target is Canada, right next door to us – and that story is detailed and well sourced.
Perhaps this isn’t surprising, given the MSM’s reticence to report on Chinese political influence operations in the U.S., which generally look worse for Democrats than Republicans. The MSM seems no more interested in Trudeau’s China problem than they were in Hunter Biden’s laptop, with its Chinese intelligence reveals, in the run-up to our 2020 election. How, then, do you explain that Fox News, which is normally happy to illuminate Beijing’s clandestine shenanigans, hasn’t reported about Chinese interference in Canada’s 2021 election either?
Americans need to wake up. Canada isn’t just our closest ally and biggest trading partner, not to mention our best friend and seamless security partner. Any threat to Canadian democracy will soon become a threat to our own. Have no illusions, my fellow Americans: if Beijing can subvert Canadian elections through espionage, dirty money, propaganda, and political trickery, Chinese Communists will soon be employing the same clandestine playbook here. If Canada’s democracy gets crippled by CCP subversion – and there’s good evidence that it’s alarmingly far along after the 2019 and 2021 elections – we’re next.
I’ve lived in Canada and I’ve had the privilege of working closely with our Canadian intelligence partners, who are skilled professionals. Canada’s corrupt politics and weak laws to safeguard their democracy are the culprits working hand-in-glove with Beijing here. You can’t pin this failure on the spooks. I realize I care more about what happens in Canada than at least 99 percent of Americans, but it’s time to pay attention to what’s going on up there, with our neighbors, before it’s too late.