Commentary
Something is stirring on Prince Edward Island (PEI) in Canada—the awakening of the public about an issue of dire consequence to democracy there and everywhere.
Hundreds of islanders listened to speeches by island activists, a Toronto publisher, and former Canadian officials from Ottawa and New Brunswick who warned attendees about China’s growing influence on their little patch of earth off the country’s east coast.
The first speaker at the event was island historian
David Weale. He got a standing ovation with the first three words of his speech: “Well, well, well.” For years, Mr. Weale has been critical of a China-linked Buddhist group on the island called “Bliss and Wisdom” that has reportedly used a shadowy network of entities to buy over
17,000 acres of land. Local law limits a corporation to just 3,000 acres.
The March 17
event, which lasted over two hours, was titled “Canada Under Siege: Prince Edward Island on the Front Line.”
In August, a Globe and Mail investigation called
Bliss and Wisdom a “Taiwan-based, China-linked Buddhist organization ... fuelled by tens of millions of dollars in international donations and led by a globe-trotting Chinese-Canadian woman known to adherents as Master Zhen-Ru.” The newspaper reports that Ms. Zhen-Ru has had Taiwan visa trouble, and “moved Bliss and Wisdom away from its roots in Tibetan-style Buddhism, headed by the Dalai Lama, toward a more Chinese-centred version of the religion that places her as the supreme leader.”
Concerns about the group’s connections to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have existed since at least
2017.
Bliss and Wisdom claims to have as many as 100,000 “students” and 1,400 monks and nuns. It is “linked to hundreds of land transactions in eastern PEI” that have been made with a briefcase full of cash, non-disclosure agreements, and mysteriously left vacant,” according to The Globe and Mail. The purchases have allegedly increased the price of PEI land beyond the means of some locals.
An estimated
600 islanders filled an overflow hall at the event in Charlottetown. To this author’s knowledge, it is one of the largest events in recent history, anywhere in the world, to focus on the CCP’s malign influence operations.
Bliss and Wisdom’s land buying reportedly started sometime after 2007. In 2008, the premier of PEI,
Robert Ghiz, led a
delegation to Beijing of four provincial premiers and “more than 100 business, research, environmental and educational institution representatives.” Two of the premiers signed agreements with China’s Ministry of Science and Technology. At the time, Mr. Ghiz promoted increased PEI exports to China and welcomed more Chinese immigrants.
Premiers went on additional trips to China in 2012 and late October
2014. Mr. Ghiz was on the latter trip when Ontario attracted
$966 million in new investment from China, including $210 million from China’s Huawei. In 2022, the United States banned Huawei for national security reasons. Mr. Ghiz unexpectedly announced his resignation two weeks after the 2014 trip, and two years later, was named president of a telecommunications l
obbying group. The group now includes promotional
literature on its website that prominently cites both Mr. Ghiz and Huawei Canada’s vice president of corporate affairs.
Bliss and Wisdom’s numerous developments on the island reportedly include the Great Enlightenment Buddhist Institute Society (
GEBIS), the Great Wisdom Buddhist Institute (
GWBI), the Three Rivers Town Hall, the Ci-Yun Institute, the Compassion and Grace Institute, and the Guan Yin Monastery.
Chinese immigrants made $200,000 in investments each for the legal privilege of moving to Canada through PEI, and then often moved to other provinces, according to Scott McGregor and Ina Mitchell in their book “
The Mosaic Effect: How the Chinese Communist Party Started a Hybrid War in America’s Backyard.” The migrants sometimes had to forfeit their investments to move out of PEI.
The book publisher and organizer of the event, Optimum Publishing International (OPI), promoted “The Mosaic Effect,” along with another book by Garry Clement, one of the event speakers. Mr. Clement’s book is titled “
Under Cover: Inside the Shady World of Organized Crime and the RCMP.” OPI is currently working with authors on a third book that will focus entirely on China’s influence in PEI. (Full disclosure: I also wrote a book for OPI.)
Mr. Clement, a former Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officer who headed its financial crime program, said at the event that China’s operations on PEI are part of its Belt and Road Initiative. He believes there is “sufficient information to launch a criminal investigation” of the PEI situation.
The investment immigration program brought $400 million into the province, according to “The Mosaic Effect.” Meanwhile, according to the book, Mr. Ghiz had a business partner, Xuan (Frank) Zhou, who was allegedly linked to the CCP’s foreign influence operations. Mr. Zhou reportedly attended one of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s trips to Beijing in 2017 and has published a
photo of himself with the prime minister on his Sunrise Group website.
In 2019,
local whistleblowers leveled allegations of corruption against PEI politicians, their friends, and associated businesses. In 2020, the plan for a large Bliss and Wisdom monastery to house 1,400 nuns on 300 acres was opposed by locals but approved by the local government in 2021.
The Bliss and Wisdom CEO of noncharitable corporate divisions,
Ke-Zhou Lu, reportedly has the nickname “General Lu.” He met with Mr. Ghiz and enjoyed his support, according to The Globe and Mail. The Buddhist
groups and Mr. Lu deny that they are under the influence of the CCP. Mr. Lu has noted that he was detained by Chinese police in 2010 and pressured to stop his group’s visits to the Dalai Lama in India.
At least one local columnist has argued that the group is unlikely to be controlled by the CCP. “If we follow the money, we see it’s years of donations from wealthy Taiwanese to Bliss and Wisdom that’s provided the tens of millions of dollars GEBIS and other Buddhist organizations use to operate here,” wrote
Ian Petrie in September 2023.
“Given the decades of repression of Buddhists, and the existential threat China now presents to Taiwan, I don’t believe these donors would support any organization that’s in the pocket of the CCP,” he added.
A request for further comment was sent to Mr. Petrie on LinkedIn.
At least one of the planned Bliss and Wisdom compounds is fortress-like, with buildings that adjoin each other in a square pattern, and a broad paved space that could potentially be used as a helipad. Bliss and Wisdom adherents from mainland China are reportedly separated from Taiwanese adherents, as are males and females.
“Bliss and Wisdom isn’t just a religious following,” according to The Globe and Mail. “It’s also a big business, with jewellery, electronics, organic farming, translation and export divisions intertwined with an ever-growing network of followers’ numbered companies, affiliated foundations, shell corporations and donors’ financial gifts.” The group’s complex corporate network is reportedly managed by a small senior leadership team. According to the investigation, donors in Taiwan and China have flowed “hundreds of millions of dollars” into Canada.
According to the CBC, which covered the
March 27 event, the government has not responded to years of freedom of information requests about major land sales on the island that appear to operate in a gray area of the law, including those of Bliss and Wisdom and other major landowners.
At just 1.4 million acres, PEI is the smallest and most densely populated of Canada’s 10 provinces. A population of about 174,000 lives in an area about equal in size to Delaware, the second-smallest state in the United States. At its closest point, PEI is just 135 miles by car from the U.S. border in Maine.
Mr. Clement said at the event that one of his sources claims that every Chinese business in Canada has to pay protection money to organized crime. China’s triads of organized crime groups are allegedly
linked to the CCP. “This is about organized transnational crime disrupting your province, and it’s going to get worse,” he said. “This idea of them building a port—do whatever you can to stop it.”
Mr. Clement compared rumors of a Bliss and Wisdom port in PEI to a port in the province of British Columbia that he tried to stop during his time in the RCMP. He alleged that the Surrey Fraser Docks there were funded by China, which he said has used Canada since 2000 as a transshipment point for exporting illegal fentanyl to the United States. “We’re talking about Asian-based organized crime that has infiltrated our countries,” he said, comparing the triads to “Hell’s Angels multiplied by 50.”
Another speaker at the event was Dominic Cardy, who described a conflict he had with China’s consul general when he was the education minister of the nearby province of New Brunswick. The consul general did not appreciate his opposition to Confucius Institutes. Mr. Cardy argued that Canadians do not recognize “that there are dangerous and I would argue in the case of China evil governments that are abusing our freedoms of speech, our openness to immigration, our openness to ideas … to undermine the very fabric of our societies.”
Another speaker, Michel Juneau-Katsuya, is a former Canadian intelligence official who famously
alleged that his agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), could prove that every federal government since the 1980s “has been compromised by agents of communist China.” He repeated the allegation at the event in PEI. “There’s a lack of accountability” on PEI, “and it’s been going on for a long time,” he said.
Mr. Juneau-Katsuya rightly cautioned that the speakers at the event should not be interpreted as against Chinese Canadians but against the CCP. He noted that not all media and politicians are negligent over the issue. However, he said that “backroom boys” are manipulating some of the media as well as some politicians to ignore the problem.
Toward the end of the program, a skeptical audience member asked the panel: “Who are you” to speak on these issues? The publisher and president of OPI, Dean Baxendale, answered in his closing remarks: “We’re people who give a damn.”
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
