The storm is from intelligence leaked to multiple Canadian reporters and authors over the past few years from Canadian security sources. The intelligence indicates that China allegedly sought to keep Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberal Party in power over the last two elections, albeit in a weak position as a “minority government” dependent on a third party’s support.
Apparently, China’s communists see Trudeau as soft on the party, but they don’t trust him further than they can throw him.
US Intelligence Probed Canada
New reporting from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) indicates that U.S. intelligence agencies have long been worried about China’s influence in Canada, to the point of conducting a “secret probe” up North of the border as far back as the 1990s.The probe, called Operation Dragon Lord, is covered in a new book by former Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) intelligence official Scott McGregor and film-maker Ina Mitchell. (Full disclosure: the publisher of the book, Optimum Publishing International, published one of mine as well.)
From 2014 to 2018, McGregor served in the RCMP as an intelligence adviser whose duties included combating organized crime. Previously, he spent 22 years in military intelligence.
National Broadcaster Confirms Allegations
The book and CBC cite a 1998 U.S. Department of Justice memo completed in coordination with other U.S. intelligence agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Defense Intelligence Agency.While CBC did not fully authenticate the memo, it corroborated concerns in it with both Canadian and U.S. intelligence officials from the time. The memo was broadly concerned with an alleged alliance between the CCP and Chinese gangs called triads. CCP-supported gang activity, according to the report, principally emanated from Canada.
“Canada was aware of these threats for 25 years and has allowed them to manifest,” McGregor told the CBC.
The CBC interviewed a former Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) Asia-Pacific Bureau chief, Michel Juneau-Katsuya, who supports the key findings of the book authors. Juneau-Katsuya said that since the 1980s, each Canadian government would be implicated by a full public inquiry of connections between Canadian officials and China’s United Front Work Department.
“Every prime minister has been compromised at one point or another by those agents of influence,” Juneau-Katsuya told a CBC news anchor. “It is a phenomenal security risk because basically you can ask yourself the question, who is really running the country? Is it a foreign entity, or is it our government?”
Juneau-Katsuya said that evidence about the prime ministers existed. He believes it should be made available to an independent public inquiry, not to find guilt in the past, but to develop better procedures to protect Canada so that “future governments will not fall into the same groove.”
US Frustrated in 2015
I’m not surprised by news of the probe. In about 2015, I heard from a knowledgeable source that U.S. intelligence was upset that China used permissive conditions in Canada to infiltrate spies into the United States. When U.S. intelligence complained, Canada did little, according to the source.While living in New York at the time, I befriended a relatively powerful Chinese-Canadian who worked at an important institution. U.S. authorities warned me off of him, saying he was “dangerous” and implying that he actually worked for China. They couldn’t do anything about him, they lamented, because he was a Canadian citizen.
Clearly, the U.S.–Canada alliance was failing in that moment, failed before, and failed after, when it came to something as important as China’s election interference, spying, and I might add, industrial espionage and intellectual property theft of as much as $600 billion annually in the United States alone.
The United States and Canada desperately need a national discussion and legal reforms to protect against obvious issues of CCP attempts to interfere in our elections and influence our leading politicians.
The author wrote of hoping his or her leak would “launch a conversation about how to improve transparency, how to enhance accountability, how to protect all members of our society against external threats, and ultimately, about how we continue to pursue a system of governance that best serves all of its citizens.”