CCP-Owned Media Targeted Tory Candidates in Last Federal Election: Disinformation Monitoring Expert

Conservative Leader Erin O'Toole gives his concession speech at his election night headquarters during the Canadian federal election in Oshawa, Ont., on Sept. 21, 2021. Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press

Chinese state media and pro-Beijing actors ran propaganda campaigns to smear the credibility of Conservative candidates in the last federal election, says the director of a foreign disinformation monitoring and debunking organization. The narratives pushed in those campaigns indicate a “likelihood of a coordinated operation” to influence Chinese-Canadian voters.

Testifying before the parliamentary House Affairs committee on Nov. 3, Marcus Kolga, director of DisinfoWatch, said weeks before the federal election on Sept. 20, 2021, his team was alerted to “Chinese state media narratives that directly targeted the Conservative Party and its leader Erin O’Toole.”

“Simultaneously, members of the Chinese Canadian community brought to our attention similar narratives appearing on local Canadian Chinese language media platforms and Chinese local media channel WeChat,” he said, adding that WeChat is commonly regarded as “a tool used by the Chinese government for surveillance and repression.”

In his opening statement, Kolga said on Sept. 9, 2021, the Chinese Communist Party-owned tabloid Global Times published an article “attacking” the Conservative Party’s foreign policy platform on China.

“The Global Times article threatened Canadians that if they elected a Conservative government, Canadians should expect ‘a strong counter strike and Canada will be the one to suffer.’”

Specifically, the Global Times article made reference to a report by The Hill Times, saying that an O’Toole government “would shift trade priorities away from China, including recognizing the ‘Chinese persecution of [Uyghurs] as genocide,’ banning Huawei from Canada’s 5G infrastructure, and having ‘greater political cooperation’ with [the] island of Taiwan.”

‘Falsely Accused’

“At the same time, an anonymous article was posted to WeChat targeting an incumbent MP, Kenny Chiu,” Kolga told the committee.

Chiu was a former Conservative MP who lost his seat in the B.C. riding of Steveston–Richmond East in the 2021 federal election after serving one term. He was known for his pro-Chinese democracy stance and for being an outspoken critic of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Conservative MP Kenny Chiu rises during question period in the House of Commons on April 13, 2021. Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press

During his election campaign, Chiu told The Epoch Times he had been a target of misinformation in previous election campaigns, but in 2021, “it has been exceptional.”

Prior to the election in April 2021, Chiu had introduced Bill C-282, a private member’s bill that sought to compel those working on behalf of foreign entities to register as foreign agents in order to increase transparency.

“The anonymous WeChat article falsely accused Chiu of seeking to ‘suppress the Chinese community’ through his bill,” Kolga said. “Both the Global Times and WeChat narratives were shared on local Chinese Canadian digital and social media platforms.”

Conservative MP Michael Cooper asked if the interference “materially affected” the outcome of the election.

“It’s incredibly hard to measure the impact of these sorts of operations on election outcomes,” Kolga replied. “At the same time, we can’t dismiss that they may have had an effect.”

‘Foremost Aggressor’

Adam Fisher, director general of intelligence assessments at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, told committee members that China is the “foremost aggressor” in foreign interference in Canada.

“China … is more interested in working within the system to corrupt it, compromising officials, and elected officials, and individuals at all levels of government, within industry, within civil society, so using our open and free society for their nefarious purposes,” he said.

Lyall King, a director with the federal Communications Security Establishment, testified that foreign threats to Canada’s electoral processes extend beyond the election period.

“I will just note that there were activities observed ... during the election,” King said. “But I will note in context as well it’s activity also that we see on a persistent basis. That is to say that we observe things before, during, [and] after the election.”

Tara Denham, director general of human rights at the Department of Foreign Affairs, said it wasn’t easy to trace the interference directly to a foreign state.

“We are looking for foreign threats,” she said. “We were not able to verify that the behaviour was directed by a state or whether it was organic or an intermingling of the two.”

Kolga said given that the narrative pushed in Global Times and WeChat against the Tories was spread to various different platforms, and “likely to have been seen by tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Chinese Canadians,” there is cause for concern.

“The fact that so many people saw that narrative, it should be of concern. And I think that we can certainly assume that that was an effort to undermine the integrity of our elections,” he said.