Chinese state media outlets should not be granted broadcasting licences in Canada because their content is meant to feed “misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda” to overseas Chinese, an expert witness told a House committee on March 30.
The Chinese regime has made it clear it wishes to use overseas Chinese to exert influence abroad, and “this becomes interference instead of simple influence,” said
Katherine Leung, policy advisor for the non-governmental organization Hong Kong Watch.
Leung spoke to the Commons Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs on the pending
Bill C-281, also known as the “International Human Rights Act,” which is currently being studied by the committee.
Part of that bill would amend the Broadcasting Act to prohibit licensing broadcasting “vulnerable to being influenced by a foreign national or entity” that has committed serious human rights violations.
If passed into law, Leung said the bill would “rightly increase the government’s powers to ban state propaganda outfits operating in Canada,” noting that similar legislative actions have been taken in the United Kingdom,
which banned China Global Television Network (CGTN) in 2021.
“In Canada, it is largely Chinese immigrant communities that are consuming this,” Leung said. “To allow CGTN to continue operating on public, state-owned Canadian airwaves is to allow Beijing’s propaganda to misinform, propagandize, and have direct influence on Chinese-speaking Canadians.”
Being broadcast on Canadian airwaves lends the Chinese Communist Party-run media more credibility, Leung said. It makes the “disinformation” seem more legitimate.
Leung’s testimony on the matter comes less than two months after Conservative MP and foreign affairs critic Michael Chong called on the federal government to revoke CGTN’s broadcasting licence.
Chong questioned Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino
about it during a House committee meeting on Canada-China relations on Feb. 6. He said that Ottawa could issue an order-in-council asking for the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) to review CGTN’s broadcasting licence.
The Liberal government
made such an order in 2022 for the CRTC to review Russia Today’s broadcasting licence shortly after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, which resulted in the CRTC revoking that licence several weeks later.
“But CGTN, China’s authoritarian state-controlled broadcaster, is still operating here [in Canada], spreading disinformation and propaganda and violating international human rights laws,”
Chong said during the committee meeting.
“I would hope that it doesn’t take a war for the government to change its position on state-controlled authoritarian broadcasters on public Crown-owned airwaves, spreading disinformation and violating international human rights law,” he said.
Andrew Chen contributed to this report.
