US Investigated Threat Posed by Chinese Regime Infiltration of Canada: Intelligence Professional

The city of Vancouver is "ground zero" for activities of the Chinese Communist Party's United Front Word Department, according to former Mountie and author Scott McGregor. The Canadian Press/Darryl Dyck

The infiltration of Canada by the Chinese Communist Party was so serious that the U.S. government launched an investigation into the matter, says an intelligence professional and author of a new book on the topic.

And that was 25 years ago, with the situation reportedly getting progressively worse over time.

Scott McGregor’s new book on the matter, “The Mosaic Effect: How the Chinese Communist Party Started a Hybrid War in America’s Backyard,” is currently topping the Amazon charts in the National & International Security category.

“This is remarkable, it’s never been discussed before, the fact that the United States was looking at Canada as this major national security threat,” McGregor, a veteran of Canadian military intelligence and the RCMP, told Jan Jekielek on The Epoch Times’ program American Thought Leaders.

The investigation was conducted under the aegis of the Department of Justice with the codename Dragon Lord, McGregor said on the program on March 18.

He says he became aware of it through a document revealed to him by an intelligence source.

The investigation also involved the FBI, CIA, and the National Security Agency, and came on the heels of the joint RCMP-Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) Project Sidewinder.

The analytical project of the late 1990s sought to look into the activities and influence of Chinese criminal gangs and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) agents in Canada.

“What’s happening there has been progressing for 25 years,“McGregor said. ”We have complete saturation in Canada of these elements in every aspect of our business, our critical infrastructure, law enforcement, it’s in everything that we’re doing right now.”

McGregor says this level of infiltration poses a “significant threat” to the United States and is the reason why Dragon Lord was launched at the time.

He says the CCP is conducting hybrid warfare against Canada and other countries, seeking to control them without resorting to kinetic means. Hence, the conflict takes place behind the scenes and there is less public awareness.

“When we’re talking about hybrid warfare. It’s about control, controlling the narrative, and controlling industry, controlling trade agreements—all of it is about control,” he says.

“And that is my greatest fear, because I see that control getting stronger every day.”

In concrete terms, this involves the CCP leveraging in Canada its state assets, business tycoons, and the Chinese criminal triads to extend control and influence.

Scott McGregor, author and former member of the RCMP and Canadian military intelligence.Crossroads/Screenshot via The Epoch Times

McGregor calls this connectivity the “unholy trinity.”

Hybrid warfare includes “sharp power,” which is political in nature, and soft power, which includes economic subversion, he explains.

And then there’s also transnational crime which includes threat finance, money laundering, and narcotics trafficking.

The former Mountie says he’s seen an interconnectivity between all these elements.

“Everywhere we looked, every piece of information we saw, the entity where they were involved, it all started to come back to the same people, the same threat streams, if you will,” he said.

McGregor added that whether it was the gambling file, real estate, or espionage, everything was connected and the people were “intertwined.”

“It didn’t matter where we looked, if you lifted the carpet up over here, there they were.”

Canadian journalist Sam Cooper, who has been reporting on leaked classified information on Beijing’s interference in Canada, revealed as much in his 2021 book “Willful Blindness: How a Network of Narcos, Tycoons and CCP Agents Infiltrated the West.”

Ground Zero

McGregor noted that Vancouver is an important hub for those interconnected activities, where the casinos have been used to launder proceeds of crime and as venues for relationship building between the different elements.

“People like to mingle, especially in the spy world and the criminal world. One of the ways they do that is through casinos, and they develop guangxi,” he said, using the Mandarin term for “relations.”

McGregor speaks from professional experience through his work with the RCMP on the file, and then with the B.C. attorney general on gaming policy enforcement.

A report published in June 2022 resulting from a public inquiry into money laundering in B.C. found that politicians had not done enough to combat the phenomenon, though it said this wasn’t because of corruption.

McGregor referred to Vancouver as “ground zero” in Canada and likely in all of North America for activities of the CCP’s United Front Work Department (UFWD).

The UFWD has been referred to by CCP Leader Xi Jinping as a “magic weapon” to advance China’s interests.

“It’s basically an element that is designed to do two things: intelligence and propaganda,” says McGregor.

The UFWD co-opts, recruits, and runs entities abroad to serve the CCP agenda, such as community organizations, media, and politicians.

Undermining the US

McGregor told American Thought Leaders that the fundamental objective of CCP infiltration in Canada is to undermine the United States because it’s the “true force behind the West.”

This goes back to Beijing’s intent to displace the United States as the world’s leading power by 2049, he said, which will be the 100th anniversary of the CCP.

And while infiltration in Canada has reached dramatic levels, the United States has also not been spared, McGregor says, with the same entities conducting the same type of activities there.

“And that is concerning, because the scope can be that much larger. There’s that much more money to be had and support to be gained.”

Leaks

The book “Mosaic Effect” comes at a time when Canada is embroiled in a scandal alleging CCP interference at the federal, provincial, and municipal levels of government.

National security leaks on the topic have been published steadily in the press since November, with the latest alleging Beijing interfered with the 2022 Vancouver city elections.

The Trudeau government has been accused of turning a blind eye to the interference, with some allegations indicating it had been warned by CSIS about CCP agents in the Liberal Party.

While refusing to hold a public inquiry, the Liberal government says it has taken the issue seriously, by for example setting up elections monitoring bodies, and last week appointed a special rapporteur to look into foreign interference.

The issue stretches beyond the Liberal Party and caused a casualty in the Ontario provincial legislature, with Progressive Conservative MPP Vincent Ke leaving the party caucus after allegations implicating him surfaced.

The non-partisan nature of the threat was noted by former CSIS intelligence officer Michel Juneau-Katsuya, who claimed in a CBC interview on March 19 that every prime minister over the past 40 years has been compromised by Beijing’s interference.

“Every [Canadian] prime minister has been compromised at one point or another by those [Chinese] agents of influence, and when we brought the warning, nobody listened,” he said.

Juneau-Katsuya, who left CSIS over two decades ago, did not provide further details to substantiate the claim.