Tag Archives: David Johnston

Terry Glavin: A user’s guide to Trudeau’s illicit affair with China’s Communists

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Terry Glavin: A user’s guide to Trudeau’s illicit affair with China’s Communists

There is no vindication awaiting the prime minister

Author of the article:

Terry Glavin

Published Jun 19, 2024  •  Last updated 5 days ago  •  5 minute read

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Trudeau
Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau attends the plenary session of the Summit on peace in Ukraine, at the luxury Burgenstock resort, near Lucerne, on June 15, 2024. (Photo by URS FLUEELER / POOL / AFP)

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In the ordinary course of heated political controversies, Canadians can sort out the issue that’s launching their politicians at one another’s throats. In the “foreign interference” upheaval that has in turns paralyzed, confounded and outraged Canada’s political class in recent days, we’re not even allowed to know what the federal party leaders are arguing about, exactly.

This doesn’t make the story easy to tell. It was already hard enough to determine when the story really begins, let alone figure how it will all end.

If we wanted to, we could push the beginning of the story back to 2003, when Beijing’s United Front Work Department boasted about electing six of its preferred candidates in Toronto. Three years later, the UFWD — China’s overseas strong-arming, “elite capture” and election-interference infrastructure — claimed electoral success for 10 of its 44 preferred Toronto-area candidates, according to an internal training manual uncovered by the Financial Times.

We could also begin the story with the way then Canadian Security Intelligence Service director Richard Fadden was thrown under the bus by Liberal and New Democratic Party MPs back in 2010, when he said several provincial and municipal politicians in Canada had come under Beijing’s influence, to a worrying degree. The charge against Fadden back then was led by the Liberals’ current health minister, Mark Holland.

But for the opening of this latest chapter, foreshadowed by a series of leaks from intelligence-agency whistleblowers going back to November 2022, we need only go back as far as June 3. That’s when an extraparliamentary oversight committee released a heavily-redacted, 84-page report that seemed to suggest that some MPs have been dallying in conduct bordering on treason.

In this way, the “foreign interference” story has revealed itself to be about something worse. Despite the huge blanked-out spaces the Prime Minister’s Office has insisted on imposing on the public record, all along this has really been a story about collusion, about certain of our politicians collaborating with hostile foreign powers to their own advantage and to further their own parties’ electoral prospects. Some MPs have been “semi-witting or witting” participants in the efforts of foreign states to interfere in Canada’s political life, the report found, particularly during the federal elections of 2019 and 2021.

This is hardly news to anyone who has been paying close attention, but the story has changed in the way its emphasis has shifted. It can no longer be told as a simple story about Canadian politicians as victims. In the story told by the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians, Canadian politicians are the culprits.

In one key respect, however, it’s been the same story, for more than 20 years. While the NSICOP report alludes to bad behaviour on the part of India’s friends in Canada, and Pakistan, and Iran and Russia are mentioned almost in passing, it’s China’s deep involvement in Canada’s democratic processes and institutions that the NSICOP report emphasizes.

By the time of the 2019 federal election, the UFWD’s budget for overseas operations was $600 million, and CSIS assessed that year that Canada had become an “attractive and permissive target” for foreign meddling. Even so, NSICOP reported that same year, public engagement was “almost non-existent.” That, too, has changed.

The public is most definitely engaged now, despite the Trudeau government’s efforts over the past year and a half to shut everything down. By filibuster, by blocking evidence demanded by House of Commons committees, and by enlisting the China-friendly, Trudeau-friendly “special rapporteur” David Johnston in a failed whitewash, the Trudeau government expended every effort to make it all go away.

The Liberals evaded the demands for a public inquiry until their minority position in the House made it impossible to stop. Trudeau and his ministers insinuated that it was all just a big fuss manufactured by anti-Chinese racists, by incompetent CSIS officials, by sour-grapes losers among failed Conservative candidates, and by dubiously-motivated CSIS whistleblowers who deserved to be hunted down and prosecuted. None of it worked.

The release of the NSICOP report followed on the equally astonishing proceedings of the Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference in April. In hearings before Commissioner Justice Marie-Josée Hogue, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his officials gave every appearance of committing something close to perjury in their efforts to dispute, dismiss and deny the veracity of incriminating evidence presented by CSIS director David Vigneault. But it was the NSICOP report that left everyone with the worst kind of unanswered questions: Who are these “traitors” on Parliament Hill?

Officially, it’s necessarily a mystery. That’s because huge swaths of the NSICOP report were redacted and expunged by the Prime Minister’s Office on the grounds that the content would be “injurious to national security, national defence or international relations,” or would violate “solicitor-client privilege.” Making things even foggier, NSICOP has been engaged in a running battle with senior officials in the PMO and several federal agencies over their habit of relying on “cabinet confidences” to withhold information. Last year, this rationale was used to blot out, in whole or in part, more than 1,000 documents NSICOP asked the government to disclose.

Even worse, Prime Minister Trudeau, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh and the Greens’ Elizabeth May, each having seen the unredacted version of the report, disagree quite dramatically about what it contains. Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre says he doesn’t want to be drawn into the cone of silence the NSICOP statute would require of him, so he doesn’t know which MPs are named in it.

Despite the furious arguments separating them on all that, there’s a weird circling of wagons going on. Everyone agrees that NSICOP has cast a “dark cloud” of suspicion over the House of Commons. All the party leaders broadly agreed last week that the unredacted version of the NSICOP report should be booted over to Justice Hogue to sort it all out. And separately, a series of national-security measures NSICOP had urged in vain on the Trudeau government for seven years is suddenly roaring through Parliament with all-party support.

Bill C-70 is already at the third-reading stage in the Senate after being introduced in the House of Commons only on May 6. Among other things, the bill contains a version of the foreign influence registry that the Liberals dragged their feet on for three years. First introduced in an April 13, 2021 private members bill tabled by Steveston — Richmond East Conservative MP Kenny Chiu, the registry was ferociously opposed by Beijing’s UFWD proxies in Canada. Chiu was defeated following a well-documented UFWD campaign to punish him at the polls.

Where things get particularly awkward for Trudeau’s Liberals is that leaked CSIS assessments consistently show that the UFWD had identified a very specific objective in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections: keeping the Conservatives out of office and ensuring a Liberal win, preferably in a more easily-manipulable minority government.

There is no way of knowing for certain whether any foreign-meddling effort in any riding in either of those federal elections influenced the vote outcome, one way or another. But however this story ends, it’s hard to see its final chapter containing the Trudeau government’s vindication. It’s much easier to imagine the story coming to a close in Justin Trudeau’s final disgrace.

Media’s Cover-Up Of China’s Influence On Canadian Politics Exposed

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Media’s Cover-Up Of China’s Influence On Canadian Politics Exposed

Justin Trudeau empowers China, damages democracy in Canada, and due to media, gets away with it.

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Brian Lee Crowley, founder the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, a public policy think tank focused on Canadian national issues, has unpleasant things to say about China’s presence in Canada. Crowley pulls no punches in an article published this month by The Telegraph in the U.K.

‘Canada’s Secret Service Is Fighting A Hidden Civil War’ 

“The leaks reveal a China hell-bent on suborning Canadian institutions. The allegations include: charges of Chinese interference in elections at every level (federal, provincial and municipal), the existence of Chinese police stations operating with impunity on Canadian soil, the intimidation of Canadians and permanent residents of Chinese origin, and threats to the families of prominent Canadian politicians.”

A motherload of condemnation it is– from the foreign press. It’s Justin Trudeau’s good fortune that he has been successful in taking the anti-China wind out of media sails in Canada.

Stalling, excuses, futile appointments(David Johnson), obfuscation and delays. Government understand the methodology. Each time a piece of damnation bubbles to the political surface, drawing out conclusions for as long as possible is the remedy. Part of which is preventing articles like Crowley’s from penetrating the consciousness of Canadian society.

This man is no conspiracy theory-pushing flake. He holds degrees from McGill and the London School of Economics, including a doctorate in political economy from the latter. His doctoral thesis focused on F.A. Hayek’s social and political philosophy and was published by the Oxford University Press.

“This civil war doesn’t pit Quebec nationalists against English Canada, but centres instead on China.”

“For decades Canada’s national security establishment has sounded the alarm about foreign authoritarian interference. Their dire warnings were ignored.”

By the Liberal Party of Canada, that is. And why not? It’s a reciprocal relationship. The government of China prop-up Justin Trudeau, and in return receive open doors for communist infiltration of Canadian society.

Think this to be a paranoid delusion? Is it not a fact that ex-Liberal PM Pierre Trudeau was a communist enthusiast who opened the doors for China to waltz into Canada, impacting everything from mineral resources to public education.

Sam Cooper is a Canadian investigative journalist and best-selling author, best known for his coverage of Canada-China relations. In a recent article, Cooper writes:

“Based on recent information from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), those efforts allegedly involve payments through intermediaries to candidates affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

“Placing agents into the offices of MPs in order to influence policy, seeking to co-opt and corrupt former Canadian officials to gain leverage in Ottawa, and mounting aggressive campaigns to punish Canadian politicians whom the People’s Republic of China (PRC) views as threats to its interests.”

And still we wait in silence. In an authentic democratic society, inclusive of media independence, these developments would bring down the ruling government.

The fact that it isn’t happening tells us that Canada is no longer an authentic democracy. Adding to the absurdity is the fact that Trudeau’s Liberals are more concerned about uncovering and punishing those who leaked the information than preventing China’s infiltration of our federal political arena.

It’s a surreal experience not once alluded to by mainstream media. Their job has transitioned away from objective news reporting. As financed by the Feds, the role is monolithic in intent: to preserve Justin Trudeau’s pseudo-dictatorship indefinitely. If and when a replacement is appointed, CBC and corporate media will back that candidate.

On the opposite side of the political spectrum is the Conservative Party. Media’s goal here is equally one-dimensional. No matter who leads the party, depict that individual as “right-wing,” racist and homophobic. Crush their potential for victory at all costs.

All of which fits into the pro-China bag that government, media and academia currently work out of. It should come as no surprise that our government is today chock full of China-apologists.

One of them is Senator Yuen Pau Woo, arguably Canada’s greatest China-pusher, appointed to the Senate by PM Trudeau in 2016. Another goes back to the days of Conservative PM Stephen Harper.

Senator Victor Oh, Vice-Chair of the Canada-China Legislative Association, thinks that our China-detractors are serious meanies.

In a video posted to WeChat, Senator Oh spoke about the “need to raise money to cover costs for [people affected] by all of these unreasonable reporters who try to smear Chinese and discredit Chinese.”

Commonly known as the “race card,” we witness how the China-lovers conflate the issues to arrive at a favourite hobby indulged in by Justin Trudeau and his motley crew of neo-communists.

It’s “racism”– end of story. Senators Victor Oh and Yuen Pau Woo wish it was. Likely, they will get all they ask for. The Chinese interference will eventually blow over. Until this is achieved, no federal election will be called.

Upon which we leap to the Mount Everest of foreign infiltration in Canadian society:

Did the government of China win the past federal election for Justin Trudeau?

According to a series of reports in the Globe and Mail newspaper and by Global News, CSIS intelligence sources, China provided secret funding through its Toronto consulate to 11 candidates who ran in the 2019 federal election.”

The popular vote was won by the Conservative Party, meaning that 11 ridings may have been enough to seal the deal for Trudeau’s Liberals. Media breathe not a word about the possibility.

Is China in charge, or what? It’s the $8,888,888 million dollar question which, more than likely, won’t be answered for decades, if ever.

Justin Trudeau empowers China, damages democracy, and because of media, gets away with it. Isn’t post-modern Canada just the greatest thing?

Au Contraire, It’s Not A “Toxic Environment”, It’s Righteous Questioning About Red Chinese Influence Peddling: They Can’t Stand the Heat — Trudeau Foundation president, board resign, citing ‘politicization’ of China-linked donation

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Trudeau Foundation president, board resign, citing ‘politicization’ of China-linked donation

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Charity’s leadership cites controversy over Beijing-linked donor to explain the move

Richard Raycraft · CBC News · Posted: Apr 11, 2023 6:51 AM PDT | Last Updated: 5 hours ago

A red and yellow Chinese flag.
The Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation’s board of directors and president have resigned, citing the political controversy from a donation a Chinese government adviser made to the charity. (Thomas Peter/Reuters)

The Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation’s president and board of directors have resigned en masse, citing the charity’s entanglement in the ongoing foreign interference controversy.

In a statement, the foundation said that a $200,000 donation in 2016 from a businessman linked to the Chinese government “has put a great deal of pressure on the foundation’s management and volunteer board of directors, as well as on our staff and our community.” 

The charity announced last month that it would return the donation. The Conservatives criticized the government over the matter, saying the donation compromised a government report on the integrity of the 2021 federal election.

“The circumstances created by the politicization of the foundation have made it impossible to continue with the status quo, and the volunteer board of directors has resigned, as has the president and CEO,” the statement said.

WATCH Trudeau reacts to CEO, board resignations at Trudeau Foundation

Trudeau reacts to CEO, board resignations at Trudeau Foundation

7 hours agoDuration 0:55Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says the foundation will continue to make a positive impact on academic institutions across the country.

The foundation is independent and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has no involvement with it.

“The Trudeau Foundation is a foundation with which I have absolutely no intersection,” Trudeau told a news conference Tuesday.

“It is a shame to see the level of toxicity and political polarization that is going on in our country these days, but I am certain that the Trudeau Foundation will be able to continue to ensure that research into the social studies and humanities at the highest levels across Canadian academic institutions continues for many years to come.”

The charity, established in 2001 to honour former prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, funds scholarships, mentorships and fellowships.

Last month, Prime Minister Trudeau appointed former governor general David Johnston as a special rapporteur to investigate foreign interference in Canadian elections and institutions, including alleged meddling by the Chinese government.

The Conservatives have questioned Johnston’s impartiality, in part by pointing to Johnston’s former role as a member of the Trudeau Foundation. Foundation members are responsible for appointing the board of directors.

Johnston resigned from the foundation following his appointment as special rapporteur. Trudeau has defended the choice, citing Johnston’s long career in public service.

The statement said three directors will remain on an interim basis to continue the charity’s work while a new board is appointed. The foundation’s website currently lists six members of the board of directors.

Its president and CEO, Pascale Fournier, had been in the position for almost five years.

Poilievre calls for investigation

Reacting to news of the resignations Tuesday morning, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre called for an investigation into the charity.

“We need to investigate the Beijing-funded Trudeau Foundation,” Poilievre tweeted.

“We need to know who got rich, who got paid and who got privilege and power from Justin Trudeau as a result of funding to the Trudeau Foundation.”https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-1

Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet said the resignations make the 2016 donation look more suspicious. He called on Johnston to step down as special rapporteur and for the government to call a public inquiry into foreign interference.

“Nothing else will do,” Blanchet said in a French statement.

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh said he won’t comment on the Trudeau Foundation specifically. He repeated his calls for a public inquiry.

WATCH Singh repeats call for public inquiry after Trudeau Foundation president, board resign

Singh repeats call for public inquiry after Trudeau Foundation president, board resign

6 hours agoDuration 0:57During a press conference at St. Clair College in Windsor, Ont., NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh is asked about the resignation of the president and board of directors of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation. A statement from the foundation said ‘the circumstances created by the politicization of the foundation have made it impossible to continue with the status quo.’

“What we’ve seen from both the Liberals and the Conservatives, they’re more interested in scoring political points, pointing fingers at each other,” Singh told a news conference.

“When it comes to something as serious as our democracy, the goal shouldn’t be to score points … We’ve been saying we need a public inquiry to get to the truth, to give Canadians confidence.”

David Johnston, Trudeau’s “Special Rapporteur’ on Red Chinese Election Meddling is a Close Family Friend, a Committed Sinophile With Long Contacts With Red China

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JOHNSTON’S AFFECTION FOR [RED] CHINA RUNS DEEP

  • National Post
  • 23 Mar 2023
  • Terry Glavin
Former governor general David Johnston has been named a “special rapporteur” into China’s interference into federal elections, but his connections to the Asian power are extensive, Terry Glavin writes.

There are so many crazy things the Trudeau government has been expecting Canadians to believe about the partisan advantage the Liberals have accrued to themselves owing to their cosy relationships with China’s agents of influence in this country that it’s really difficult to decide which is the most objectively unbelievable and easily disprovable.

It’s a target-rich environment, as military tacticians would say. But I’m going to lay out the evidence against just one howler, which is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s proposition that “horrific, partisan attacks against a man of extraordinary integrity” is anything like a reasonable way to characterize doubts about former Governor General David Johnston’s independence in the matter of Beijing’s influence-peddling operations in Canada.

In the muddle of the playby-play coverage of House of Commons committee manoeuvres and the fate of a resolution calling for a public inquiry into Beijing’s well-documented interference operations in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections, there are two key things to keep your eye on.

The first is that Beijing’s influence operations in Canada went into hyperdrive after the Trudeau government came to power in 2015, and Beijing’s United Front Work Department undertook extraordinary clandestine measures in 2019 and 2021 to keep the Trudeau government in power. The second is that Trudeau has enlisted Johnston as his “independent special rapporteur” in the matter in order to avoid answering these straightforward questions: What did Trudeau know about what Beijing was up to, when did he know, and what did he do about it?

For argument’s sake, let’s set aside the relevance of the intimate relationship between the Johnstons and the Trudeaus — their neighbouring cottages in the Laurentians, the childhood ski trips the Trudeau boys and Johnston’s daughters went on together, and so on. You can even set aside Johnston’s role as one of the governing members of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, even though the foundation has been directly caught up in the scandal, owing to the clandestine donations the Foundation recently chose to return to a certain superrich Chinese benefactor following disclosures that the money was part of a Beijing-directed grooming operation targeting Trudeau himself, going back to 2013.

The unreported and unarguably pertinent facts to take into account involve Johnston’s own half-century of participation in Beijing’s strategy to draw Canada into its orbit of influence, and his own personal and ongoing association with figures deeply compromised by their collaboration with Chinese government institutions and by their own vested interest in the catastrophe of the Canada-china collaborations that were spun into high gear after the Trudeau Liberals came to power in 2015.

In the 1980s Johnston was laying the foundations of the Canada-china universities exchange program. Later, as president of the University of Waterloo, he oversaw the establishment of the Confucius Institute, a scandal-shredded arm of the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda and espionage operations in western countries. Widely known in Chinese establishment circles by his nickname “Jiangshan,” Johnston was awarded an honorary doctorate by Nanjing University in 2012, by which time he’d already made more than a dozen visits to China.

Three of Johnston’s daughters attended university in China — one at Zhejiang University, Nanjing University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, another at the Beijing Language and Culture University and Hangzhou University, and the third at Fudan University in Shanghai. During a luncheon speech to the Canada-china Business Council in 2013, Johnston said it would be “wonderful” if all Canadians learned to speak Chinese.

While the federal government has been recently forced to issue strict guidelines to Canadian universities regarding the threat of technology transfers and intellectual-property accommodations with Chinese institutions, as recently as 2017 Johnston attended a conference on “science, technology and innovation” at Chongqing University where he professed a “profound Chinese complex” and boasted that even his grandchildren teach him things about China.

It’s a multi-generational “complex” the Johnston family shares with the Trudeaus, going back to Pierre Trudeau’s service to Mao Zedong during the 1960s as one of the regime’s most valued propagandists in the west. Back then, Trudeau Senior co-authored a book with his friend Jacques Hébert about their time as the regime’s invited guests during the Great Leap Forward and the famine that killed perhaps 70 million people. Trudeau and Hébert sneered at western journalists’ efforts to report on the famine and claimed to have noticed nothing more than “controlled distribution of foodstuffs.” The pair dined well during their entire time in the country.

But set aside the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation entirely. The board of directors of Johnston’s own Rideau Hall Foundation — a “parting gift” from Justin Trudeau’s government upon his departure from the Governor General’s office — is a snapshot who’s-who of Beijing’s best friends and business partners in Canada.

A Rideau Hall Foundation director emeritus is Paul Desmarais III, from the Desmarais family, which founded the Canada-china Business Council. Then there’s Dominic Barton, who served as an adviser to several Chinese state-owned enterprises and whose Mckinsey and Company consulted with Chinese corporations involved in the construction of militarized islands in the South China Sea while Barton was chair of Trudeau’s blue-chip Advisory Council on Economic Growth. Barton was appointed Canada’s ambassador to China following the firing of the disgraced John Mccallum.

There’s John Manley, the Telus director and former deputy prime minister from the exuberantly Beijing-compliant Chrétien era. Manley’s contribution to the debates about Xi Jinping’s kidnapping of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor was to suggest the Canada Border Services Agency should have surreptitiously allowed Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou to evade a U.S. Justice Department extradition request.

There’s Beverley Mclachlin, who has refused to step down from her position on Hong Kong’s highest court despite Beijing’s evisceration of Hong Kong’s rule-of-law system. There’s John Montalbano, chief executive officer of the Royal Bank’s Global Asset Management arm, which manages Beijing’s global natural-resources acquisitions through China’s National Council for Social Security Fund, one of the world’s largest pension funds. On it goes like this.

Believe as much as you like that there is nothing untoward about Johnston’s appointment. And to be fair, he did a wonderful job as Governor General. A Governor General’s job is to make Canadians feel good about themselves, despite everything, and to make a convincing case that no matter how bad things look, everything’s OK.

And that is the job he’s been asked to do for Justin Trudeau in the matter of Beijing’s long and sinister reach into Canada’s democratic political institutions, and it should not be surprising if he does the job well.

WHAT DID TRUDEAU KNOW ABOUT WHAT BEIJING WAS UP TO?