JOHNSTON’S AFFECTION FOR [RED] CHINA RUNS DEEP

• National Post
• 23 Mar 2023
• Terry Glavin

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?