How Chinese Gangs Invaded Canada and How Canada’s Corrupt Politicians Helped Them by Dan Murray, Immigration Watch Canada – January 8, 2020 https://immigrationwatchcanada.org/2020/01/08/how-chinese-gangs-invaded-canada-how-canadas-corrupt-politicians-helped-them/
Canadian diplomat Brian McAdam was posted at Canada’s Hong Kong consulate between 1989-1993. He became Canada’s immigration control officer in Hong Kong. He soon uncovered evidence of what he believed was a major scandal. Both Canadian and Chinese consular staff were selling visas to members of Hong Kong’s and Mainland China’s mafia as well as to Communist China’s intelligence service. The price, he heard, ranged from $10,000 to $100,000 per visa.
According to Postmedia reporter Don Butler, “McAdam had evidence that members of Chinese criminal gangs, known as Triads, were applying to enter Canada as entrepreneurs under the country’s business immigration program. And many were getting visas.
“What was very, very disturbing to McAdam was that he kept seeing connections of these Triad members to Canadian politicians.
He started writing reports — ultimately 32 — documenting the names of the gangsters who were getting into Canada. His reports provided details on murderers, money launderers, smugglers and spies.
The reports caused panic in the immigration minister’s office and at headquarters in Ottawa. McAdam alleged, “I was exposing incredible negligence. I was exposing incredible corruption. And I was exposing the flaws in our whole immigration system.
“People in Ottawa didn’t want to investigate anything. They just shut their eyes to everything.”
According to an Ottawa Citizen report, McAdam received dozens of threatening calls (from the Chinese Mafia) with messages such as “Stop what you’re doing or you’re going to find yourself dead”.
What finally broke him down, he said, was “the incredible feeling of betrayal from my colleagues”. One day, a Hong Kong police officer told McAdam that a Triad member whose phone was tapped, told the Hong Kong police officer that the Triad member had complained to someone in Canada’s immigration department. The Immigration Department official reassured the Triad boss, “Don’t worry about McAdam and what he’s doing. We’ll take care of him.”
And, says Mr. McAdam, they did “take care of him”
Macadam was shocked at what the Hong Kong officer said to him. I’d worked with these people for years.” “It goes to your very soul,” he says. “It is a spiritual crisis. It is a psychological breakdown.”
Immigration Canada offered him a good new job in Ottawa, supposedly in a new organized crime unit at Foreign Affairs. But when he showed up for work in 1993, he discovered the job didn’t exist. The personnel manager urged him to take a retirement package, though he was just 51.
Days later, he went on sick leave and never returned to work. His 30-year career in Europe, the Caribbean and Asia was over.
McAdam started preparing details about his experiences. In an 850-page manuscript titled “The Dragon’s (China’s) Deception” He writes: “I was mocked, demeaned and threatened in a hostile environment while dealing with some of the world’s most ruthless criminals. Staff in both Hong Kong and in Ottawa gave copies of my confidential reports about some of the criminals to the gangsters themselves, and that greatly put my life at risk. I received death threats for a number of years but no one was ever concerned about my safety. My big question (was): Why did Canadian diplomats in Hong Kong and bureaucrats in Ottawa do whatever they could to destroy my work and myself?”
Around that time, he was formulating the idea of a formal investigation to verify and enlarge his findings in Hong Kong. By 1995, a dozen CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) and RCMP officers formally launched their first joint project. Its name was “Operation Sidewinder”.
In spite of dealing with his ill health, Mr. McAdam supplied the team with extensive documentation of China’s criminals and the Communist government’s ambitious program of acquisition, espionage and political influence in Canada and around the world.
The RCMP’s own more narrow investigation into Mr. McAdam’s discoveries — separate from “Sidewinder” — had begun in 1992. They probed incidents of corruption but limited themselves to locally engaged staff — not Canadians.
A seven-year investigation ensued. Seven RCMP investigators came and went. “As soon as one (Mountie) would (find something damning), they’d pull him off the case,” Mr. McAdam says. (That pattern continued.)
“I believe both probes (by the Sidewinder team and by the RCMP) had considerable political interference to shut them down,” says Mr. McAdam, “and it seemed to be coming from the highest levels.”
David Kilgour, then Liberal MP for Edmonton-Strathcona and secretary of state for Latin America and Africa, wrote persistent letters sympathetic to McAdam’s concerns. Mr. Kilgour sent his first letter directly to then-prime minister Jean Chrétien asking for a public inquiry — which Mr. McAdam had requested. Instead, the government ordered an RCMP probe.
Among the RCMP officers sent to Hong Kong was a 26-year veteran, Cpl. Robert Read, who, in 1996, spent months reviewing and corroborating many of Mr. McAdam’s findings. RCMP Supt. Jean Dubé pulled Read off the file in 1997 and later fired Read.
“They fired him to stop the investigation,” says Mr. McAdam.
In 2003, an RCMP external committee confirmed Cpl. Read’s findings. It found the RCMP “consistently demonstrated a reluctance to investigate” and ordered the force to rehire him. The RCMP refused. Cpl. Read sued.
Prime Minister Chretien ordered that all copies of the Sidewinder report be destroyed, supposedly to avoid alienating China and endangering trade and other relations with China. More likely, Chretien was concerned about the money the Liberal Party’s major donors (developers, speculators, banks, media corps) made from the influx of Chinese into Canada. Chretien feared that these people would not stand to have their cash cow interfered with.
One copy of the Sidewinder report survived.
According to Postmedia reporter Don Butler, documents released in 2001 (under access to information rules) state that the RCMP believed the spy agency shelved the report because it was uneasy with its message that Beijing’s spies were working with Chinese criminal gangs in Canada.
According to an updated Globe and Mail report of April 6, 2018, which focused on the testimony of Canadian agent Michel Juneau, the original Sidewinder team culled some of its information from a Mainland Chinese intelligence officer who defected in 1997.
The man, who was a member of the United Front Work Department, one of China’s five espionage arms, went public with allegations that he had been ordered to go to Hong Kong to engineer a pact between Beijing and criminal gangs known as triads.
Mr. Juneau also pointed out that at the RCMP’s request, the original Sidewinder team produced a binder, brimming with what is known in the intelligence business as facting. It provided documented evidence, culled from secret CSIS reports, other government departments and agencies and foreign intelligence agencies, that supported every single line in the original report, he said.
Mr. Juneau noted that other Western intelligence organizations and a bipartisan U.S. congressional committee have since produced reports that echoed many of Sidewinder’s conclusions. “We were ahead of our time and that’s what probably killed our report.”
According to UBC Professor David Ley, between 200,000 and 300,000 Chinese entered Canada through the Business Immigrant program. Many of them and their families still live in Canada. It is extremely probable that many continue their criminal activities.
For details, see https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/the-mcadam-file-bribery-chinese-gangsters-and-betrayal
http://www.david-kilgour.com/2008/Aug_18_2008_17.php
