{"id":2712,"date":"2023-03-24T04:22:06","date_gmt":"2023-03-24T04:22:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/canadafirst.nfshost.com\/?p=2712"},"modified":"2023-03-24T04:22:41","modified_gmt":"2023-03-24T04:22:41","slug":"david-johnston-trudeaus-special-rapporteur-on-red-chinese-election-meddling-is-a-close-family-friend-a-committed-sinophile-with-long-contacts-with-red-china","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadafirst.nfshost.com\/?p=2712","title":{"rendered":"David Johnston, Trudeau&#8217;s &#8220;Special Rapporteur&#8217; on Red Chinese Election Meddling is a Close Family Friend, a Committed Sinophile With Long Contacts With Red China"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h1 class=\"wp-block-heading\">JOHNSTON\u2019S AFFECTION FOR [RED]  CHINA RUNS DEEP<\/h1>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<ul><li>National Post<\/li><li>23 Mar 2023<\/li><li>Terry Glavin<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.prcdn.co\/img?regionKey=kLd2IMGNJsSIw93YI6RFHA%3d%3d\" alt=\"\"\/><figcaption><strong>Former governor general David Johnston has been named a \u201cspecial rapporteur\u201d into China\u2019s interference into federal elections, but his connections to the Asian power are extensive, Terry Glavin writes.<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>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\u2019s agents of influence in this country that it\u2019s really difficult to decide which is the most objectively unbelievable and easily disprovable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It\u2019s a target-rich environment, as military tacticians would say. But I\u2019m going to lay out the evidence against just one howler, which is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau\u2019s proposition that \u201chorrific, partisan attacks against a man of extraordinary integrity\u201d is anything like a reasonable way to characterize doubts about former Governor General David Johnston\u2019s independence in the matter of Beijing\u2019s influence-peddling operations in Canada.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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\u2019s well-documented interference operations in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections, there are two key things to keep your eye on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The first is that Beijing\u2019s influence operations in Canada went into hyperdrive after the Trudeau government came to power in 2015, and Beijing\u2019s 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 \u201cindependent special rapporteur\u201d 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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For argument\u2019s sake, let\u2019s set aside the relevance of the intimate relationship between the Johnstons and the Trudeaus \u2014 their neighbouring cottages in the Laurentians, the childhood ski trips the Trudeau boys and Johnston\u2019s daughters went on together, and so on. You can even set aside Johnston\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The unreported and unarguably pertinent facts to take into account involve Johnston\u2019s own half-century of participation in Beijing\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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\u2019s propaganda and espionage operations in western countries. Widely known in Chinese establishment circles by his nickname \u201cJiangshan,\u201d Johnston was awarded an honorary doctorate by Nanjing University in 2012, by which time he\u2019d already made more than a dozen visits to China.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Three of Johnston\u2019s daughters attended university in China \u2014 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 \u201cwonderful\u201d if all Canadians learned to speak Chinese.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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 \u201cscience, technology and innovation\u201d at Chongqing University where he professed a \u201cprofound Chinese complex\u201d and boasted that even his grandchildren teach him things about China.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It\u2019s a multi-generational \u201ccomplex\u201d the Johnston family shares with the Trudeaus, going back to Pierre Trudeau\u2019s service to Mao Zedong during the 1960s as one of the regime\u2019s most valued propagandists in the west. Back then, Trudeau Senior co-authored a book with his friend Jacques H\u00e9bert about their time as the regime\u2019s invited guests during the Great Leap Forward and the famine that killed perhaps 70 million people. Trudeau and H\u00e9bert sneered at western journalists\u2019 efforts to report on the famine and claimed to have noticed nothing more than \u201ccontrolled distribution of foodstuffs.\u201d The pair dined well during their entire time in the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But set aside the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation entirely. The board of directors of Johnston\u2019s own Rideau Hall Foundation \u2014 a \u201cparting gift\u201d from Justin Trudeau\u2019s government upon his departure from the Governor General\u2019s office \u2014 is a snapshot who\u2019s-who of Beijing\u2019s best friends and business partners in Canada.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A Rideau Hall Foundation director emeritus is Paul Desmarais III, from the Desmarais family, which founded the Canada-china Business Council. Then there\u2019s 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\u2019s blue-chip Advisory Council on Economic Growth. Barton was appointed Canada\u2019s ambassador to China following the firing of the disgraced John Mccallum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There\u2019s John Manley, the Telus director and former deputy prime minister from the exuberantly Beijing-compliant Chr\u00e9tien era. Manley\u2019s contribution to the debates about Xi Jinping\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There\u2019s Beverley Mclachlin, who has refused to step down from her position on Hong Kong\u2019s highest court despite Beijing\u2019s evisceration of Hong Kong\u2019s rule-of-law system. There\u2019s John Montalbano, chief executive officer of the Royal Bank\u2019s Global Asset Management arm, which manages Beijing\u2019s global natural-resources acquisitions through China\u2019s National Council for Social Security Fund, one of the world\u2019s largest pension funds. On it goes like this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Believe as much as you like that there is nothing untoward about Johnston\u2019s appointment. And to be fair, he did a wonderful job as Governor General. A Governor General\u2019s 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\u2019s OK.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And that is the job he\u2019s been asked to do for Justin Trudeau in the matter of Beijing\u2019s long and sinister reach into Canada\u2019s democratic political institutions, and it should not be surprising if he does the job well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>WHAT DID TRUDEAU KNOW ABOUT WHAT BEIJING WAS UP TO?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>JOHNSTON\u2019S 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\u2019s agents of influence in this country that it\u2019s really [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2006,1994,1122,2002,1999,2005,127,2001,71,2000,2003],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadafirst.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2712"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadafirst.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadafirst.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadafirst.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadafirst.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2712"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/canadafirst.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2712\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2714,"href":"https:\/\/canadafirst.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2712\/revisions\/2714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadafirst.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadafirst.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadafirst.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}