Politics 22 - Canada's Sheepishness

At the 11th annual Halifax International Security Forum held in Canada recently, Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan conveyed the strongest evidence yet that after much indecisiveness, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government has retreated into the Liberal Party’s traditional normal approach to relations with Beijing — acquiescence, and submission.

Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan

As Terry Glavin of Maclean’s said:  “The Trudeau government’s newfound faith in ‘appropriate discussion’ is the Canadian equivalent of ‘thoughts and prayers’ — an easy out when dealing with the China lobby”.

While the people of Hong Kong decisively crushed Xi Jinping’s increasingly savage aggression and belligerence by their district elections at the weekend, Sajjan said at the forums opening, “We don’t consider China as an adversary,”.  Well, Hongkongers certainly do. 

Mr. Glavin continues;  “So do the Uighurs of Xinjiang, a Muslim people whose persecution has accelerated to the point that at least a million of them are confined to concentration camps and forced-labour zones laid bare in the greatest detail yet in a trove of leaked Chinese  government documents just released by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.  So do Tibetans, whose dispossession and oppression over the past seven decades is now being replayed in Xinjiang — and whose tragic predicament, once a hallowed cause in Canada, is now rarely if ever even mentioned in polite company”.

My favourite quotes from the Maclean’s article are:

• The findings of Canada’s own National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians contradicts the weird claims Sajjan made at the Halifax conference.  Last April, in its first-ever annual report, the committee officially declared China a threat to Canada’s national security, owing mainly to Beijing’s hostile espionage, its cyber threats and its subversive overseas influence-peddling operations.

• Security Forum president Peter Van Praagh, Sajjan’s co-host at the weekend gathering, sees the same too, and he said so. “I think it’s clear that China and Canada do not share the same interests. There is some intermingling on some issues, but China has a very different view of the world than Canada’s view of the world. And so, what are we willing to surrender in terms of our own values in co-operation with China, and where is that line drawn?”

• For several weeks now it has been increasingly evident that Trudeau’s government is willing to surrender a great deal and to draw that line where Beijing has always wanted it drawn — with diplomatic and corporate relations inside the relationship, and all those bothersome “Canadian values” about human rights, democratic accountability, the international rules-based order and the rule of law left entirely outside of it.

• First came the September appointment of Dominic Barton as Canada’s new ambassador to Beijing. Barton took over from the disgraced China evangelist John McCallum, and while Beijing was sad to see McCallum go, Barton was the replacement China had hoped for.  In August, at a multinational summit in Bangkok, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi quietly told Canadian officials as much.  Barton came pre-approved by Beijing, in other words.  Barton had been an adviser to the state-owned China Development Bank, and he’d spent several years swinging big-money deals in Shanghai.  During his years as managing partner of McKinsey & Company, the global consulting giant had taken on several Chinese state-owned corporations as clients.  Just one of them was an enterprise building islands in the South China Sea, which Xi Jinping has arbitrarily annexed in defiance of the United Nations.  Last year, McKinsey held its glamorous annual retreat in Xinjiang, just a short walk from one of China’s several Uighur concentration camps.

• Ottawa still hasn’t made up its mind about allowing Huawei into Canada’s fifth-generation internet connectivity rollout, even though a green light could end Canada’s engagement with the U.S., Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom in the “Five Eyes” security and intelligence consortium.

• Canada’s new foreign affairs minister, François-Philippe Champagne, a protegé of former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, was again asking China’s Wang Yi for Kovrig and Spavor to be released.   Francois-Philippe Champagne, came straight out of the corporate sector when he was elected in 2015. He is not known to have ever uttered so much as a cautionary word about China. 

• Rounding things off was last week’s elevation of Mary Ng to the post of minister of international trade. It’s a file that’s just tacked onto her previous cabinet portfolio — small business and export promotion.  Hired as an appointments secretary in the Prime Minister’s Office after the 2015 federal election, Ng was a political unknown until only two years ago, when she was elected MP in Markham-Thornhill, the riding held by John McCallum.  There are some interesting highlights in her strangely meteoric rise to the international trade ministry, especially with regards to China.

The full text of the reference article is available at:  https://www.macleans.ca/politics/worldpolitics/ottawa-goes-meek-and-gentle-with-beijing/

'Don’t step out of line': Confidential report reveals how Chinese officials harass activists in Canada

'They said if this (critical) story comes out in the Canadian press, then you are responsible for the life of your relatives’

The report details a sweeping intimidation campaign by Chinese officials against activists here in Canada.

Mike Faille/National Post

At home in Ontario, his activism barely raised an eyebrow.

But when a quiet-spoken Chinese dissident travelled to the country of his birth last year, security officers shadowed him for weeks, booking hotel rooms next to his, even following him to breakfast.

Before he left, they also had a disturbingly direct message: Stop condemning the Chinese government to Canadian media, or the family he had come to visit would face the consequences.

“They said if this (critical) story comes out in the Canadian press, then you are responsible for the life of your relatives,” he recalls.

According to a confidential report submitted to the federal government earlier this year — not yet released to the public — it’s just one example of a sweeping intimidation campaign by Chinese officials against activists here in Canada.

The product of a coalition led by Amnesty International Canada, the report catalogues harassment ranging from digital disinformation campaigns to direct threats.

Targets include Canadian representatives of what the Chinese sometimes call the five “poisons”: the Uyghur Muslim minority, independence-minded Tibetans, Taiwanese, democracy advocates and, especially, the Falun Gong.

“This is not just a matter of occasional and sporadic incidents,” said Alex Neve, secretary general of Amnesty Canada, one of the organizations behind the report, along with groups representing Chinese religious, human-rights and ethnic minorities in this country. “There is a consistent pattern … a troubling example of a foreign government being very active in Canada in ways that are undermining human rights.”

The threats also seem to be working. The report, which comes just as the Liberal government and business leaders strive for closer economic ties with China, notes a “significant chilling effect” on human-rights activism among Chinese-Canadians.

That includes the Ontario dissident interviewed for this story, who agreed to speak only on condition of total anonymity, and has ceased activism since his trip.

Among those who continue to speak out are Falun Gong organizers. And as recently as last month, emails making grandiose claims about the group — that their leader was “the greatest God in this world, exceeding any others including Jesus Christ” — were sent to members of Parliament. The missives also claimed that MPs such as Liberal Judy Sgro were being featured in the group’s posters.

The emails were purportedly from Falun Gong practitioners themselves, but according to organizer Grace Wollensak, they had nothing to do with the group, and clearly echo Beijing’s propaganda campaign against it.

Seen as a threat to communist party control, China banned the Falun Gong in 1999, and has allegedly jailed, tortured and killed countless practitioners since. Although Chinese authorities often call it an “evil cult,” Canadian experts have described Falun Gong as a new, loosely organized religion emphasizing meditation and “profoundly moral” teachings.

When the fake emails began to arrive a few years ago, says Wollensak, they were easily traced to accounts in China. They’re harder to track now, and some politicians are unaware they are not from Falun Gong.

“It’s really an attempt to disparage the Falun Gong’s followers,” says Sgro, who chairs a parliamentary “friendship” committee with the organization (and keeps getting the emails).

Over the last decade or so, city councilors, mayors and other politicians have certainly tried to quash Falun Gong commemorative events or protests, often under pressure from local Chinese consulates. The former mayor of Vancouver, for instance, publicly ordered the group to stop protesting outside the local consulate in 2006.

Uyghurs in Canada, who number about 2,000, have faced more insidious intimidation, says community leader Mehmet Tohti.

The Muslim ethnic group is at the centre of unrest in China’s Xinjiang region, with human-rights groups accusing Beijing of repressive crackdowns in response to calls for independence and alleged terrorist acts.

Tohti, who founded the Uyghur Canadian Association, believes he too has been shadowed by Chinese agents in Toronto. And he says telephoning kin back home can land them in prison.

When he rang a distant relative two years ago, for example, “immediately she was put in police custody.” “It was in February and she was put outside for two hours,” says Tohti. “They’re punishing me and forcing me to stop doing what I’m doing.” 

Experts say such tactics form part of a larger push to influence and monitor Chinese-Canadians, Chinese citizens who study here and Canadian society as a whole — a project active in many other countries, too — that has reportedly swelled under leader Xi Jinping.

The groups behind the report — presented to Global Affairs Canada, RCMP and CSIS officials at meetings in September — want Canadian authorities to take a more coordinated, aggressive approach to the harassment.

Adam Austen, a spokesman for Global Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland, declined to comment on the broad-ranging report, saying the department does not talk about “specific cases.”

But he says any attempt by a foreign government to improperly influence or harass Canadians is taken seriously. “In instances where unacceptable activities by foreign diplomats do occur, appropriate action is taken, up to and including rendering the diplomat ‘persona non grata.’”

One Chinese official accused of harassing Falun Gong was blocked from renewing Canadian credentials. Another was successfully sued for libelling the group. But activists say they are unaware of any Chinese diplomat actually declared persona non grata.

The Chinese embassy in Ottawa did not respond to requests for comment.

Meanwhile, activists suggest the long arm of China continues to punish dissents in Canada. Former Miss Canada Anastasia Lin is acutely aware of the collateral damage from criticizing China: After speaking to Canadian media about China’s oppression of the Falun Gong, she was barred from the 2015 Miss World contest in Sanya, and says her father, still living in China, has been intimidated repeatedly by police.

Lin also revealed to the Post that her pageant sponsor — a Toronto dress shop owned by a Chinese-Canadian — dropped her after receiving an admonishing email from the local consulate.

“Most of the Chinese here would have business ties or family back in China, and that itself is holding everything they have in China hostage,” she says. “So people here don’t step out of line.