Chinese Influence Scandal Imperils Trudeau’s Government

 

Over the last month, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his government have faced fresh allegations that they repeatedly ignored vital national intelligence warnings that the Chinese government has been working to both penetrate the ruling Liberal government and also help keep it in power, and that elements within the Liberal Party of Canada have committed treason against the country.

China’s efforts to influence Trudeau’s Liberal Party of Canada, long underreported, have now been shared with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (csis; Canada’s top foreign security watchdog), Canada’s Five Eyes partners, and French and German spy services.

csis identifies China’s efforts as “a direct threat to our national security and sovereignty” and Canada’s “greatest strategic threat to national security.”

China’s alleged penetration of the ruling Canadian government could explain Canada’s exclusion from a new trilateral military intelligence and security partnership between the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia (aukus).

Reports based in part on anonymous csis whistleblower briefs were published in both the Global News and the Globe and Mail. These reports allege that China directly interfered in Canada’s 2019 and 2021 elections in an effort to have Trudeau’s pro-China Liberal Party reelected, targeting 11 candidates in the Greater Toronto Area in 2019.

Reports allege that the prime minister and his government ignored repeated warnings about China’s clandestine efforts before these elections. They also state that the Trudeau government was warned that Member of Parliament Han Dong was nominated and elected in 2019 with the help of Chinese state efforts.

Intelligence reports allege that Dong is affiliated with China’s state government. csis says he was in regular communication with its Toronto-based Chinese Consulate, collaborating with the Chinese government over two Canadians taken into custody in retaliation for Canada detaining Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou on behalf of the United States government. Intelligence sources say Dong told the consulate that “Beijing should hold off freeing Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor.” Dong did not deny the conversation took place but denied he was working against the interests of the two wrongly detained Canadian men.

According to the intelligence sources, Dong was concerned that releasing the two men would boost the public image of the opposition Conservative Party that was putting public pressure on the Liberal government to do more to secure their release.

After these latest revelations broke, the Liberal Party issued a statement that M.P. Dong was acting independent of the government and that the government was not aware of his conversations. Dong has resigned from the government and now sits as an independent.

The ongoing csis leaks are revealing that some level of treason was taking place within Trudeau’s Liberal government and that Trudeau or his government ignored it for political partisan purposes. The situation may be even worse than we know.

The question now is whether Prime Minister Trudeau or his office sat on this explosive intelligence. And if intelligence of this kind had been supplied to Trudeau and his government, why did Trudeau allow Dong to remain in the party?

Trudeau was reelected to a minority government in September 2021, narrowly defeating the Conservative Party of Canada. Now it appears that happened with the help of China.

The scandal raises all kinds of questions and casts doubt on the nation’s election integrity. It also threatens Trudeau’s smooth-running government machine.

China’s growing web of influence in Canada has included an intricate marshaling of fifth-column elements. It has used a bevy of state-sponsored inducements for several purposes: to successfully court the elite within all levels of Canada’s political, bureaucratic and business communities; to coerce elements of Canada’s Chinese and Hong Kong diaspora communities; to partner with Chinese elements within Canada sympathetic to China’s foreign interests and willing to promote them; to leverage legal donation laws within Canada to mask its illegal political influence-peddling efforts; to embed Chinese agents within political candidate campaign teams; to push cash through various intermediaries into the campaigns of preferred political candidates; and to bus Chinese international students to vote in a Liberal Party nomination for a candidate sympathetic to Chinese interests, thus attempting to exert influence over Canada’s federal party nominations and its 2019 and 2021 national federal elections.

This spectrum of influence peddling is organized by United Front, China’s international foreign influence program, inaugurated in 2015 by Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping. csis says its investigation revealed that Han Dong was also communicating with United Front affiliates in New York.

Based on insider csis findings, Global News reported that several 2019 election candidates of undisclosed federal political parties met with Canadian-based United Front representatives. Based on the target and the content of the intelligence warnings, the reasonable assumption is that these candidates were standing for Trudeau’s Liberal Party.

Whether these efforts affected the 2019 election results, csis could not say—it is not charged with counting the votes in Canada’s elections. Prime Minister Trudeau and his government insist that China’s alleged influence campaign did not affect election results. “Canadians can have confidence that integrity of our elections held,” he said. His office tried to undercut the csis allegations by suggesting they contained any number of errors.

csis has taken the extraordinary step of publicly expressing its concerns of voter fraud and election result manipulation by China’s government. So while it doesn’t count the votes, it has sufficient corroborating and incontrovertible intelligence reports that raise serious concerns that some level of the voting was fraudulent and expressly directed toward candidates for Trudeau’s government.

Why didn’t the government act? The prime minister and his office have so far refused to comment publicly on what it knew and when it knew it.

Global News reported, “The prime minister’s office (pmo) did not directly answer a series of questions from Global News, including whether or not Prime Minister Trudeau was briefed in 2022 on Canadian intelligence that alleged China had covertly funded a clandestine network of candidates in the 2019 election.”

A foreign influence registry might have prevented the abuses; however, a 2021 Conservative Party private members bill that would have established a foreign influence registry failed in the Trudeau government-controlled House of Commons.

China’s clandestine behavior coupled with Trudeau’s inaction on securing the federal elections, even after repeated efforts to warn him and his government, open the door to suspicion about the integrity of the election results and even the authenticity of Trudeau’s government. It also puts a big question mark over the government’s resolve to put national interest above partisan politics.

Trudeau has rebuffed any suggestion of publicly investigating duplicity by his government or complicity with China to undermine Canada’s democracy. He even suggested that those calling for a public inquiry are motivated by racism.

That the Trudeau government is compromised is almost beyond question, though all the facts need to be gathered and csis briefs need verifying through a nonpartisan public inquiry.

The question now becomes just who in the government is compromised and how far up it goes. However, the opposition parties need the New Democratic Party (ndp) to break ranks with the Trudeau government to move forward with any meaningful parliamentary efforts to hold the government to account.

Trudeau has so far managed to avoid this. In January 2022, the Liberals and the ndp brokered a side agreement that formally sees the Trudeau government pushing ndp policies as part of its own legislative platform in exchange for the ndp’s continued backing in the House of Commons until 2025. One opposition party leader called it a “false majority.”

The coalition has allowed Trudeau to operate with the legislative confidence of a majority government and, as necessary, avoid parliamentary committee accountability and confidence votes. And the ndp continues to give the appearance it is disinclined to see this power-sharing arrangement disturbed.

Instead, Trudeau has asked family friend and former governor general David Johnston to impanel what is being characterized as a toothless and government-friendly investigation to investigate his government.

Johnston is also a registered member of the scandal-plagued Trudeau Foundation. The National Post reported the Trudeau Foundation received an influx of donations that began with Trudeau’s political rise and continued after he became prime minister. One donation in particular, csis alleges, has direct links to China.

The National Post reported, “In 2016, after meeting with Trudeau in an exclusive fundraiser at a private Vancouver home, Chinese businessman Zhang Bin donated $200,000 to the Trudeau Foundation.”

That sum was packaged in a broader $1 million donation, and of that total, $50,000 was earmarked for erecting a statue of Trudeau’s father, Pierre Trudeau. The Trudeau Foundation recently returned the donation to Zhang Bin.

The results of this proposed report will be used to consider any further steps toward a broader investigation, making remote any serious investigation and possible accountability of the government.

It’s possible the opposition parties could force Trudeau’s government to convene a public inquiry. The prime minister could attempt to prorogue Parliament to try to kill the investigation, but that would halt progress on Trudeau’s coveted Internet censorship bill (Bill C-11). As the intelligence leaks pile up, Trudeau’s government looks to be on the verge of collapse.

With the pressure mounting, Trudeau’s Liberals have proposed to resurrect foreign influence legislation. Cynics say this is the government’s most transparent effort in years to divert public attention from the guile, complicity and breezy government approach to China’s foreign security threats.

China’s efforts to penetrate Canada are neither new nor hidden. The intelligence community’s decade-long warnings about China’s growing influence coincide with the rise of Justin Trudeau. That these warnings have only now grown into a crisis exposes the shameful collapse of Canada’s media.

The Trumpet has warned about these trends for years. The ruling Liberal government has been trading Canadian national interests for Chinese money for decades.

In 2012, when Trudeau was standing for Liberal Party leadership, he penned an op-ed published in the National Post that was both a “love letter” to China and a dog whistle to powerful Liberal insiders and other connected interests. It was a declaration of his intention not to disturb the Chinese economic invasion of Canada bisecting lucrative liberal business interests and that he was all in.

The Liberal Party of Canada has long been a Trojan horse for the Chinese invasion of Canada. “The Liberal Party of Canada is becoming the only party that the People’s Republic of China can support,” csis has warned.

Since Trudeau has been in power, that invasion has accelerated, morphing into policy compliance and national humiliation on the world stage. This kind of leadership is a heavy curse on the nation. How can Canada remain free and prosperous under these conditions?

These circumstances reveal the dangerous reality of Canada’s ruling government: They are putting partisan interests and personal gain ahead of national security. And not only is Justin Trudeau and his government and financial backers deluding themselves about the nature of China’s ambitions, their deceit and complicity are deluding the nation. They are putting the nation to sleep and undermining Canada’s democracy.

The Bible reveals that Canada’s internal divisions will have serious consequences. Reality can only be ignored for so long before it comes crashing in.

End-time Bible prophecy shows that China’s designs on Canada are far from benevolent and will lead to violence. Canada will have to suffer to learn the dangers of compromising with evil. We should have learned these hard lessons from the last world war, but Canadians have long forgotten that distant national suffering.

In this way, it’s the 1930s all over again: Just as England’s prewar leadership compromised with Hitler and Germany, Canada’s leadership continues to compromise with a newly emboldened Chinese dragon.

Canada’s leadership is weakening the nation. This enflames China’s warlike ambitions, putting the security of the Canadian nation in imminent peril. It also endangers world peace.

To learn more about these alarming trends, what you can do about them on a personal level, and to have the enduring hope you need to courageously face them, request a free copy of Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry’s booklet Winston S. Churchill—The Watchman.