China constitutes a serious and growing threat to our electoral system and to the public’s trust in it, concluded in her first report Judge Marie-Josée Hogue, who nevertheless believes that Beijing has not succeeded in affecting the outcome of the elections. of 2019 and 2021.
The commission she leads is due to deliver a final report later this year on how China, Russia, India and other states and non-state actors are going about influencing our elections.
She took over after Justin Trudeau’s first initiative on foreign interference ended in debacle. He had appointed a family friend, former Governor General David Johnston, “special rapporteur” to investigate Chinese interference. Married to a Chinese woman and having two daughters who studied in China, he did not exactly have the profile of a neutral and impartial investigator. Moreover, obviously to protect Trudeau and the Liberals, Johnston wanted his report to remain secret.
This attempt to cover up China’s interference in the election failed when a majority of MPs in the Commons passed a motion calling for him to step down, citing “serious questions” about conflicts of interest.
Trudeau, at the heart of the intrigue
Justin himself and some of his ministers were to be at the center of the Hogue investigation. For years, he did everything not to see Chinese infiltration in the PLC and in the Pierre-Elliott Trudeau Foundation, of which David Johnston was a member.
Trudeau was even aware of allegations of Chinese interference before the 2019 vote, but refused to act.
If we know that China attempted to distort the electoral results, it is thanks to courageous agents of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) who decided, at the risk of their careers, to leak confidential information to the media about the machinations of Beijing.
In the second part of her investigation, Judge Hogue must get to the bottom of things. We must know why Trudeau accepted that a man close to China, Han Dong, was chosen as the Liberal candidate for Don Valley North in Ontario when he had been informed by CSIS of his close ties with the Chinese consulate in Toronto.
According to CSIS, buses full of Chinese students, controlled by Beijing agents, came to participate in Han Dong’s inauguration vote. He left the Liberal caucus in 2023 to sit as an independent.
Scientific secrets stolen by China
Chinese interference in Canada is not limited to politics. For years, a scientific espionage network stole information from the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, Canada’s main virus research center: one of the few in North America capable of handling pathogens like Ebola. .
Xiangguo Qiu, head of vaccine research, and her husband Keding Cheng, a biologist, were fired from the lab in 2021. A 2020 CSIS report considered Qiu and Cheng to pose “a very serious and credible danger to the Government of Canada as a whole and in particular in facilities considered high security due to the potential for theft of hazardous materials. The couple had secret contacts with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. Chinese military scientists even came to work with Xiangguo Qiu in his Winnipeg laboratory.
The couple of spies were able to flee to China without being worried. Asked about this, the director of CSIS, David Vigneault, did not want to say why. He also refused to talk about any secrets the couple may have provided to Beijing.
