Canada-China Relations Committee on May 3rd, 2021

[Michael Chong, Conservative, Wellington—Halton Hills, ON]

No, I didn't, actually, and there are still three minutes left, as far as I can see.

[The Chair, Liberal, Geoff Regan]

We'll divide it up.

I do want to take a five-minute health break. I'll give you a minute and a half, Mr. Chong.

[Michael Chong, Conservative, Wellington—Halton Hills, ON]

Can I get a bit more than a minute and a half, possibly? We have three minutes left.

[The Chair, Liberal, Geoff Regan]

I'll give you two minutes. Go ahead.

[Michael Chong, Conservative, Wellington—Halton Hills, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to build on what some of my colleagues have raised earlier about anti-Asian racism.

My father was a Chinese immigrant who came to this country in 1952, only a few short years after the Chinese exclusion act was repealed by the Canadian Parliament. Even though the act was repealed, the sentiment behind it clearly had not been. Growing up as a half-Chinese kid in the 1970s, I know full well what discrimination and racism is all about.

I want to ensure that something else I've seen first-hand is put on the record. Many Canadians of Chinese descent who have been critical of China, such as Hong Kong pro-democracy activists and human rights groups, have been attacked and intimidated online and in person by their fellow Canadians of Chinese descent for not being sufficiently loyal to China and for not supporting the motherland.

I just wanted to make sure that this was on the record, because that community is a minority within a minority in many respects, and often they feel very isolated. I think we need to give voice to the voiceless.

Seeing that my time is limited, I have a very quick question for Mr. Houlden.

You mentioned in the industry committee that much of China's FDI, its foreign direct investment, arrives via third countries. Could you possibly elaborate on that a bit more?

[Prof. Gordon Houlden]

Absolutely, and the House of Commons library subscribes to the investment tracker produced by the Chinese through the University of Alberta, which can provide you with a lot of detail.

Quickly, that money flows through Hong Kong, it flows through Luxembourg, and it flows through all of the Caribbean ports where such money is transferred. It's not just China that does that—a lot of multinational corporations do the same thing, for a reason—but it leads to incredible distortion in the numbers. You can look at Stats Canada numbers, but the reporting of the volume of Chinese investment in this country is about a third to a half of what it is in fact. We at the China Institute can back that up with facts that prove the numbers to be substantively higher.

[Michael Chong, Conservative, Wellington—Halton Hills, ON]

Thank you.

Thank you, Chair.

[Prof. Paul Evans]

Mr. Chong, we'd enjoy inviting you to the University of British Columbia. We are plotting what we are going to do to try to diminish some of those intra-Chinese hostilities among our students when people resume in September.

[Michael Chong, Conservative, Wellington—Halton Hills, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Geoff Regan]

Thank you, Professor. That's time.

I'm glad we took the time for that, Mr. Chong. Thank you.

Ms. Zann, you have two minutes.

[Lenore Zann, Liberal, Cumberland—Colchester, NS]

My goodness, I thought we were taking a break.

My question is for Professor Evans. I've heard it said that words are windows or they're walls, and you asked a question of the committee last year: Do we keep our doors open to Chinese students and to research exchanges in our universities while closing windows to protect intellectual property and national security in an era of technological competition with China and extraterritorial pressure from the United States?

Could you please give us a response now to that question you posed last year? Thank you.

[Prof. Paul Evans]

This is strange to say, but I think I got the right question and the right answer a year and a half ago. What that means is that as we're looking at how we're going to put those fences around certain kinds of Chinese activities, etc., the challenge is that our American friends are demanding regularly that we expand those areas into biomedical work. They're demanding that it is not just dual-use military activity, but that in fact the Chinese projects that we need to be censoring are not just about military dual use but are giving China certain commercial advantages in high-tech sectors.

The attack on Huawei is a lot bigger than national security conventionally defined. It now comes into a peer competitor Chinese organization, and that's one of the places where I think Canada and the United States are going to have to differ if we move forward, and we need that professional discussion. Techno-nationalism is eating us up.

[The Chair, Liberal, Geoff Regan]

Thank you so much to our witnesses, professors. It's much appreciated and it's been an excellent session.

Now I'm going to suspend. We're going to take a five-minute health break, but if we can get back in less than five minutes, let's try to do that, please. We'll see you shortly, colleagues.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Geoff Regan]

I call this meeting back to order.

For our third panel tonight I'd like to welcome, as individuals, Justin Li, director of the National Capital Confucius Institute for Culture, Language and Business at Carleton University, and Ward Elcock.

Thank you both for being here.

I will turn to Mr. Li for his opening remarks. Please proceed. You have five minutes.

[Justin Li, Director, National Capital Confucius Institute for Culture, Language and Business, Carleton University, As an Individual]

Thank you.

Good evening. I'd like to thank the chair of this special committee, distinguished vice-chairs and members of this committee and members of Parliament for your kind invitation.

I would also like to acknowledge the support and guidance of the clerk and her colleagues. I appreciated the information they provided for this process in order to prepare for our discussion.

My name is Justin Li. I'm the director of the Confucius Institute at Carleton University. I'm a Canadian citizen. I came to Canada as a landed immigrant in 1996 and I received my Canadian citizenship from then-Governor General of Canada the Right Honourable Michaëlle Jean on July 1, 2009.

I was employed by an Ottawa-based high-tech company called JetForm as the country manager to launch its operation in China in 1998. After JetForm was bought by Adobe in 2002, I became an independent consultant engaged in international marketing for Canadian firms seeking business in China.

When I applied to become the director of the Confucius Institute at Carleton in early 2011, the process included a round of interviews with faculty members from various departments, including business, public affairs, language and arts.

Our goal is to promote understanding, share knowledge and strengthen the human bonds between the people of Canada and the people of China, and I'm honoured to have the privilege of contributing to these efforts.

Our institute focuses on three areas: We support the delivery of Chinese language training, we offer some cultural programming, and we assist visiting scholars from China. Simply put, I connect Carleton with the Confucius Institute's network of Chinese language instructors from China.

The Chinese academics who are interested in coming to Canada as visiting scholars for the purpose of providing language instruction initially contact our institute either individually or through their own universities. When Carleton requires instructors, I offer a selection of candidates to the university.

These individuals are interviewed and selected through the normal Carleton process. Successful candidates must go through Canada's immigration process, which includes both health and security checks.

Our cultural programming is another area of focus. This has included workshops on traditional arts, including calligraphy, paper cutting, food and tai chi. Most of these activities are hands-on sessions for students at Carleton, providing experiential learning and immersive experiences.

We have also offered music events, and some are innovative. For example, we collaborated on an evert at which music students and alumni of Carleton performed their own fusion music works—jazz on traditional Chinese musical instruments. On another occasion, our music students were invited to the National Arts Centre in Ottawa to perform an open concert for public education purposes.

Since 2013, we have organized study tours in China. The students are responsible for covering the cost of transportation to and from China. The institute acts as a host once they arrive in China. Each tour is accompanied by a Carleton faculty or staff member as a chaperone and supervisor. The student selection is managed by the relevant Carleton departments and faculty members.

We always inform the Canadian embassy in Beijing of our China tours. In 2017 our music student group was invited to the embassy when the former Governor General, the Right Honourable David Johnston, visited China. It was a major highlight for our students.

Finally, I assist our visiting scholars while they are in Canada. This is an informal role that can include helping them to access health services or find a grocery store when they first arrive, and generally welcoming them to Canada.

To be clear, the institute at Carleton University is not involved in any elementary or high school programs. We focus solely on delivering Chinese language instruction to the students at Carleton, as well as to adult audiences for professional development purposes and their own points of interest.

I hope this offers a clear sense of our activity at Carleton.

In closing, I would like to state that I'm proud of our work at Carleton's Confucius Institute and I feel privileged to contribute to a shared understanding and closer relationship between the country of my birth and the country where I have chosen to live and raise my family.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Geoff Regan]

Thank you very much, Mr. Li.

Mr. Elcock, it's good to see you again. Please proceed. You have five minutes.

[Ward Elcock, As an Individual]

Mr. Chairman, I have not put in any written remarks, but I did want to make a few comments before the session begins.

First, let me say it's a pleasure to appear before the committee. Some of my views are public on issues such as Huawei and the Meng case, and the detention of the two Michaels, so I won't spend a lot of time dealing with those issues, but I'm happy to answer questions with respect to any of them or on my views with respect to any of them.

On the broader issue with respect to China, I think two things that happened in the last week or two are important. One is the meeting between the Americans and the Chinese on climate change. The other is the comments made today by the American Secretary of State in London, in which he essentially said that the goal of the United States was not the containment of China but rather that the competition with China, the relationship with China, needed to be conducted in an appropriate way in accordance with the multilateral system that we and in particular the Americans have spent many years trying to build since the Second World War.

I thought both of those events were important, and they suggest that there is perhaps a better way forward than under the previous American administration, but obviously that will take some time to develop.

My background, Mr. Chairman, is largely on the intelligence side. Indeed, I spent over 25 years in intelligence. I did want to make a couple of points with respect to that area.

First, let me say that there is more than one country that collects intelligence in Canada. China is by no means the only one that does so. It is, however, probably our largest counter-intelligence target, and that would have been true back as far as the late 1990s, so that isn't really a change.

The methods that China uses have not really changed either. There are some new cyber-tools that were not as advanced in the late 1990s, but those are in many respects only tools that allow agencies to do things that they did through other means in an earlier time.

The Chinese have over the years exercised a wide range of intelligence collection capabilities, including what we used to call “vacuum-cleaner collection”, which was everybody collecting all the time, so any visiting delegation would spend some of its time appearing in places where they were not supposed to be to take photographs or collect other information.

They also have very professional organizations that are dedicated to collecting intelligence in the normal ways that intelligence agencies, both in the west and in other parts of the world, collect information.

The Chinese also spend a great deal of time in developing those who they see as supporting their interests. Not all countries are so heavily engaged in that exercise as the Chinese, but certainly over the years the Chinese have emphasized developing the relationships that they see as possibly advancing the interests of China in dealing with a country like Canada or with other countries.

Finally, let me say that I think there is a tendency—or at least I have observed a tendency, because so little happens in the counter-intelligence world, or apparently so little happens in the counter-intelligence world—to believe that nothing is happening. Speaking as an intelligence professional, I guess, I would make the comment, which I hope is useful to the members of the committee, that the fact that you're not seeing anything doesn't mean that nothing is happening.

Counter-intelligence is not like counterterrorism, wherein the goal is to arrest a terrorist and either expel them from Canada or imprison them. Counter-intelligence is a much more long-term and much slower investigation, in which prosecution is not necessarily the aim of the game at the end of the day—

[The Chair, Liberal, Geoff Regan]

Thank you, Mr. Elcock. I'm sorry to cut you off, but we're over the five-minute point.

[Ward Elcock]

Okay. Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Geoff Regan]

Now we'll go to our first round of questions.

We have Mr. Genuis, please, for six minutes.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Li, what kind of information about your ongoing operations do you provide to entities in China?

[Justin Li]

Could you repeat your question?

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

What kind of information about your operations do you provide to entities in China?

[Justin Li]

This institute is part of Carleton. It's like many other institutes and centres. It's one of many at Carleton, so it is under Carleton's policy and procedures. The work of other centres and institutes, such as the India centre, is focused on different parts of the world. This institute focuses only on language training.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

I'm sorry, Mr. Li, if my question wasn't clear. Let me ask it again.

What kind of information about your ongoing operations do you provide to entities in China? Are you reporting back—