Foreign influence from China has explicitly been happening since the nineties. Soon after the Tiananmen Square massacre, they realized that they needed to control overseas dissidents to ensure that there would be less resistance to the Beijing regime.
This has been happening for a very long time. It has increased in power since Xi Jinping has taken over, but it is deeply embedded in various sectors in Canada. It has to be looked at as a holistic issue and not an individual policy issue.