Thank you for inviting me to participate in this study, Mr. Chair.
I will be speaking in English, but please do not hesitate to ask your questions in the official language of your choice.
Beijing's espionage and interference is now the single greatest threat to Canada's democratic way of life. The PRC is intent on gaining control of Canadian critical minerals and it is actively running influence campaigns over resource development. Balloons and election interference are merely the latest episodes in a long list of hostile hybrid warfare efforts perpetrated by the CCP against Canada.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's staunch refusal to convene a public inquiry is actively jeopardizing Canada's security and its bilateral relationship with its most important strategic ally. Beijing's corruption of Canadian business and politics poses a national security problem to the United States, in part because the U.S. shares intelligence with Canada.
Recent unclassified versions of CSIS annual reports repeatedly warned about the state capture and elite capture of Canadian political, business, financial, educational and societal elites and institutions. Beijing invests heavily to make influential opinion leaders beholden to the PRC, who are then induced to repeat and lend credibility to the CCP's political disinformation. I know of Canadian academics who have been offered thousands of dollars to co-publish articles with scholars from China. Others have received lucrative trips, with all expenses paid by the regime in Beijing. In the same way, the PRC pays off politicians. Since 2015, CSIS has called out select Canadian politicians by name.
Australia's experience shows that no government is immune. In 2016, Australia's Liberal trade minister, Andrew Robb, announced that he would not run again after having negotiated deals that were exceptionally favourable to China, including a free trade agreement. Robb then took up a $880,000-a-year job with a billionaire closely connected to the CCP and its trade policy. As trade minister, Robb negotiated a 99-year lease for the Australian port of Darwin with that same Chinese billionaire.
In 2017, Labour senator Sam Dastyari quit the Australian Senate over accepting donations from entities with links to the CCP. The senator had even tipped off one such donor about being the likely subject of a counter-intelligence operation.
In 2020, the founder of a Chinese-language school in Canberra made an unsuccessful run at a seat in Australia's Senate. It turns out that he had a long history of activity with the PRC's United Front Work Department, which is tasked with mobilizing diaspora communities to meddle in foreign states.
UFWD's illicit activities have been called out by CSIS, the Privy Council and the federal court. Under broad guidance from CCP's consulates, the UFWD co-opts staff of targeted politicians, facilitates the clandestine transfer of funds, recruits potential targets, suppresses protests and supports ethnic Chinese under its influence in their election bids. The PRC maintains the second-largest diplomatic service in Canada for good reason.
Blurry lines between Beijing state organs, Asian-organized crime groups, and select members of Canada's mainland Chinese immigrant communities and business interests are the hallmark of the CCP's covert, coercive and corrupt influence, which has been systematically eroding resistance to the Chinese government from within.
Suspect activities by the CCP in Canada date back at least as far as the ill-fated Project Sidewinder in the late 1990s. This joint CSIS-RCMP investigation had been looking into the way Chinese intelligence and Chinese triads were collaborating on intelligence operations right here in Canada.
A Canadian prime minister's awareness that the fortunes of some of his party's candidates may have been aided and abetted by the CCP is all too ironic. Out of sheer self-preservation in any democracy, a ruling political party would have forced someone with as abysmal a record during his second term as Chinese President Xi Jinping's to resign. Xi never would have won a free and fair democratic election for a third term.
“Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows”, reads the famous line in Shakespeare's The Tempest. This refers to a man who's shipwrecked, and seeks shelter beside a sleeping monster. Politics makes equally strange bedfellows, and one would hope that Canadian decision-makers will finally wake up early enough to recognize the CCP for what it is.