Information & Ethics committee  Good morning, folks. My name is Cherie Wong. I'm in Ottawa, and I am the executive director of Alliance Canada Hong Kong. Thank you for having us. Foreign interference in our institutions is not new. Since the 1990s, Chinese dissident communities have raised attention regarding

Canada-China Relations committee  I'm hesitant to say “skewed”, because I have a very strong perspective, so I may not come across as a very impartial examiner, but I can tell you that many members of my community have had very violent confrontations with Chinese language media journalists who are pushing the lim

Canada-China Relations committee  As someone who is Asian, who is a dissident of the CCP and who is a Canadian, I have often been asked to choose sides and told that I can only do one and not the other. I think, first and foremost, that we need to draw a difference between the Chinese communities, the ethnic Chi

Canada-China Relations committee  I think one of the members previously mentioned that Canadians don't really understand foreign state actors and don't really know who they are. This is why we need a transparency scheme: to point out who they are, to point out these organizations who are receiving funding from st

Canada-China Relations committee  Social media has always been a tool of authoritarian regimes. They're able to use bots to create misinformation. This is where, as you said, we should be doing this kind of education because everyday Canadians are individuals who can choose between a slave-labour-made product and

Canada-China Relations committee  Absolutely. Self-censorship has been widespread in the Chinese ethnic media because many journalists have families or friends who are still in China and PRC-controlled regions. They're afraid that if they speak up, their family and friends could be endangered.

Canada-China Relations committee  There's a very simple solution to this very complicated problem: fund ethnic media. The reason it has been so infiltrated by the CCP is that they have been bringing in the resources that the Canadian government and Canadian local communities have been unable to provide. We need

Canada-China Relations committee  The wine and dine happens with Canadian and Chinese communities alike.

Canada-China Relations committee  It has been tabled. It's just waiting for translation.

Canada-China Relations committee  Yes, thank you for the question. Yes, unfortunately, it was a very small blurb, but there are a lot of ways that the information and narrative discursion warfare is being conducted here in Canada and other western liberal democracies. To answer your question, I notice the same

Canada-China Relations committee  We need strong advocacy for dissidents who are facing these difficult situations. I can speak from experience: the individuals who are facing these threats have never felt more alone. We have nowhere to go. We are talking to you today, but tomorrow we would be talking to the RCMP

Canada-China Relations committee  I'll preface this answer by saying that this happens to every single party. There is not a single party not vulnerable to the CCP's influence; every single party is. From my report, I can tell you that we have recorded various incidents of political influence, at the federal, pro

Canada-China Relations committee  I believe we need a federal policy in a centralized place to address all forms of foreign influence. These actors are often the same and coming from the same organizations or the same network. A foreign-influence transparency scheme and a public commission paired with it would be

Canada-China Relations committee  I think we do need a federal response, because we see this co-ordination not only happening in Canada; it's happening in our ally countries. We should create a multilateral response for this kind of question. I think first and foremost we need to centre the needs around the com

Canada-China Relations committee  Absolutely. One of the proposed recommendations we have is a public commission on foreign influence paired with the transparency scheme so that it would act as a registry body for foreign actors to sign up to ensure that their activities are recorded here in Canada, but that comm