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Taiwan had trudeau figured out 7 years ago. From 2016.
Chinese Military,Political and Social Superthread
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Retired AF Guy
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That is surprising pretty well done!
OldSolduer
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Fuckjng hilarious
RangerRay
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Real Story Series: Diplomat, Socialite, Spy.
The Chinese agent behind this week's scandal is a high-society social butterfly well known to several Liberal MPs and cabinet ministers. But that's not the half of it.
therealstory.substack.com
Part One
While I try to keep Real Story subscribers in the China loop, I managed to go the entire month of April without filing a thing to either the Ottawa Citizen or the National Post about the national security threats posed by Xi Jinping’s many friends in this country’s high Laurentian places.
There were too many other stories to chase down that nobody else was paying attention to. Besides, April’s workload was a bit heavier than usual and I reckoned the China file was in good hands (Steve Chase and Bob Fife over at the Globe, take a bow). It was hard work keeping my powder dry.
In last Tuesday’s Real Story newsletter I dove straight into the “post-national” bedlam Team Trudeau has invited by expunging conventional understandings of what constitutes threats to Canada’s national security, A haven for terror proxies, police-state goons. That’s Canada for you.
And this past week in the Ottawa Citizen and the National Post I broke my abstinence from chronicling Justin Trudeau’s toleration of Beijing’s strongarm rackets: Evidence of Beijing's terrorizing of Chinese-Canadians, and its manipulation of Canadian politicians, has been in plain sight for years.
I’m taking a long-overdue break from my Postmedia work for the rest of this month but I’ll be keeping the lights on at the Real Story. I’m going to run a bit of a series in the coming days. It will focus on what’s been going unnoticed in the story about China’s Ministry of State Security secretly going after the ordinarily unflappable and unimpeachably decent Conservative MP Michael Chong (Wellington-Halton Hills).
The thing that put a target on Chong’s back, remember, was his sponsorship of a February, 2021 House of Commons motion condemning Beijing’s persecution of the Uyghurs and other captive Muslim minorities as a genocide. There’s a lot to that motion that’s gone under the radar. I’ll be coming around to that.
I’ll be looking closer at that spy, Wei Zhao, the agent working for China’s Ministry of State Security out of the Toronto consulate. He’s well aquainted with at least a half-dozen Liberal MPs and cabinet ministers (named in last Tuesday’s newsletter) and there will be more in the coming days.
Here’s the thing: CSIS has been warning about the Liberals’ liaisons with Wei Zhao for at least three years, and warning about a certain Liberal kingmaker who hangs around with Zhao, to no avail.
The facts of Wei Zhao’s liaisons can be derived mostly from open-source intelligence and publicly-reported information that hardly anybody bothers to notice. But there’s a lot more about him that CSIS has been trying to draw attention to.
And there’s a lot more to that 2021 CSIS intelligence assessment titled People’s Republic of China Foreign Interference in Canada: a Critical National Security Threat than just some cryptic reference to an unnamed MP that’s turned out to be Michael Chong.
Sorry to tell you, but there’s no backing away from a fight with Xi Jinping.
I’ll be getting into these questions too:
What’s the deal with these “gatekeeper” political staffers that append themselves to MPs, “thereby placing them in a position,” as the CSIS report describes, “where they can deceptively control and influence the activities of elected officials in ways that support PRC activities”?
What’s the story with that English-language magazine that’s being paid to run pro-Bejing propaganda? What was the horrible fate that befell Sheng Xue, the democracy activist whose warnings to Parliament back in 2006 I wrote about in my column last week?
But first, I need to get past the “news” in order to get into the backstory. I can’t just breeze by the contradictions in the “narrative” the Trudeau Liberals are expecting us to believe.
Not to offer the Prime Minister’s Office any advice on how to spin all this, but there is a reasonable excuse. The only problem with it is that it’s slam-dunk evidence that a combination of inattention, incompetence, negligence, and imbecility, especially when it comes to China, has crippled Canada’s capacity to deal with national security threats ever since Justin Trudeau came to power.
So let’s get all that out of the way now.
Want to get through the paywall?
The hell you say
Prime Minister Trudeau and Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino say they’ve been in the dark all along about Beijing’s threat to target Chong and his family. This is half true and half a lie, and there may be a straightforward and honest explanation that’s just too embarrassing for Trudeau to admit.
On Friday afternoon Mendicino blamed the Canadian Security Intelligence Service for leaving him blindsided about Beijing’s plans to punish Chong for his impertinence regarding the Chinese regime’s treatment of the Uyghurs and other Turkic groups in and around Xinjiang.
Mendicino: “What I would say is that it's a serious problem that in July 2021 that neither the prime minister or the public safety minister at the time were briefed directly by CSIS."
No less a disingenuous misdirection came from Liberal MPs Kevin Lamoureux and Mark Gerretsen in the House of Commons, whose contrivance last Thursday was to the effect that the fault lies with Chong himself. Gerretsen: “The member from Wellington-Halton Hills actually had a defensive briefing on this two years ago, so he knew about this when it actually happened.”
Remember: Whatever briefings arose from the nine-page July 2021 CSIS intelligence assessment that fell into the hands of the Globe and Mail, titled People’s Republic of China Foreign Interference in Canada: a Critical National Security Threat, the document referred to “specific actions to target Canadian MPs” and did not name Chong specifically.
In the middle of all the clamour last week, Trudeau’s national security adviser, Jody Thomas, confirmed that what a CSIS source told Bob Fife and Steven Chase was true, that one of the unnamed MPs in the intelligence assessment - the one targeted for retaliation owing to the attention he was drawing to the Uyghur genocide -was Chong.
Importantly, Thomas also said the July 2021 CSIS document was circulated up through the national-security chain of command to her office before she took over the job as Trudeau’s national security adviser last year.
Real Story subscribers can make what they will of Trudeau’s claim last Friday: “That information never made it up to the political level in my office, to me or even to the Minister of Public Safety at the time."
It was an outright falsehood, or something damn close to it - either a deliberate lie, an obfuscation, or he genuinely doesn’t know what he’s talking about - when Trudeau said this: “CSIS made the determination that it (the July 2021 CSIS report) wasn’t something that needed to be raised to a higher level because it wasn’t a significant enough concern.”
Taylor and CSIS director David Vigneault have both refuted this, and in any case, CSIS intelligence assessments are circulated widely through the federal intelligence establishment. That’s why CSIS produces intelligence assessments. Everybody in Official Ottawa knew. CSIS did not keep the report to itself.
Here’s that honest but too embarassing excuse available to Team Trudeau.
When the CSIS report went up the ladder in July 2021, Trudeau didn’t even have a national security adviser. The Privy Council post of National Security and Intelligence Adviser was vacant between June and November that year. And it was vacant right through the September 2021 federal election that Beijing’s agents were so busy trying to monkeywrench in the Liberals’ favor.
Vincent Rigby had quit in June. Acting national security adviser David Morrison didn’t come into the picture until November, and Rigby wasn’t permanently replaced until Taylor got the job in January, 2022.
That should at least tell you something about the Trudeau government’s unseriousness on these issues. Wesley Wark, the seasoned national-security boffin over at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, has a good run-down on all this here, which you should read once you’re done with this edition of the Real Story.
Having sources and backchannels helps. It comes with the job. But even when journalists listen very closely, it’s easy to miss the big things that are the hardest to hear above the noise of the “staccato signals of constant information” otherwise known as “the news.”
So that’s what I listen for. The Real Story lets me tell you what I hear. And that’s what this series will disclose. Liberals, Conservatives, New Democrats - nobody comes out of this unscathed.
'Persona non grata:' Canada expelling Chinese diplomat after threats to Conservative MP
The Liberal government moved Monday to expel Chinese diplomat Zhao Wei, who Canada's spy agency alleged was involved in a plot to intimidate Conservative MP Michael Chong and his relatives in Hong Kong.
Expelled
Halifax Tar
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'Persona non grata:' Canada expelling Chinese diplomat after threats to Conservative MP
The Liberal government moved Monday to expel Chinese diplomat Zhao Wei, who Canada's spy agency alleged was involved in a plot to intimidate Conservative MP Michael Chong and his relatives in Hong Kong.www.ctvnews.ca
Expelled
It's about damn time.
Well, it’s finally happened. JT bit the bullet and has expelled a Chinese diplomat. What kind of Chinese fireworks will we see as a result?
www.nationalnewswatch.com
‘Persona non grata’: Canada expelling Chinese diplomat after threats to Tory MP | National Newswatch
National Newswatch: Canada's most comprehensive site for political news and views. Make it a daily habit.
QV
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How are you this obtuse to this situation?
It is proof of failure... it is too little too late... it reeks of "oh shit they now know we knew a long time ago, better do something"...
Even the CBC comments section, which are not typically ugly towards the LPC, are recognizing the ineptness. Top comment on this article:
"At this point Canada is not only broken, but also compromised.
Thank you JT"
Top comment on this article:
"Trudeau vehemently denies any knowledge. I feel like we've heard this before. Several times."
Surely the Taiwanese aren't the only ones who knew this 7 years ago. How many people are there that could have sounded the alarm but didn't? Wow.
GK .Dundas
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Well , it's finally happened they've expelling a Chinese diplomat.I was wondering if you actually had to kill someone for that to happen.
The last diplomat we expelled was in 2018. Expelling diplomats is not a complicated process but it can be complex.
Beyond what most of us here likely understand.
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Why is this government always so slow to respond to things of which the solution is obvious to everyone else?
Don’t ask JT that question. Otherwise, he’ll then appoint a royal commission to look into why it’s taken so long. And then, years later, give you an inconclusive answer that cost millions of dollars to obtain.
RangerRay
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This is a government that doesn’t like to make quick decisions. Fighter jets, Huawei 5G, expelling “diplomats” conducting undiplomatic activities…these are just the ones off the top of my head where it took the government YEARS to make a decision that was more straightforward than your average tough government decision.
I swear to God this government cares more for how many palms their friends can grease than our national interests. That’s the only thing that explains this obsequiousness to Beijing.
I swear to God this government cares more for how many palms their friends can grease than our national interests. That’s the only thing that explains this obsequiousness to Beijing.
Jarnhamar
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On one hand you can say the Liberals are damned if they do damned if they don't. They expelled the diplomat and people still aren't happy.
On the other hand did they have much of a choice?
Trudeau and Mendicino say CSIS never shared the report.
Katie Tedford and CSIS say they did. There's a report supporting this too.
Mendicino then turns around and blames "bad actors" but doesn't name them.
If this happens a dozen more times I'm going to start thinking there's a pattern developing.
QV
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They are damned if they do it very late and damned if they don't. So they best get on with it and not expect a pat on the back for finally doing the right thing only after getting caught up. They should hang their heads in shame and resign already.
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