Trudeau said nothing, did nothing about MP's recruitment of Chinese students
Prime minister was made aware of Liberal nomination meeting incident by CSIS, foreign interference inquiry hears
Among this week’s many disturbing revelations about the Trudeau government’s official indifference to Beijing’s interference operations during the 2019 and 2021 federal elections, what might come as the biggest shock to most Canadians is just how easy it was for Chinese high school students to be bused in to vote for Beijing’s favoured candidate in a Liberal party nomination race in the Ontario riding of Don Valley North.
The candidate was Han Dong, whose last-minute admission to Justice Marie-Josée Hogue’s public inquiry into election interference — that he’d personally recruited the students — was a shocker, too. So was the Canadian Security Intelligence Service brief to the effect that the students appeared to have been coerced by a proxy of China’s Toronto consulate, and warned that they’d face reprisals if they refused to go along.
The Liberal party saw nothing amiss about foreign students showing up to vote en masse for Dong, who subsequently stepped away from the Liberal caucus to sit as an independent while a melodrama derived from leaked CSIS reports about his conduct sorted itself out. The party’s rules say that anyone over the age of 14 who is “ordinarily resident in Canada” can vote in party nominations and leadership races. CSIS also says the students not resident in the Don Valley riding were provided with falsified documents by the Chinese consulate.
But none of this will come as a surprise to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, because he’s known about all of this from the beginning. CSIS alerted him to the Don Valley North goings on four years ago. Trudeau said nothing about it, and he did nothing about it.
Early last year, after it was reported that CSIS had warned him about Dong’s compromised candidacy, Trudeau bristled. The Liberals were “extraordinarily happy and lucky” to have Dong as an MP, Trudeau said, and “unelected security officials” don’t decide who should or shouldn’t run for office.
Trudeau also attributed concerns about Dong’s nomination win to “anti-Asian racism,” as did David Johnston, the “special rapporteur” Trudeau appointed as part of his ultimately failed strategy to block the public inquiry, which has only now begun with Justice Hogue’s public hearings.
Johnston was privy to the same CSIS intelligence that was made public Tuesday, but in the report he filed recommending against a public inquiry, he alluded only to certain mere “irregularities” in Dong’s nomination win but was otherwise dismissive of concerns. “Reports of buses of people brought to nomination meetings may be a surprise to the less initiated,” Johnston wrote in his report, “but numerous people with campaign experience told us that there are ‘always buses,’ and wondered whether they get more attention when they contain racialized Canadians.”
Someone else who was wholly unsurprised by Tuesday’s revelations was Ronaldo Au-Yeung, co-author of an investigative report just published in the journal of the Canadian International Council, titled “Beyond general elections: How could foreign actors influence the prime ministership?”
As part of their investigation, Au-Yeung and co-author Alsu Tagirova managed to join the Conservative party, the Liberal party and the New Democrats, with randomly-chosen identities. Their report makes for chilling reading.
It’s not just that anyone can easily register with the Liberal party to vote in local nomination races. Pretty well anyone can vote to decide who the Liberal leader can be, and the leader of the party that wins a general election gets to be prime minister.
Au-Yeung, a Hongkonger and permanent resident of Canada, is a PhD student at the University of Notre Dame in Illinois and an adjunct lecturer in political science at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. Yeung specializes in international-relations theory, grand strategy and China.
As far as the Liberal party knows, however, Au-Yeung is the fictional British secret agent and Hollywood movie legend James Bond, a registered Liberal. With little more than a minute’s worth of keystrokes, Au-Yeung persuaded the Liberal party to accept James Bond’s registration with a fake address, a fake birthdate, and a fake telephone number.
Is it really possible that a Beijing-run operation could elect the leader of the Liberal party? Yes, Au-Yeung told me. That would be the worst-case scenario. Is it actually possible that a massive monkey-wrenching operation of that kind explains Justin Trudeau’s own election as Liberal leader in 2013, when he took 81,389 votes against the 12,148 ballots picked up by his nearest runoff-vote contender, Joyce Murray?
It’s unlikely, but Au-Yeung says it’s impossible to know.
The new rules in place during the Liberals’ 2013 leadership contest brought in 300,000 new registrants in a process that aimed to do away with the notion of party “membership” altogether. Members became “supporters,” and the overwhelming majority of the party’s rank-and-file going into the 2015 election were Trudeau recruits.
“It would be very hard to tell anything about who exactly Trudeau recruited back then,” Au-Yeung said. In any case, the party that came to power in 2015 was no longer the party of Paul Martin, Jean Chrétien, John Turner, Pierre Trudeau and Lester Pearson. It was the Justin Trudeau party, and its emergence coincided with a massive push by Beijing’s United Front Work Department, and its Office of Overseas Chinese Affairs, to influence, intimidate and manipulate political parties and democratic processes in liberal democracies.
Canada was a prime target owing to this country’s natural resource wealth and Canada’s access to American consumer markets, and the Trudeau government distinguished itself in the G7 by its enthusiastic welcome of Beijing’s advances and inducements.
The Liberal party distinguished itself by recovering its 2015 campaign expenses by having Trudeau star in “cash for access” fundraisers with Chinese multimillionaires. Trudeau’s own riding association in Papineau brought in $63,000 from Metro Vancouver’s ethnic Chinese Liberal supporters over the space of two days in the summer of 2016, and among the donors were several with intimate connections to China’s Vancouver consulate. The infusion of cash ended up amounting to roughly $244,000.
Au-Yeung says it’s “wishful thinking” and “delusional” to imagine there will be no adverse effects from looking the other way as hostile, anti-democratic foreign powers exert influences in democratic processes and institutions. But the accelerated entrenchment of a new Mandarin-speaking constituency within Trudeau’s Liberal party has made it exceedingly difficult to determine where foreign interference ends and where “ethnic bloc” political activism begins.
This is just one of the thorny questions the Hogue inquiry will have to grapple with.
There are any number of ways to prevent political parties from becoming captive to legions of fake members or “supporters,” and to block foreign students or other foreign-national temporary residents from registering en masse, as in the Han Dong scenario, Au-Yeung says.
Restricting party votes to permanent residents and citizens, as the Conservative party does, would help. Requiring proof of identity and residence isn’t that hard — banks do it all the time. But there’s got to be a will to do it, and in the case of the Trudeau Liberals, there’s little indication that they would want things any other way.
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