China Controls Canada's Elections And Operations
Chinese Consulate in TorontoAccording to the Global News report, the consulate directed the transfer of funds during the 2019 election. The report also said that a member in the consulate directed a staffer for unnamed federal election candidates to monitor and interfere with their engagement activities.
Information operation on WeChat targeting the 45th General Election
Backgrounder
Summary
The Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections (SITE) Task Force (TF) has detected an information operation targeting the 45th General Election by Chinese social media platform WeChat’s most popular news account Youli-Youmian (有理儿有面), an anonymous blog that does not disclose its provenance.1 Intelligence reporting links the Youli-Youmian account to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) Chinese Communist Party’s Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission (CPLAC).
The SITE TF assesses that this information operation was intended to influence Canadian-Chinese communities in Canada (i.e. speakers of a Chinese language, such as Mandarin, Cantonese, or Hakka) and looked to mould perceptions about the Prime Minister, Liberal Party of Canada (LPC) Leader and LPC candidate for Nepean, Mark Carney.
The Youli-Youmian account was also responsible for targeting members of Parliament Michael Chong (in June 2023) and Chrystia Freeland (in January 2025).
Content
The information operation targeting Mr. Carney is deliberately amplifying narratives in a coordinated and inauthentic way on WeChat, to Chinese audiences, including communities living in Canada. The SITE TF observed large spikes of what is believed to be coordinated inauthentic behaviour on March 10 and 25, 2025.
Specifically, various contrasting narratives were spread on WeChat about Mr. Carney – first amplifying the candidate's stance with the United States2, then targeting his experience and credentials.3
Tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs)
In February 2023, the China Digital Times reported that social media posts from the Youli-Youmian account are frequently assigned to employees at Chinese state-owned enterprises to amplify to wider audiences as part of their work duties.4 The SITE TF assesses that similar coordinated inauthentic activity was likely at play in the targeting of Mr. Carney on March 10 and 25.
The campaign received high levels of user engagement and views, with amplified articles about Mr. Carney receiving between 85,000 and 130,000 interactions, and an estimate of 1 to 3 million views. This level of engagement on WeChat is high when compared with popular state media outlets like the People’s Daily that average only 30,000 interactions per post.
The articles posted on the Youli-Youmian account on March 25 were amplified in a coordinated and inauthentic way by a group of 30 smaller WeChat accounts that boosted the discoverability of the posts. This amplification occurred over the course of four days, keeping narratives about Mr. Carney in algorithmic feeds, albeit at much lower engagement and views.
Background
WeChat developer Tencent reports that the platform has over 1.3 billion monthly active users but has not disclosed how many of those users live overseas.5 Marketing firms in Canada put the number of Canadian WeChat users at over 1 million.6 Despite this popularity, WeChat has remained not well understood by information integrity researchers. The PRC is likely aware of this oversight and may carry out these information operations on WeChat to avoid scrutiny.
Malign behaviour from the Youli-Youmian account was first identified by Rapid Response Mechanism Canada (RRM Canada) at Global Affairs Canada during federal by-elections taking place in June 2023.7 During that period, analysts noted that the popular WeChat account had targeted Mr. Michael Chong, CPC MP for the Wellington-Halton Hills riding at the time, with false narratives.
The Youli-Youmian entity was also responsible for targeting former LPC leadership candidate Chrystia Freeland in late January 2025.8
Implications
The SITE TF assesses that the objective of the information operation is to influence Chinese communities in Canada in the context of the 45th General Election. The information being spread is inauthentic and coordinated, with the goal to manipulate.
Endnotes
- “What are the most-read blogs on China’s WeChat?,” Ginger River Review, February 1, 2023.
- “The US encounters a ‘tough guy’ Prime Minister,” Youli-Youmian – FreeWeChat, March 10, 2025.
- “Canada’s road to a ‘seeking survival’ election,” Youli-Youmian – FreeWeChat, March 25.
- “Ministry of Truth – February 7 WeChat Moments Forwarding Task, China Digital Times, February 07, 2023.
- “WeChat revenue and usage statistics (2025),” Business of Apps, January 22, 2025.
- “Verdict: Harry Rosen builds its Chinese audience on WeChat,” Media in Canada, February 20, 2020.
- “WeChat account activity targeting Canadian parliamentarian suggests likely foreign state involvement,” Rapid Response Mechanism Canada – Global Affairs Canada, August 09, 2023.
- “Is Trump taking on an ally to get at China?,” Youli-Youmian – FreeWeChat, January 30, 2025.
Canada says WeChat news account pushing false narratives about Carney
OTTAWA, April 7 (Reuters) - Canada said on Monday the most popular news account on Chinese social media platform WeChat was pushing false narratives about Prime Minister Mark Carney in a bid to influence the Canadian election campaign."The information operation targeting Mr. Carney is deliberately amplifying narratives in a coordinated and inauthentic way on WeChat, to Chinese audiences, including communities living in Canada," the government's Privy Council Office said.In a statement, Ottawa said the account had targeted Carney's experience and credentials in a bid to manipulate Chinese voters. The effort would not affect the course of the April 28 election, it added.The messaging is being spread by the Youli-Youmian account, Canada said, citing intelligence reporting that linked the outlet to the Chinese Communist Party.A spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Ottawa said they were unaware of the information operation."It is simply absurd and unjustified to launch (a) groundless smear and attack against the Chinese government on the basis of individual remarks on a social media platform. China firmly opposes this and will never accept it," the spokesperson said in an email.
The spokesperson said China adheres to the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries, and has never interfered in Canadian internal affairs.U.S. tariffs against Canadian goods and the incumbent Liberal Party's selection of Carney to replace unpopular former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau have thrown open the race that was previously led by the Conservatives.According to the 2021 census, there were 1.7 million people of Chinese descent in Canada, or 4.7% of the population. The ethnic Chinese vote is important in parliamentary constituencies in big cities such as Vancouver and Toronto.Canada said last month China was likely to try to interfere in the vote. Beijing, which has poor relations with Ottawa, has denied previous allegations of meddling.The Youli-Youmian account had also engaged in "malign behavior" in June 2023 and January 2025, targeting senior Canadian politicians.Glavin: Evidence of China's interference has been lying in plain sight for years
The case of MP Michael Chong, whose family was targeted by Beijing, is just the latest in a long and sordid story of Chinese emissaries in Canada being allowed to get away with unlawful and outrageous conduct.
ByPublished May 03, 2023“The Chinese community here is frightened by the Chinese government, even though they are in Canada … A lot of Chinese organizations or social groups are very close to the consulate and to the embassy. Why is that? It’s not because they don’t understand the values, or they don’t trust or agree with the values. It’s just because they are so frightened. They know that the Chinese government is so brutal they could do anything.”
If you thought that those words appeared in some news story over the past few days, perhaps in an interview with a Canadian Security and Intelligence Service whistleblower speaking anonymously out of fear of prosecution under the Security of Information Act, you’d have guessed wrong.
Those words were spoken 17 years ago, quite publicly, in testimony before the Subcommittee on International Human Rights of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development. Sheng Xue, the vice-president of the Federation for a Democratic China, was trying to explain to Parliamentarians the vicious reach of Beijing’s strong-arm operations in Canada.
It’s all to the good that a CSIS whistleblower and the Globe and Mail were quickly vindicated this week when the prominent Conservative MP Michael Chong received official, in-person confirmation from CSIS head David Vigneault that the stories were true, that he and his family had been targeted by Beijing following his sponsorship of a February 2021 Commons motion to condemn Xi Jinping’s regime for engaging in genocide against the Muslim minorities of Xinjiang.
It’s also all to the good that the spotlight has been bright on the dirty work of Beijing’s agents of influence in efforts to monkey-wrench the outcome of the 2019 and 2021 federal elections to the advantage of Justin Trudeau’s Liberals, and that Canadian tempers have not been so easily soothed by former prime minister Jean Chrétien’s cavalier assessment: “Ten or 15 constituencies in Canada at most? I don’t think it’s a very big problem.”
It turns out that the unseemly intimacies with China’s Communist Party ruling class that Chrétien so assiduously cultivated both during and since his time as prime minister, which Justin Trudeau’s Liberals torqued into hyperdrive in 2015, are becoming a problem no longer so easily relegated to the back pages of Canada’s national newspapers.
Trudeau government in reactive mode only
There is still a strange Groundhog Day quality to the recent stories about the scandals related to Beijing’s success in capturing the affections, if not the outright allegiance, of so many personalities among Canada’s political and business elites.
Here’s a headline from this week: China views Canada as a ‘high priority’ for interference: CSIS report. That was on top of the Globe and Mail’s story about the leak of a top-secret report, titled People’s Republic of China Foreign Interference in Canada: a Critical National Security Threat. Among other things, the report noted that Beijing’s “diplomats” in Canada were going after a certain unnamed MP, who, sources told the Globe, was Michael Chong.
Here’s another headline, but it’s from three years ago: Why CSIS believes Canada is a ‘permissive target’ for China’s interference. Both stories make out the same case, more or less, but the 2020 headline was on a story about a public document released by the National Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliamentarians.
And yet here we are, and it’s not easy to show that the Trudeau government is taking what is a full-blown national-security crisis as anything more than yet another opportunity to dodge, weave, mislead, conceal and draw attention away from the paralyzing fear that has gripped tens of thousands of Canadians — Uyghurs, Hongkongers, Tiananmen refugees, diaspora democracy activists, Tibetans and so on — that Sheng Xue described to that House of Commons committee back in 2006.
To the extent that the Trudeau government is at least giving the impression of taking the crisis seriously, its actions have only been in response to widespread public revulsion, derision and outrage.
A foreign-agents registry?
Well, maybe, at some point, so long as it doesn’t upset certain “vulnerable communities,” which is an odd way to describe the Beijing-loyal landlord class in the Mandarin bloc that lords it over the Chinese diaspora in Canada and finds its most eager interlocutor in the notoriously Beijng-friendly Sen. Yuen Pau Woo.
And maybe there will be some sort of public inquiry in place of directly answering questions about what Trudeau knew about Beijing’s interference in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections, and when he knew it, and what, if anything, he did about it. But that will be determined by an “independent rapporteur” in the person of the old Trudeau family friend David Johnston.
It remains the height of bad manners to notice Johnston’s former role as a governing member of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, which has been directly implicated in a dirty-money influence operation Beijing was running in order to curry further favour with Justin Trudeau himself, as if such an effort was even necessary. And never mind Johnston’s own half-century of efforts to draw Canada ever closer into China’s orbit.
Back in 2017, 2019, and 2020, Amnesty International undertook extensive investigations in collaboration with Chinese-Canadian and other human rights organizations that set out in shocking detail the breadth and scope of Beijing’s bullying and intimidation operations in Canada. These reports were not leaked to the press. They were publicly disclosed, and widely noticed.
The case of Michael Chong, a trusted friend of human rights activists in the Chinese diaspora, is just the latest in a long and sordid story of Beijing’s emissaries in Canada being allowed to get away with unlawful and outrageous conduct. It’s that long story, and the federal government’s inaction, that has caused quite a few veteran officials in Canada’s intelligence agencies to lose their patience and go public, at the risk of their livelihoods.
Maybe a tipping point has been reached. But we have been here before, and the evidence has been in plain sight, on the record, without the need for whistleblowers.
And here we are, still.
Mary Ng has now been named as a Chinese asset, one of several Liberals part of China's influence on Canadian Elections and Operations
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