Massive infiltration of CCP influence in Canadian politics found in Canada's smallest province PEI.

Massive infiltration of CCP influence in Canadian politics found in Canada's smallest province  PEI.

The CCP’s hybrid warfare is already here: Dean Baxendale and Garry Clement in National Newswatch

Oct 10 2025

What Canada has reaped from this misguided engagement is a fragmented reality of elite capture, compromised provincial economies, and strategic sectors vulnerable to coercion.

By Dean Baxendale and Garry Clement, September 30, 2025

For four decades, successive Canadian governments, both provincial and federal, have engaged with the People’s Republic of China under the illusion that mutual trade and diplomacy would foster stability and peace, all while drawing China into the liberal democratic order. For Canada, this engagement was also driven by a desire to benefit from China’s cheap labour, lax environmental standards, and generous subsidies, delivering an influx of low-cost consumer goods to Canadian households.

Beijing sold us the dream of access to its burgeoning middle class, a fantasy we financed through the offshoring of our own manufacturing base. The result was a hollowing out of Ontario and Quebec’s industrial sectors. And when the COVID-19 crisis originating from a P4 bio-laboratory in Wuhan swept across the globe, we were starkly reminded of our dangerous overreliance on a fragile and unbalanced global supply chain.

What Canada has reaped from this misguided engagement is a fragmented reality of elite capture, compromised provincial economies, and strategic sectors vulnerable to coercion by a regime that disregards every international norm, from human rights to environmental protections, from state-backed subsidies to forced labour in Xinjiang. We see the consequences in our agriculture, energy, and tech sectors, which are now entangled with a regime that plays by no rules but its own. This is not globalization, its entrapment, and provinces like Saskatchewan and PEI are now facing the fallout.

In our book, Canada Under Siege, we outline evidence that Prince Edward Island has become a forward operating base for Chinese Communist Party (CCP) hybrid warfare, an unsettling but entirely avoidable consequence of our provincial and national naiveté.

But PEI is not alone.

Across Canada, particularly in resource-rich provinces like Saskatchewan, the CCP has exploited Canadian openness, leveraging Belt and Road-aligned business interests, clandestine influence operations, and strategic agricultural dependencies. When Canada supported the arrest of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou in 2018, Beijing retaliated not only with hostage diplomacy, but with targeted canola tariffs, crippling Saskatchewan’s billion-dollar agricultural exports overnight. As that crisis ebbed another arose when Canada increased EV tariffs to 100%, in concert with the US administration’s demand, the PRC retaliated again against Canadian canola products with a 75% tariff on canola and its bi products once again crippling Canadian farmers.

This is not diplomacy. This is hybrid warfare, and it is now finally cutting both ways.

Elite Capture in the Heartland

In the early 2000s, China courted provincial governments and elite business circles under the guise of benign investment. Their offers, often fronted by opaque state-owned enterprises, were sweetened with promises of trade deals, infrastructure investment, and cultural exchanges. But as we’ve now learned through financial tracing and interviews, these arrangements were often anchored in political leverage and intelligence operations.

From Vancouver real estate (Vancouver Model) to Charlottetown monasteries, the same CCP playbook is used: co-opt local influencers, embed economic dependency, and create legal ambiguity so deep that accountability becomes impossible.

Even the canola crisis of 2019 wasn’t merely a trade dispute. It was a demonstration. A warning shot that China can, and will, use Canada’s provinces as leverage points to achieve federal policy concessions.

The Environmental Irony

We must also confront the hypocrisy: while China undercuts global markets with slave labour, carbon-intensive production, and disregard for environmental norms, it simultaneously uses Canada’s commitment to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) standards as a tool to weaken our competitive edge.

China’s dominance in critical minerals, solar panel manufacturing, and pharmaceuticals is built not on innovation, but exploitation—of people, laws, and the environment. And yet, Canadian policymakers too often remain silent or complicit.

PEI: The Lobster in the Trap

Prince Edward Island’s recent entanglement with Bliss and Wisdom, a religious group with well-documented links to China’s United Front Work Department, exemplifies this threat. Through intricate land deals, spiritual authority, and cross-border cash flows, the group amassed enormous real estate holdings, linked not to religion but to international business activities allegedly well beyond what’s legally allowed.  Meanwhile the group pays no taxes due to their generous religious status.

This is not religious freedom. This is foreign interference masquerading as faith.

In February of this year under public pressure, the Minister of Land, Steve Myers called for an investigation into the purchase of lands by the group. This will be handled by IRAC, The Islands Regulatory and Appeals Commission which is a great first step, but as former Solicitor General and PEI Liberal MP Wayne Easter has stated, “it is time for a public inquiry.”  Time for a National Counter-Strategy.

We are not powerless. But our response must be as sophisticated as the threat.

1. Mandate a National Security Review of all foreign-influenced land and infrastructure holdings in Canada—especially in provinces targeted by economic coercion.
2. Implement Transparency Laws to identify beneficial ownership of companies and organizations with ties to foreign states. Bill C70 was passed over a year ago and we still wait for the appointment of a commissioner. This delay has demonstrated the government’s lack of seriousness on combatting foreign interference in Canada.
3. Create a Federal-Provincial Security Task Force to ensure coordinated action against hybrid threats—bridging CSIS, RCMP, and provincial law enforcement.
4. Enforce Reciprocity in Trade and Investment—we must no longer allow foreign entities to buy land, critical assets, or media platforms in Canada without equivalent access in their home jurisdictions.
5. Civic Education and Media Literacy—our public must understand how influence operations work, and how easily democracy can be eroded under the guise of pluralism.

A Moment of Reckoning

This isn’t just about PEI or Canola from Saskatchewan. It’s about the sovereignty of Canada.

We have tolerated, even welcomed, the slow encroachment of authoritarian influence into our most cherished institutions, our schools, our farmland, our churches. We’ve done so in the name of trade, tolerance, and globalization. The Trojan Dragon isn’t at the gates. It’s already within.

We cannot afford another decade of willful blindness or reactive politics. The CCP has turned our own systems—laws, trade frameworks, and open civil society, into tools of manipulation. Whether it’s foreign-influenced monasteries in PEI or retaliatory tariffs on Saskatchewan’s canola, the evidence is overwhelming: Canada is already on the battlefield of hybrid warfare. What we now require is not just vigilance, but resolve, a whole-of-nation strategy that treats foreign interference not as a foreign issue, but as the defining domestic threat of our time. National security begins in the provinces with a robust national legal and policy framework in support of our mutual interests.

From Sidewinder to P.E.I.: Are Canada’s Political Elites Benefiting from Beijing’s Real Estate Reach?

Garry Clement: Politicians even appeared to benefit from the relationships cultivated with Chinese officials and members of Bliss and Wisdom

 Garry Clement analyzes a deeply reported investigation into the land acquisitions and foreign affiliations of the Bliss and Wisdom Buddhist group in Prince Edward… 

How Justin Trudeau [AND HIS] government was compromised by the CCP

Justin Trudeau’s government has been compromised by the Chinese Communist Party and Canada’s democracy is in jeopardy. This is a startling claim, all the more so for the fact that Canadian intelligence officials are the ones making it. 

Over the past month, a series of leaks from within CSIS, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, has stirred up an astonishing storm. In November, it was leaked that a clandestine CCP network had funded and infiltrated the campaigns of 11 candidates in 2019’s federal election. 

The story may roll on and faulty intelligence may be mixed up in it, but public trust has already been battered

Trudeau reacted to November’s leak by having his staff tell the press that he had confronted Xi Jinping about the claims at a meeting during the G20 conference in Bali. Extraordinary footage then emerged of Xi accosting Trudeau about the leaks before walking off muttering that the Prime Minister was ‘very naïve’.   

Details of the interference were then murky, but further leaks early last month claimed that the Trudeau was in fact briefed about the CCP network – which allegedly involved more than a dozen aides, a standing provincial politician, unelected officials and donors – before the 2019 election and not just after. Intel suggested that large sums changed hands, election law was breached (though there is no police investigation), and Trudeau’s Liberal party were the beneficiaries. 

More CSIS leaks followed through the middle of February. There was CCP interference in 2021’s election, it was claimed, aimed at achieving a Liberal minority government, which was indeed the outcome. Efforts to influence results at a local level included coercing Chinese international students into campaigning in seats with large Chinese-Canadian populations. A surveilled conversation with a Chinese consulate official was quoted directly in documents shown to the Canadian press: ‘The Liberal Party of Canada is becoming the only party that the PRC [People’s Republic of China] can support.’  

Michael Chan, a Liberal kingmaker and fundraising coordinator, was named as a long-running CSIS target. Chan was already known for his public remarks condemning democracy protests in Hong Kong and for his close links to Chinese diplomats. Spooks told the press they had a dossier on Chan and that he had been meeting with suspected Chinese intelligence agents. Chan stated that CSIS had never tried to interview him, but had ‘conducted intimidating interviews’ with his associates. He accused CSIS of ‘systemic racism’ and of fostering ‘division, hate, and the destabilization of a peaceful, harmonious, vibrantly diverse society’.  

Trudeau stood by his decision to keep it all secret. ‘It’s certainly a sign,’ he announced, ‘that security within CSIS needs to be reviewed. And I’m expecting CSIS to take the issue very seriously.’  

The CSIS leakers, citing ‘surveillance and wiretap evidence’, struck back by naming a serving Liberal MP whom they claimed was a knowing beneficiary of covert CCP interference. This was Han Dong MP, first elected in 2019 and then re-elected in 2021. Michael Chan, it was alleged, had deposed another candidate, also Chinese Canadian, to secure Dong’s nomination. The two supposedly knew what they were doing but top Liberals allowed Dong to stand in spite of CSIS warnings (both Dong and Chan strongly deny they had any role in CCP interference).