Weekend Special: Who to trust?
Concluding the effort that began May 8 with
Real Story Series: Diplomat, Socialite, Spy, we left off yesterday with the horrible fate that befell the Federation for a Democratic China and its vice-president, Sheng Xue, whose warnings to the House of Commons about Beijing’s influence operations in Canada,
17 years ago, were ignored.
I highlighted Sheng’s November 21, 2006 testimony to a House of Commons committee in my May 3 column in the National Post and the Ottawa Citizen,
Have we finally reached a tipping point in Chinese interference?, after which I took a brief break from newspapering that ended this past week with
David Johnston escapes inquiry into his own China dealings.
In sum, the mayhem that engulfed Sheng and her federation was what Nicholas Bequelin, Amnesty International’s regional director for East Asia, called “a textbook destabilization of the exile movement.”
This edition of The Real Story is going to be quite link-rich. Best to just read through and come back to the links if you want, when you’re done. A word of caution: I can talk trash about the Ottawa press gallery as well as anyone, and much of the criticism (especially when aimed at the bosses at the CBC) is richly deserved, but sweeping denunciations are wholly unfair.
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There’s war, and there’s war, and then there’s war. Xi Jinping isn’t relying only on the military in his plans to subvert and conquer the world’s liberal democracies.
So keep that in mind, and do remember as well the caution I left off with in yesterday’s newsletter, perhaps especially when I get into the business about the Conservative Party: If you’re susceptible to paranoia, try harder to fight it. Don’t succumb. If you can’t fight it, you’ll probably want to steer clear of what’s coming down the pike here.
First, some serendipitous “breaking” developments:
Merci, Jean-Francois Cloutier
I’m as amused as anyone that I’ve been pretty much alone in the Anglo news media in noticing that the Impeccably Credentialed Laurentian Gentleman David Johnston’s “ski buddy” conflicts of interest vis-a-vis the Trudeau family are small spuds compared to his lifetime of kowtowing to and collaborating with Beijing’s state-capitalist establishment in Canada.
Odd that Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives, too, have chosen not to notice. So I’m pleased to see that Johnston’s troubling China ties have attracted the attention of award-winning journalist Jean-Francois Cloutier and the Journal de Montreal’s Investigation Bureau, in
two full pagesof this weekend’s newspaper.
The Journal de Montreal spread highlights eight apprehensions of bias in Johnston’s appointment as Prime Minister Trudeau’s “special independent rapporteur” in the matter of the Trudeau government’s handling of Beijing’s election interference operations in 2019 and 2021.
Of the eight instances of conflict cited by the Journal team, seven directly relate to the Beijing-infuence angles that compromise Johnston (all of which I’ve covered either in my columns or in this newsletter; thanks for that credit, Journal crew!). It’s only the last one, headlined
Trudeau Family Friend, that gets into the “ski buddy” stuff.
If any of my subscribers are tempted to bang on about the “MSM” right now, I get it, but save it. I’m still “MSM,” and the news media’s overall incapacitation in Canada is the main reason I launched this newsletter in the first place. While I’ve been suitably harsh -on the bosses at the CBC, for instance - let’s keep things in perspective, shall we?
As for my own “scoops” about David Johnston, it’s just that I have a bit of an unfair advantage. I’ve had my eye on him for years. Here’s me six years ago, in Macleans:
Ottawa's despicable display in China.
It would be hard to imagine a more obscene display of Canada’s slavish relationship with China’s depraved Communist Party regime: The very moment imprisoned democracy activist and Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo died under heavy guard on a hospital bed in the northeast city of Shenyang on Thursday, a beaming Governor General David Johnston was posing for photographs at the opulent Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing, shaking hands with Chinese tyrant Xi Jinping, Liu’s jailer and tormentor.
It was all so very chummy.
Oh look. Apparently Beijing isn’t fond of Erin O’Toole.
Here’s Bob Fife and Steven Chase, first again with the news, if we can even call this “news” anymore:
Former Conservative leader informed he is being targeted by Chinese government. No kidding? What’s really newsworthy about this is that O’Toole is being told
only now that Beijing put a target on his back while he was Conservative leader, and it’s still there.
A source close to Mr. O’Toole said the Conservative MP was briefed Friday by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and he is still considering how best to reveal details to the public in a manner that balances Canadians’ right to know with national-security concerns about classified information.
Again, this will not surprise this newsletter’s subscribers, who have been privy to some key “details” about the targeting of O’Toole, about which there will be more today. It’s pretty much the main attraction in today’s newsletter, which I’ve been holding onto and I’ve been hinting at for days, and now it’s here.
Here’s another amusing confluence. Yesterday I posted a link to Friday’s newsletter on Twitter, thus:
It's worse than you think. More tomorrow. Here’s a dispatch a few hours later from the Globe’s Nathan Vanderklippe:
Stephen Harper thinks foreign interference is ‘far worse than we think’. It is not altogether routine for me to agree with the former prime minister on many things, so I just point this out, for levity.
Anyway, as promised: What’s the deal with that English-language magazine that the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service says has been paid to run pro-Beijing propaganda? What’s the story behind that dubious “China expert” who keeps showing up in the press? And what’s the story behind a former registered China lobbyist who has somehow ended up on the Conservative Party’s governing council?
Better sit back for this one.
Most of this series has been available to free subscribers, with the darker stuff available to my paying subscribers. We’re going dark now.
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The Skeezy, The Scoundrels and the Royally Screwed
The Canadian Security and Intelligence report the Globe and Mail’s indefatigable Steve Chase and Bob Fife relied on to blow open the story about Ministry of State Security agent and social butterfly
Wei Zhao’s involvement in the plot to “make an example” of the Conservatives’ Mike Chong was titled
People’s Republic of China Foreign Interference in Canada: a Critical National Security Threat.
A key focus of the report concerned Chinese influence operations aimed at destabilization of the Conservative Party, which I got into in a column here:
China's main goal? Ensuring Canada's Conservatives would loseand elaborated upon for Real Story subscribers, with some pretty disturbing backstory, here:
Beijing’s Best Canadian Friends, Part Etcetera.
Conservatives who are enjoying a well-deserved surfeit of schadenfreude at the Liberals’ expense these days should keep these things in mind, and should recall this Weekend Special on the lucrative contractual acquisitions
Jean Charest didn’t come clean about when he wanted to be Conservative Party boss:
The Comprador in the Conservative leadership race keeps digging. Here's the bedrock Jean Charest is about to hit.
Conservatives would also do well to reflect on their good fortune in the ill luck that befell Charest’s fellow leadership candidate
Patrick Brown, the preferred candidate of the pro-Beijing astroturf Chinese Canadian Conservative Association. The CCCA desperately wanted Erin O’Toole gone owing to his principled stand on Beijing’s long reach into Canadian political life, and
they wanted Brown to replace him owing to Brown’s skeezy standpoints on such matters as the Conservatives’ own proposed Foreign Influence Registry.
To be perfectly honest, I still can’t tell whether Pierre Poilievre’s party will be welcoming to Conservatives disposed to the worldview of O’Toole and Michael Chong, or Conservatives more inclined to tolerate the unsavory dispositions of the Charest-Brown variety.
Anyway, in the Fife-Chase account of the contents of that CSIS report that made reference to certain unnamed Conservative MPs (one of whom turned out to be Chong) there was reference to a certain small English-language magazine that (how to put this?) perhaps isn’t always quite as up-front as you’d expect it to be.
Ottawa Life
Far be it from me to suggest that
Dan Donovan’s Ottawa Life magazine is the media operation the CSIS report refers to, and to be honest it could have been one of a handful of “magazines” I could think of. But let’s be honest here. Some “journalists” are happy to carry Beijing’s water for free. By extraordinary coincidence,
our friends over at Blacklocks Reporter had an amusing little piece this past week about Ottawa Life, the very magazine I was referring to when this series began.
“No, this was not a paid ad,” Donovan told Blacklocks, in reference to a puff piece that appeared in the magazine written by none other than Chinese ambassador Cong Peiwu. “Like most magazine publications, if we are approached to publish an op-ed we make a determination and then decide to run it or not.”
Okay, but Ottawa Life is not like most magazines, even though it fits the profile of those ubiquitous urban lifestyle mags that clutter the media landscape (some of which aren’t that bad, to be honest, so sorry about that). Styling itself as “savvy, smart and stylish” and “the intelligent, illustrious and iconic voice of Canada's most beautiful and influential city,” Donovan’s Ottawa Life has published so many sweet essays by Chinese ambassadors over the years I lost count trying to add them up.
Here’s
Donovan meeting with Congwhen the new ambassador took up his posting during Beijing’s imprisonment of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor. Cong “greets me with a warm smile and a firm handshake,” Donovan is happy to report. “He is dressed in a sharp looking business suit and tie. . . He is friendly with a pleasant demeanor, courteous to a fault, and enthusiastic about being back in Canada.”
Lovely.
Here’s Dan Donovan being angry with Canadian journalists and academics who prefer not to slobber on Cong’s slippers:
Canada’s approach to China is based on misguided superiority complex and bad reporting. You think this month’s Real Story series is a tad long? Ottawa Life has been running a formal series of encomia to Beijing’s benefit, titled China Explained, that
stretches all the way back to 2013.
When you get through this newsletter one of the links you might want to click is this
New York Times investigation of Beijing’s elaborate social-media propaganda network. Among the “influencers” profiled by the Times is the insipid
Cyrus Janssen, whose routine complaint is that “Western media is always attacking China.”
In Ottawa Life magazine,
Janssen shows up only as as “one of North America’s leading experts on China and Chinese marketing.” I bet he is.
How to get your name in media rolodexes as a China expert.
Straight away I should declare what you might call an apprehension of my own bias. The main “expert” in what follows has called me “a retard.”
This all started five years ago, when I suggested to my bosses at the Ottawa Citizen and the National Post that maybe we should be careful about who we were allowing to appear in the opinion pages as independent “experts” on Canada-China relations. At the very least, these “experts” should be obliged to disclose their interests, like, say, that they are in fact lobbyists working on public-relations contracts with the Toronto consulate of the People’s Republic of China.
This set off quite a stir and ended up the subject of
a months-long investigation undertaken by Ian Young at the South China Morning Post, who has recently decamped to the Canadian Press bureau in Vancouver. Although barely noticed in Canada at the time (as was usually the case with Young’s scoops about China-related scandals in this country), Young’s investigation revealed an operation that “blurred the lines” between lobbying, journalism and activism.
The registered lobbying firm in question is
Solstice Public Affairs (this gets around to the Conservative Party; be patient), whose principals “have attacked critics [i.e. I’m a ‘retard’] and propelled viewpoints that often hew to Beijing’s talking points and interests on a range of subjects.”
In the middle of all this is something called the Canadian Chinese Political Affairs Committee and its co-founder, a certain
Karen Woods, whose engagement with Solstice, which had secured a weird and unheard-of type of contract with the Toronto’s Chinese consulate, initially piqued my curiosity.
The strange Consulate-Solstice-CCPAC triangle with Woods in the middle of it all was also noticed by Kevin Carrico, senior research fellow in Chinese studies at Monash University.
Especially after the December, 2018 detention of Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou and Beijing’s capricious abduction of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, Woods started showing up on CBC chat shows and in places like the Toronto Star with opinions “that essentially recycle PRC government talking points,” Carrico said, and Woods “presents them as having been published by just an interested citizen.”
I pointed this out first to my long-suffering and extraordinarily patient editor Christina Spencer at the Ottawa Citizen, and also to Kevin Libin at the National Post. Also, a Solstice principal had written a very odd opinion piece in the Citizen that had caused my bullsh*t detector to start clanging (yes, this brings us to the Conservative Party angle, which I’m coming to).
Around that time a friend at the Toronto Star who knows a thing or two about these things called me to say he was furious about a piece that had shown up in his own newspaper’s opinion pages.
It was published just after the Meng’s detention. Headlined
Huawei Crisis has Chinese-Canadians Worried, the op-ed was shameless: “Many from the Chinese business community who donate to the Liberal party feel their interests are betrayed by Justin Trudeau. They feel Trudeau has been blindsided by Trump and merely acted as his lickspittle.”
The author of the piece was identified this way: "Karen Woods is the co-founder of the Canadian Chinese Political Affairs Committee (CCPAC) and a “senior associate” at the firm Solstice Public Affairs. The editors were clearly unaware that Solstice had been hired by China's Toronto consulate "to arrange meetings with MPs and Senators in order to “promote various economic and cultural relations” between the two countries.
My Toronto Star friend managed to convince the editors to amend Woods’ identity at the bottom of the piece to mention her unmentioned association with the Solstice consulate contract: “This article was updated from a previous version to make clear that Solstice Public Affairs was recently hired by the Chinese Consulate-General in Toronto.”
Some time later Woods showed up as the co-author of a piece in the National Post styled as an open letter from the CCPAC to “Uncle Xi” Jinping. Editor Kevin Libin took pains to ensure that Woods was at least properly identified, although there was something less than forthrightness in her account of herself, as Young makes plain in his SCMP investigation.
Woods told Libin that she’d never worked on the Toronto consulate lobbying contract. But her boss at Solstice, longtime Liberal Party functionary (!)
Craig Brockwell, said that yes, Woods did public-relations work for the Chinese consulate, except on provincial rather than federal matters. Woods definitely saw the op-ed placement as a win. On Twitter, Woods had this to say about me the day the piece appeared in the Post: “What better way to get back at him than by publishing in his paper?”
To the consternation of Canada’s persecuted Chinese diaspora activists, Woods is still being treated like some sort of expert. Whatever her game is, she’s no expert in anything except her self-described skills as a “social media influencer.”
Now, as I’ve mentioned, the crew of Canadian journalists working on the China file was until quite recently a very, very small town. Quite a few journalists who have never been on the beat in any way and have no friends or contacts in the Chinese diaspora are trying to figure out what the hell is going on. And some journalists are failing at that effort because they’re not even trying.
You can decide where to place Stephen Maher in all this. I won’t disparage him. He’s new to the parish, after a manner of speaking.
Real Story subscribers may recall my account of the debacle at Maclean’s magazine, where until a bit better than a year ago I was a contributing editor. After the new owners turned the venerable title in a kind of Celebrity Cooking affair, or a slightly more upscale version of Ottawa Life, I found myself among the defenestrated along with Macleans editor-in-chief Alison Uncles, star columnist Paul Wells, staff writers Jason Markusoff & Marie-Danielle Smith, brainiac Philippe J. Fournier, deputy editor Colin Campbell, national editor Charlie Gillis, Ottawa bureau chief Shannon Proudfoot and the great John Geddes.
Anyway, Stephen Maher appears to have been kept on in some capacity, although apparently he now covers China-related subjects for Walrus magazine, which published
this not-especially-insightful piece on Chinese election interference, which was re-published by the Centre for International Governance Innovation
here, which cites and quotes the expert. . . wait for it. . . Karen Woods.
Far be it from me to suggest Woods is involved in one of Beijing’s destabilization operations, of the type we’ve seen in the Sheng Xue case. These things are sometimes a devil to unravel.
I’m just saying.
How the Conservative Party figures into all this
The op-ed in the Ottawa Citizen that had already set my alarms off before Karen Woods’ undisclosed bona fides first came to my attention was a strikingly peculiar piece headlined
Disproportionate funding goes to media outlet linked to Falun Gong.
It was essentially a data-heavy complaint that Tang Dynasty TV (NTDTV), which was founded by members of Falun Gong - a brutally-persecuted religious sect in China - was getting a disproportionate ethnic-media piece of the money pie carved up by the Canadian Media Fund. Which is perfectly understandable, really, given that most of Canada’s Chinese-language media was taken over by Beijing-aligned money years before. Taxpayers should pay for that?
The piece was written by a certain
Stewart Kiff, identified as a former reporter with “more than 25 years’ experience in public affairs” who also happened to be president of something called Solstice Public Affairs. Craig Brockwell, the point man on the Solstice contract with China’s Toronto consulate, told the South China Morning Post that Kiff’s Ottawa Citizen op-ed was not in service of the consulate, but was rather an exercise in “client development” that pre-dated the contract by a few months.
Seems it was succcessful exercise, too.
Subscribers may recall from back in March a Real Story deep dive into the destabilization operation the Beijing-aligned Mandarin bloc was running on the Conservative Party and the target Beijing put on Erin O’Toole’s back, in
Beijing’s Best Canadian Friends, Part Etcetera, under the sub-heading
Why was Beijing so desperate and determined to see the Conservatives lose? The column version was this one:
Beijing simply could not abide Erin O'Toole's tough-on-China policies.
Globe and Mail readers will recall
this blockbuster, a couple of months later, in which Fife and Chase report:
In late 2020, CSIS said China’s diplomats in Canada attempted to build inroads with members of the Conservative Party, “likely in an effort to engage with and steer away individuals from what the mission perceives to be anti-PRC portions of the Conservative Party’s platform.
From the Real Story’s
Beijing’s Best Canadian Friends edition you may remember
Bert Chen, the Conservative Party National Council coup plotter who was turfed for getting up that petition calling for O’Toole’s ouster in the days following the 2021 election.
The guy whose CV was missing the bit about his stint with the firm Golden Gate Lawyers in Beijing on behalf of the Chinese National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) in its $15.1 billion takeover of the Calgary oil and gas company Nexen Inc.
The guy who told me the Conservative Party should shut its cakehole about China, and also went out of his way to tell me - before Beijing’s target on Michael Chong’s back was front-page news - that Michael Chong’s problems shouldn’t be the Conservative Party’s problems.
Well, Bert Chen had to be replaced by somebody, right?
And Bert Chen has been replaced by. . . Stewart Kiff, of Solstice Public Affairs.
“Kiff was mysteriously acclaimed as the only replacement candidate from Ontario,” say some disaffected Conservatives, “thereby earning a seat on the Party’s most powerful board, despite having been democratically rejected just 11 months earlier by grassroots card-carrying Party members.”
Those disaffected Conservatives are not happy with this, and they’re now out and about with it,
here.
I wouldn’t refer to Stewart Kiff as the party’s “unelected Manchurian candidate.”
Maybe not a scoundrel, exactly, pretty skeezy though, and it all makes you wonder whether a Poilievre government would be more to the tastes of Jean Charest and Patrick Brown Conservatives, as opposed to Michael Chong and Erin O’Toole Conservatives.
Onward.
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