Conservatives have softened China stance since riding losses in 2021 election, critics say
Pierre Poilievre has stressed that Conservatives are friends of the Chinese people and share values like hard work, family and tradition
Author of the article:Tom Blackwell
Published Mar 27, 2023 • Last updated 11 hours ago • 7 minute read
Pierre Poilievre participates in the Chinatown Spring Festival Parade, amid Lunar New Year celebrations, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, January 22, 2023. REUTERS/Jennifer Gauthier
Pierre Poilievre’s venture into the Greater Toronto Area’s Chinese community in January was in some ways a standard bit of politicking.
He broke bread with community leaders, answered questions from Chinese-language news media and even said a few words in Chinese, an unremarkable outreach to an important block of ethnic voters.
More notable were some of the others at the meetings.
One of the organizers and the man who introduced Poilievre was Joe Li, a regional councillor who harshly criticized the tough China policies proposed in the Conservatives’ 2021 election platform, suggesting Canada should not publicly confront Beijing on human rights.
Sitting next to the party leader at a luncheon was Simon Zhong, a figure who has long been aligned with the Chinese government, once sitting on a Communist Party advisory body.
The events added to concern by some Beijing critics that the Conservatives have softened their stance on the issue since the last election, when at least three Tory MPs lost ridings with large Chinese-Canadian populations amid complaints – and a misinformation campaign – about that hawkish China platform.
More recently, former Conservative candidate Mark Johnson emailed party members to say he felt the talk of Chinese election interference was overblown and dangerous. Johnson said he lost Toronto’s Scarborough-Agincourt riding “fair and square” in 2021 in a heavily ethnic-Chinese riding.
“There’s an appreciation in the party that we need to repair the relationship with Chinese Canadians,” he said in an interview. “I think a lot of people understand that the party antagonized and drove away Chinese-Canadian voters.”
“My campaign manager and I knew right at the beginning of the campaign .. that the Conservative Party had become unpopular in the Chinese community.”
RECOMMENDED FROM EDITORIAL
Former MP Alice Wong, seen here at her Richmond Centre campaign headquarters in 2019, is one of the Conservative candidates who experienced an unusual drop in votes in the 2021 election.
Conservatives had sudden, unusual drop in votes in ridings of concern for Chinese interference: data
One of China’s goals in Canada is to mould a more positive image of China — and neutralize Beijing’s enemies, analysts say.
China’s end game: What Beijing hopes to gain by meddling in Canadian politics
Michel Juneau-Katsuya, former head of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service’s Asia-Pacific desk, said recent Conservative attacks on the Liberal government over its response to alleged election interference by China are justified, but seem more about politics than addressing national security.
Overall, he believes the Tories’ stance has indeed moderated.
“You know what that means?” asked Juneau-Katsuya. “It means the Chinese have successfully scared and bullied the Conservatives.”
Poilievre’s office, however, says the party has not changed its positions since the last election – and that the leader’s appearance at the January events had nothing to do with Li or Zhong. (Li says the leader’s team reached out to him about helping organize the gatherings.)
“The Leader attends dozens of events every month, many of which are organized and hosted by a variety of community groups, meeting with thousands of Canadians all across the country,” said spokesman Sebastian Skamski. “Conservatives have long been advocates for those communities that have suffered under the oppression of the communist regime in Beijing. We are proud of that record and will continue to champion it.”
Meanwhile, one staunch critic of China’s interference in Canada said the Conservative leader seems to be taking a smart approach to the issue.
But the discussion of the party’s China posture is a reminder that it is not just the Liberals who have a history – for better or worse – of sometimes embracing the regime and overlooking its transgressions.
Stephen Harper’s Conservative government came to power in 2006 pledging to take Beijing to task for its human-rights abuses, only to eventually be criticized for looking the other way as it pursued more trade. Zhong and Toronto businessman Wei Chengyi, another staunch ally of Beijing, accompanied Harper on a 2014 trip to China. And former Harper ministers like John Baird have argued since for closer relations with Beijing. Stockwell Day even tweeted warmly about a meeting he had with Huawei’s founder shortly after China detained two Canadians in apparent retaliation for the arrest in Vancouver of the CEO’s daughter. A one-time Harper aide is Huawei’s Canadian spokesman.
But under Leader Erin O’Toole, the party made challenging Beijing a central part of its platform.
The 2021 election manifesto stated that Tories have no quarrel with the people of China, calling the country an ancient civilization that has contributed greatly to humanity, and saying the party stands by Chinese-Canadians who are “enduring an appalling rise in anti-Asian hate and discrimination.”
But it went on to call the Chinese regime itself a “clear and rising threat.” In response, it proposed a raft of policies, from decoupling China-based supply chains to discouraging universities from partnering with Chinese state-owned enterprises and implementing a foreign-agent registry.
O’Toole later claimed the party lost as many as eight or nine seats in B.C. and Ontario because of interference by China – specifically a co-ordinated campaign of misinformation by Beijing proxies who depicted the Tory platform as an assault on people of Chinese descent. A McGill University study also cited such misinformation aimed at Chinese Canadians, though concluded it did not have a significant effect on the overall election results.
O’Toole could not be reached for comment. But Juneau-Katsuya and Mehmet Tohti, head of the Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project, said party insiders have told them that an internal review of the 2021 election recommended a different approach to ethnic Chinese communities.
The resulting change has been “dramatic,” charged Tohti.
O’Toole used to ask Justin Trudeau about repression of China’s Uyghur minority once or twice a week in Question Period – Parliament’s most high-profile forum, said the activist. But Tohti said he’s yet to hear a Conservative leader ask the prime minister about the issue since the September 2021 election.
“It was almost forgotten,” alleged Tohti. “All political parties just got the message – stay harsh on China and lose the election …That itself shows that interference is working.”
At Poilievre’s early-January events in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough, Poilievre was introduced by Li, who had urged O’Toole to resign after the last election, citing the China platform.
The York Region councillor and former federal candidate for the Conservatives told a 2021 news conference that Canada should not publicly criticize Beijing’s rights record, that Taiwan – self-governed and democratic – should reunite peacefully with Communist-controlled mainland China and that Canada had triggered the diplomatic feud that resulted in Canadians Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig being imprisoned for almost three years – by arresting Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou under a U.S. extradition request.
Zhong, photographed sitting next to Poilievre at one of the events, is Ontario co-chair of the National Congress of Chinese Canadians (NCCC), a group that for years has echoed Beijing’s talking points on a range of contentious issues, from China’s desire to annex Taiwan, to opposing Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement and promoting China’s Confucius Institute. He was once a delegate to the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, and appears in a video of NCCC members last year singing in celebration of the People’s Republic’s 73rd anniversary, concluding with the words “long live the Motherland (China).”
One of the reporters at the event said the previous two Conservative leaders always talked “China, China, China,” upsetting immigrants from the Mainland, and asked about Poilievre’s approach.
The new leader stressed that Conservatives are friends of the Chinese people and share values like hard work, family and tradition with Chinese Canadians. He also said Ottawa must have a firm plan to address foreign interference, and develop trade with Asian countries other than China.
“At the same time, we have our disagreements with the (Chinese) government and they will be discussed,” said Poilievre. “And we will be honest and frank about them, at the same time as we distinguish between the disagreements we have with the government in Beijing versus the people of China and the population here in Canada who come from China.”
Li said in an interview the jury is still out on the Tories’ approach to Beijing, but he liked what he heard from the new leader.
“I am satisfied that at least he’s cautious,” said the councillor. “By all means you can criticize China if they do something wrong, but do it in a closed forum.”
Cheuk Kwan of the Toronto Association for Democracy in China, a stern critic of Beijing, said it sounded like Poilievre hit the right notes in those comments.
“He didn’t do anything compromising at all,” said Kwan. “He was sending a very important message, the fact that you have to separate the Chinese people from the Chinese state.”
Certainly, no one can accuse the Conservatives of ignoring the election-interference issue, which has dominated Parliament lately. But critics of Beijing’s role here note that the issue arose only because of media reporting and suggest the Tory interest is chiefly in bashing the Trudeau government.
“Both of them just consider their respective partisan interests, instead of lining up in safeguarding national security,” charged Jonathan Fon, a prominent commentator in Toronto’s ethnic Chinese community.
Juneau-Katsuya says successive Conservative and Liberal governments ignored warnings from intelligence officers like him about interference from China as they pursued increased economic ties. Harper, for instance, approved the sale of oil-sands giant Nexen to a Chinese state-owned company, while John Baird, his foreign affairs minister, earned condemnation from Human Rights Watch for “soft-pedalling” rights with his Chinese counterpart.
“There is not a single political party, and there is not a single government,” Juneau-Katsuya charged, “that has not been compromised.”
https://nationalpost.com/news/conservatives-china-election-interference
