As Canada dithers on Chinese interference, U.S. attacks it head-on
U.S. prosecutors bust an alleged ‘secret police station’ in New York, as similar stations in Canada remain open
Author of the article:Tristin Hopper
Published Apr 19, 2023
Canada is now in Month Three of a scandal holding that the Trudeau government has shown indifference to overt attempts by the People’s Republic of China to subvert Canadian affairs.
So it’s notable that when similar allegations of Chinese meddling turned up in the United States, it was met with a particularly hardline response by U.S. intelligence.
“For years, the FBI has been sounding the alarm about the threat posed by the Chinese government,” reads a Monday statement by Christopher Wray, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
He added, “the Chinese government will stop at nothing to lie, steal, and cheat its way to wealth and power, to silence those who oppose it, and to project its authoritarian view around the world — and within our own borders.”
Wray’s statement was in response to charges made in New York City alleging that the Chinese Ministry of Public Security contracted two U.S. nationals to establish a “secret police station” in a commercial space in Manhattan’s Chinatown. While ostensibly set up to assist Chinese expats in renewing driver’s licenses and other documents, U.S. authorities alleged the stations had a more “sinister” role in tracking and intimidating dissidents.
The New York City case is not all that different from similar allegations of “secret police stations” operating on Canadian soil. In September, a report by the Spanish-based human rights group Safeguard Defenders identified three such stations in the Toronto area, saying that they were part of the Chinese policy of “involuntary return” – a program of coercing PRC expats to return home if authorities deemed them to be in violation of Chinese law.
A Global Affairs representative told a House of Commons committee in October that such stations would be “entirely illegal” if they existed. And while the RCMP did begin investigating the alleged stations last year, they’ve said little about the case other than the fact that they made a point of having uniformed Mounties visit them in person.
“We haven’t heard very many new complaints on those three stations in Toronto and the one in Vancouver as a result of the disruption we have done,” RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki, who has since resigned, said in February.
One of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s few statements on the stations came last month, when he said that they “concerned us enormously.” He then urged intelligence services to “take it seriously.”
At the same time, it’s those very intelligence services that have been accusing Trudeau of refusing to take Chinese interference seriously.
In a series of leaks beginning in February, CSIS released briefing notes alleging that Trudeau was kept up to speed on the agency’s finding that Beijing was actively attempting to influence the results of the 2021 election.
Regardless, CSIS sources allege, Trudeau largely seems to have ignored the warnings.
In a March op-ed for The Globe and Mail, one of the leakers said they went public only after years of Ottawa ignoring the “urgent” issue of Chinese interference.
“It had become increasingly clear that no serious action was being considered. Worse still, evidence of senior public officials ignoring interference was beginning to mount,” they wrote.
The New York arrests are not the first time that the U.S. justice system has confronted the issue of alleged Chinese government interference on foreign soil.
In October, U.S. District Attorneys in New York and New Jersey charged 13 individuals with allegedly conspiring to orchestrate the forced repatriation of a Chinese national living in the U.S.
Any number of Chinese-Canadians have for years reported similarly being targeted and harassed by agents acting on behalf of the People’s Republic of China, only to have their complaints ignored by Canadian authorities.
Cherie Wong, executive director of the group Alliance Canada Hong Kong, said in testimony last month before a House of Commons Committee that many fellow Chinese-Canadians were afraid to speak up against Beijing “because they have seen extreme cases of where activists and dissidents are threatened.”
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/as-canada-dithers-on-chinese-interference-u-s-attacks-it-head-on
