The Canadian Election Interference We're Not Talking About
It's not just China. It's Russia and India, and a lot of it is in plain sight. CSIS has made it clear it's not just federal - it's provincial and municipal, too.
There’s a video game called “Among Us” that has become a wildly popular. It’s similar to a game I played as a kid called “Murder in the Dark,” where you are trying to figure out who the play killer is. It’s also known as “Mafia” or “Werewolf” and aside from being a fun parlour game, it has very serious origins. The game was developed in 1986 by Russian professor Dimitry Davidoff. Davidoff summed up the game as “Informed Minority against an Uninformed Majority” and the game, as played out, shows that an informed and deceptive minority can essentially, “defeat” a trusting but misinformed majority.
This says a lot about the vital importance of accuracy, accountability to a democracy, especially today, when we are inundated with record levels of junk science, half-baked-ideas, junk economics, and total ignorance of the law and civil rights paired with deliberate attempts to mislead, from vested interests as well as foreign powers who want to disrupt our society for their advantage.
That brings us to a Canadian whodunit going on, with the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians, (NSICOP) reporting that “some elected officials "began wittingly assisting foreign state actors soon after their election.””
The basic principle of free and fair elections in Canada, is that there is supposed to be somewhat of a level playing field at election time so that voters are making their decision based on the debates of the people who are going to represent them. There are regulations in place to hold candidates and campaigns to account.
Canada’s spy agency, CSIS has reported that Russia, India, China and Pakistan have all tried to interfere in Canadian elections, and CSIS itself has emphasized it is happening at every level of government, yet there is no real discussion of it beyond the federal level.
We should be aware that, just as there is a difference between an attempted robbery and a successful one, there is a difference between attempted election interference and successful election interference. They’re both wrong, but the levels of harm involved are different by orders of magnitude.
Federally and provincially, each party uses different methods to select candidates, and each province sets its own rules for campaign finance and donations. The money in campaigns is almost all spent on communications. The reason for the regulations is so that campaigns backed by moneyed interests do not completely dominate the debate, and drown out all opposition.
Most provinces and the federal goernment have rules like:
Campaign spending limits. There is a top amount that each candidate and each party can spend.
Donation limits from donors, to reduce influence. At the federal level and in some provinces.
Reporting and auditing.
Restrictions on the role of third-party messaging
While there are genuine third-party groups that are independent, there is also a proliferation and creation of fraudulent third party “astrofturf” groups, which may simply be created by consultants on behalf of a political party and its core of supporters.
In the 2019 election, the Daisy Group, headed by Warren Kinsella, was hired by Andrew Scheer’s Conservative Party to create a fake anti-racism community group that singled out candidates from Maxime Bernier’s PPC party for their radical views.
While this might sound like the easiest job ever, the details matter. It was called a “seek and destroy” contract, and while Kinsella defended himself by saying he was attacking racism, part of the clear purpose of the campaign was to make the Scheer’s Conservatives look moderate in comparison.
A source with knowledge of the project identified the Conservative Party of Canada as the client. Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer has repeatedly refused to confirm or deny that his party commissioned the work.
The project, known as Project Cactus, was designed with three phases, according to documents seen by CBC News.
The first involved research and branding in March and April. The second was identified as a "launch phase" known as "seek and destroy," running from April 16 through to June 30, the start of the pre-writ period when new restrictions kicked in for third-party advertising.
This last aspect is important, because the disclosure of third-party spending happens within deadlines close to the election. It doesn’t happen all the time.
Setting up “citizens’ groups” like these is not just common, it is routine in the U.S., and in Canada. The partisanship of these various propaganda shops is notable not only for the rock-bottom quality of their research, but for their selective outrage and deafening silence, because the same actions which they treat as a capital crime in others, they ignore in their own, and it by no means confined to the right.
Canada is filled with apologists for various horrific and harmful policies, that appear to have been implemented by no one at all. Society, or an ideology ending in -ism is to blame, not the human beings in charge.
While some players in the political landscape have the ethics and tactics of a confidence man, the more simple and obvious lie is much more basic, which is claiming a lack of bias, when there is one.
I happen to find this not just distasteful, but despicable. The lack of self-awareness and responsibility is morally bankrupt, and I have to say that I have always had a hatred of conmen and anyone who believes that people somehow deserve to be ripped off. The vulnerabilities conmen prey on are often positive human traits, like trust, hope, kindness, and they leave broken people in their wake.
I say all of this because there is plenty of “internal interference” in Canadian politics, and a lot of it consists of force-feeding the Canadian public economic fairy-tales, like “tax freedom day” or creating a story or crafting a narrative that takes people’s eye off the real problem.
So where does foreign interference come in?
Patrick Brown and his Big Brother, Modi
Patrick Brown, former Ontario PC Leader and candidate for the Conservative Leadership, had a very close relationship India's Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. Brown called Modi his "big brother."
This excellent article in The Pointer details many of the machinations that are involved in the ways politicians work with newcomer communities as “blocs” in order to serve their interests in nomination and leadership races, and says that “Brown said he has used Modi's campaign tactics and even borrowed a slogan the Indian prime minister had used to help him gain power.”
Brown travelled to India more than two dozen times prior to Modi’s election. The Globe and Mail portrayed this as an opportunity for Brown - that he could “reap rewards at the ballot box” as a consequence.
Brown welcomed Modi to Ontario, as detailed in this PC Ontario press release, where Brown is quoted as saying “It was a great opportunity to catch up with my good friend and ‘brother’ Narendra Modi”
“In my multitude of meetings with Modi, I have always been impressed by his intellect, sincerity, and humility. PM Modi has brought a sense of optimism to the country of India, and has contributed to widespread economic development in India and the province of Gujarat,” concluded Leader Patrick Brown.
In a speech to the House of Commons, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that there was credible evidence that the murder of a Canadian on Canadian soil had been, ordered by the Government of India.
The reaction at first, from many in the Canadian conservative media, was to suggest that Trudeau was “isolated” and “alone”on the world stage. Writers like Brian Lilley of the Sun, repeated and parroted the same framing and positioning offered up by India, and American and British commentators followed suit.
Considering the seriousness of the charge - that the Government of India was hiring criminals to implement murder-for-hire plots in other countries, the reaction was to treat it as political theatre.
That changed when it emerged that the murder in Canada was one of several aimed by the government of Narendra Modi, in both the U.S. and Canada. Referred to as “brazen murder-for-hire-plots” the U.S. indictment suggests that there were multiple schemes to assassinate Sikhs - one in the U.S. and three in Canada.
Former CSIS officials said that Trudeau had been vindicated.
It no secret that Modi is a Hindu nationalist. In 2002 when he was Chief Minister of Gujarat, he was accused of “allowing” anti-Muslim riots that killed over 1,000 people. That led to him being denied a visa by the US - which had to be reversed once he was elected Prime Minister of India in 2014. (Modi only just this week saw his majority government in India reduced to a minority - a result few predicted.)
If you want to understand how this plays out, a lot of it is in internal political party politics.
In Canada, because there are a lot of what people consider “safe” seats for certain political parties - left, right or centre - the real battle is for the nomination - or the even the leadership. Once that is secured, getting elected by the general public is considered a formality.
This is really important. Unlike public elections, political parties; nomination and leadership races are run by the rules set by each party.
When Brown was Leader of the PCs, there was a nomination meeting so messy that it spawned a number of lawsuits, arrests, a recorded promise of six figures in hush money, and a dead person voting.
“The vote was rigged. A ballot box was stuffed. By the time the night was over, at least 85 fraudulent ballots were cast to get the desired outcome. It was so rotten, police say, that one of the supposed voters had died a week earlier. … The Globe and Mail reported that senior PC officials discussed offering Peller $130,000 to not cooperate with the police investigation before a senior party member blocked that idea.”
Before the Conservatives were against China, they were for it
It’s notable that so much of the coverage of election interference has been focused on China, when Russia and India have both been involved. There are many tensions between China and its government and people who have immigrated to Canada over the years, including anti-communists, political dissidents, descendants of rail workers, and people who have come from Hong Kong or Taiwan. CSIS has been warning about possible Chinese influence - often relating to corporate espionage and the theft of technology and innovation.
There has been a big surge in Conservative anti-China rhetoric since the Conservatives in Canada were defeated in 2015. In government it was a different story.
The Harper Conservatives signed more than one notable deal. One, in 2012, was the loosening of Canada’s standards on uranium exports to China, as reported in the Globe and Mail. It was a deal announced by Harper, in China, after he was personally lobbied by the Premier of Saskatchewan, Brad Wall, to benefit Cameco - “the world’s largest publicly-traded uranium company.”
The deal involved “less stringent accounting for how the uranium is used than Canada typically demands”. China has nuclear weapons, but
“Of greater concern is [China’s] long support for the civilian nuclear industry in Pakistan, which developed atomic bombs in the 1990s, and whose scientists have sold nuclear-weapons technology to Iran and North Korea. China is supposed to stop nuclear trade with Pakistan, but has argued it should be allowed to continue to supply nuclear material and equipment.”
In 2014, the Harper Conservatives signed an agreement to share customs information sharing with China without announcing it to the Canadian public, as Global News reported. It drew many critics, pointing out that China would be able to see all the gaps Canada had:
“I’m hard-pressed to know why it is that Canada feels it would be in our interest to share information on sensitive matters of interdiction of illegal exports and other customs-related matters with the Chinese state, who would likely pass it on to exactly the people that we are hoping to prevent from doing this kind of illegal activity,” Burton said.
The article noted issues with Chinese theft of Canadian military capacity.
Last year, a China-born naval architect, Qing Quentin Huang, was arrested for trying to smuggle information about Canada’s arctic patrol ships back to the Chinese government.
And Su Bin, a Chinese businessman, is accused of stealing data on the F-35 fighter jet and trying to sell it to Chinese state-owned companies.
The Harper Conservatives also signed a 31-year trade agreement, which was shrouded in secrecy.
Critics of the agreement, such as Gus Van Harten, an Osgoode Hall law professor who has written two books on investment treaties, raise several key objections:
Canadian governments are locked in for a generation. If Canada finds the deal unsatisfactory, it cannot be cancelled completely for 31 years.
China benefits much more than Canada, because of a clause allowing existing restrictions in each country to stay in place. Chinese companies get to play on a relatively level field in Canada, while maintaining wildly arbitrary practices and rules for Canadian companies in China.
Chinese companies will be able to seek redress against any laws passed by any level of government in Canada which threaten their profits. Australia has decided not to enter FIPA agreements specifically because they allow powerful corporations to challenge legislation on social, environmental and economic issues. Chinese companies investing heavily in Canadian energy will be able seek billions in compensation if their projects are hampered by provincial laws on issues such as environmental concerns or First Nations rights, for example.
In 2011, Conservative MP Bob Dechert, who was Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice and then Minister of Foreign Affairs, was having a relationship with a reporter for China's news service.
Since then, the Conservatives have reversed themselves, and have often enjoyed the support of the The Epoch Times which is owned and run by Falun Gong, a religious sect that has faced terrible repression in China. As a free newspaper and online presence, it is extremely anti-China and politically conservative, with an editorial reputation for “clickbait and misinformation.”
However, the U.S. Department of Justice has just charged an Epoch Times executive with using the company for money laundering proceeds, for:
allegedly moving at least $67 million in illegally obtained funds to bank accounts in the media outlet’s name. According to the indictment, Guan was in charge of something (rather suspiciously) called the “Make Money Online” team, in which Guan and underlings “used cryptocurrency to knowingly purchase tens of millions of dollars in crime proceeds.” The alleged scheme was fairly simple, relying on prepaid debit cards, which are a common method in crypto laundering. The Make Money Online team, based abroad, would allegedly purchase “proceeds of fraudulently obtained unemployment insurance benefits” loaded onto prepaid cards. The team then allegedly traded them for cryptocurrency at 70 to 80 percent of the cards’ actual value. After making the deal, the Feds claim that those funds would then be transferred into bank accounts associated with the Epoch Times as well as into Guan’s personal bank accounts.
The Alleged Russian Spy who Doorknocked for an NDP Canadidate in Ottawa
In 2018, the Norwegian security service arrested the above individual, “José Assis Giammaria” a “A purported Brazilian researcher, who has been identified as a graduate of the University of Calgary.”
It’s worth pointing out that in 2015, the NDP under Tom Mulcair was often leading in the polls, and it’s not unusual for volunteers to then go to work for MPs when elected.
The Guardian UK ran an article citing that Giammaria’s real name was likely “Mikhail Mikushin” - a senior Russian military intelligence officer who was spending years in Canada developing a deep cover, because vital statistics like names, birth, and death certificates are not national - they are provincial.
“Canada, alongside South American countries, has long been a site for Soviet and Russian programs to create deep-cover identities for “illegals” – agents who operate covertly and without diplomatic cover, said Stephanie Carvin, a professor of international relations at Carleton University and former national security analyst.
The country’s lack of a centralized birth and death record-keeping system makes it relatively easy to appropriate an identity, she said.
There is plenty of evidence of Russian interference, including messaging during Canada’s “Freedom Convoy” protests that showed “Calls for Trudeau to step down during ‘Freedom Convoy’ traced back to Russian proxy sites” Russian trolls spread anti-vaccination misinformation during the Pandemic.
Notably, in 2020, a PC Minister in Manitoba participated in a web conference, ostensibly for a global network of homeschoolers (GHEX) that included an astonishing array of far-right and authoritarian panellists from the U.S., as well as Brazil, Pro-Putin Russian Members of Parliament, one of whom had once been detained for questioning by the FBI, and a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for AfD, a far-right party with a neo-Nazi wing that was considered a threat to democracy by Germany’s security services.
Even more remarkable, one of the Board members of GHEX, Alexey Komov was the spokesman for a Russian Oligarch close to Putin - “God’s Oligarch,” Konstantin Malofeev. Komov acted as a translator during the webinar.
Malofeev's Tsargrad TV was a media partner for the [GHEX 2018] conference. In July, YouTube cancelled the broadcaster's account, citing a violation of sanctions laws.
“A think tank called Katehon — a subsidiary of Tsargrad — is one of seven Russian proxy websites identified in an August U.S. State Department report as a "proliferator of virulent anti-Western disinformation and propaganda via its website ... led by individuals with clear links to the Russian state."
Everyone is a target - especially the Provinces
As a matter of convenience in political messaging, Canada’s Premiers and its opposition love to blame everything on the Federal Government, but as I keep emphasizing, Canada is one of the most decentralized countries in the world, which means that the subnational Provincial governments and cities - which are created by and overseen by provinces - have total responsibilities and budgets that exceed the total spend of the Federal Government. It’s also a country with huge variation in the size of jurisdictions. There are large cities, like Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal, that have populations and budgets larger than entire provinces.
CSIS wrote that:
Those provinces and municipalities not only own much more infrastructure, they regulate much more than the Federal Government does. Everything from human and civil rights and business registration, property registries, development permits and natural resource permitting and revenue is all provincial.
CSIS alleged that an Ontario MPP in the PC government of Doug Ford, Vincent Ke “served as a financial intermediary in a Chinese Communist Party election interference scheme.” and a number of Ke’s staff were involved in setting up 15 corporations, which were explained away as being for the purpose of buying property.
Canada: On Guard for Thee
One of the defining features of corruption is that it treats everything as if it is for sale. This is why liberal democracy, the rule of law, and rulings based on rights, and not on money, are contimually under threat, and continually have to be defended and promoted.
One of the findings of the NSICOP report is that
“CSIS did not advise the Conservative Party of Canada of any intelligence suggesting there was foreign interference in the leadership contest,” said Sarah Fischer, director of communications for the Conservative Party. “This is the first time we have heard about it.”
Fischer said Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre's campaign received no notice of interference in his race and “has no awareness of what is referenced.”
That is hard to swallow, given that there were reports six months ago in December, 2023 - that India and China had interfered with the Conservative race. They weren’t low profile. It was written by Andrew Coyne in the Globe and Mail.
Also, there are documents he really should be reading that no one is allowed to give him, since Pierre Poilievre has made the odd choice not to avail himself of a National Security Clearance.
It is hard to understate what is at stake. This is about the kind of government we will have, whose interest they are working in, and whether we can have confidence that our vote will count and that our leaders will represent us. It matters about whether we’ll make decisions freely based on reality or whether we’re being swindled or coerced. At the very least, we can work to ensure we’re cutting down on the swindling and coercion, and rewarding the right. It would be about time.
•DFL
Thank you for this truth telling eye opening piece. The provinces are failing Canadians and have been self serving, disregarding the needs of the people and hiding under cover of its the bad federal government to blame. The foreign interference information helped me understand better our fragile democracy. I wonder why when it comes to election interference we never mention the Americans. The Conservatives when in power reduced the oversight powers of the Chief electoral officers. Polievre himself following orders from External forces via Harper proposed a bill in the House to remove the franchise even further with amendments that made it hard for citizens to vote and to lower scrutiny of Elections Canada officials. Polievre the anti democratic weasel was the perfect Harper choice to help foreign government interference in our election laws which are far too lax and lack oversight and teeth.