Glavin: It’s no surprise David Johnston nixed a China-meddling inquiry

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The former governor general himself has long been friendly toward Beijing.

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In the uproar over revelations earlier this month that Beijing’s meddling in Canadian politics involved a secret plan to target the family of Conservative Party shadow foreign affairs minister Michael Chong, His Excellency Cong Peiwu, China’s ambassador in Ottawa, had some advice for the Trudeau government.

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“China strongly urges the Canadian side to immediately stop this self-directed political farce,” Cong said, further urging Parliament to mind its manners and “not go further down the wrong and dangerous path.”

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s “special independent rapporteur” David Johnston, who has spent much of the past half-century kowtowing to Beijing’s political and corporate elites, appears to have taken Cong’s advice to heart this week in the key recommendation he has made in his first report.

There will be no public inquiry into the steady stream of shocking headlines (or “media allegations” as Johnston calls them) to the effect that Beijing’s emissaries and their wealthy Mandarin bloc friends in Greater Toronto and Metro Vancouver exerted themselves with unseemly and apparently illegal enthusiasms in the Liberal Party’s favour during the 2019 and 2021 federal elections.

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Johnston was appointed, it is crucial to recall, in order to allow Trudeau to avoid answering questions about what he knew about this state of affairs, when he knew it, and what, if anything, he did about it. To be fair, there is something in Johnston’s 53-page report that approaches an answer to these questions. Although Johnston did not and would not put it this way: the Trudeau government’s indifference to Beijing’s manipulations of this country’s political sovereignty has so crippled the federal government’s national-security capabilities that a crisis on the scale of a five-alarm fire could break out long before anyone in the Prime Minister’s Office smelled smoke.

But there will be no public inquiry into this catastrophic mess, Johnston has conveniently ruled. His reasons are a hodgepodge of contradiction and brazen misdirection.

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A public inquiry would be “a clear overlap with the work I have already started doing,” Johnston declares. A commissioner appointed under the Inquiries Act would have powers to order documents and subpoena witnesses to testify truthfully about what Beijing has been up to, but “I do not need the subpoena powers” provided by the Inquiries Act, Johnston advises.

A public inquiry would be “unsatisfying” because an Inquiries Act commissioner would be obliged to question witnesses in camera and review material in private, and yet somehow, at the same time, a public inquiry would be so public that Canada’s intelligence agencies would be forever ruined: “No one would be a source and in fact the lives of existing sources would be imperilled, and methods would be compromised shortly after they are developed. We could not participate in the Five Eyes relationship, as our allies would be unwilling to share intelligence if it was all being made public.”

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But again, somehow, at the same time, Canadians must simply accept that “they are not going to see the intelligence, they are not going to see the internal memoranda, and they are not going to hear from the security agencies in any detailed way.”

So to hell with the will of Parliament, where the House of Commons has voted 172-149 in favour of a public inquiry. Canada’s elected representatives should mind their own business, and a public inquiry would disturb the confidence of Canadians in their government’s abilities to detect and defeat the intrusions of a hostile foreign state into the political life of the country. “I have concluded it would not serve a useful purpose to enhance trust,” Johnston concluded. Or in Cong Peiwu’s words, Canada should “immediately stop this self-directed political farce.”

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The Opposition has made much of the appearance of a conflict of interest in Johnston’s appointment. The former governor general is a lifelong friend of the Trudeau family, for instance, and then there’s Johnston’s role in the Trudeau Foundation, which is caught up in the scandal owing to a certain $140,000 donation that turned out to be from a Chinese state entity in a grooming operation aimed at Justin Trudeau himself, going back to 2013.

Overlooked is an apprehension of bias far more grave, arising from long-ignored and very public warnings from Canada’s national security agencies regarding Xi Jinping’s overseas deployment of the Communist Party’s vast United Front super-agency.

The United Front is a bullying and influence-peddling enterprise with a budget that now exceeds that of China’s foreign ministry. Through its control of the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office run out of China’s embassies and consulates, the United Front looms darkly over every aspect of life in Canada’s Chinese diaspora communities, and yet it’s mentioned only once, in passing, in Johnston’s 53-page report.

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The United Front’s key strategy of “elite capture” has enjoyed successes in Canada that boggle the imagination, not least because of the Trudeau Liberals’ early and wild-eyed embrace of China’s outward-growth policies. Because elite-capture operations are ordinarily out in the open, they’re not “clandestine,” so their inducements and palm-greasings are beyond the purview of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. And Johnston himself is an “elite capture” poster boy.

Johnston has professed that it would be “wonderful” if all Canadians learned to speak Chinese; his three daughters have done so, having attended several universities in China. When he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Nanjing University in 2012, Johnston had already made more than a dozen visits to China. As president of the University of Waterloo, Johnston oversaw the establishment of one of China’s propaganda-and-espionage Confucius Institutes. He has met Xi Jinping several times and has accompanied several trade delegations to China.

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Quite apart from his Trudeau Foundation connections, Johnston’s own Rideau Hall Foundation boasts several key figures from the Canada-China trade establishment among its leading lights. From Paul Desmarais III, whose family founded the Canada-China Business Council, to Dominic Barton, the global corporate champion of China’s state-capitalist empire and briefly the Trudeau government’s ambassador to China, the Rideau Hall Foundation board is a minor who’s-who of Beijing’s collaborators in this country.

And now, Johnston is taking it upon himself to draw the Canadian victims of Beijing’s rapacity into a series of public hearings about the United Front’s strangely unmentionable strong-arm operations in Canada.

“This is a really bad day for our democracy,” Mehmet Tohti, executive director of Canada’s Uyghur Rights Action Project, told me yesterday. “It is shockingly disappointing for me that Johnston came to the conclusion not to have a public inquiry.”

Disappointing, but under the circumstances, not especially surprising, since a proper inquiry into Beijing’s influences in Canada would sooner or later turn its attention to Beijing’s many friends in high places here, including Johnston himself.

Terry Glavin is an author and journalist.

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