Burton: To protect Canadian sovereignty, we need transparency about foreign influence

 

Burton: To protect Canadian sovereignty, we need transparency about foreign influence

 

https://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/burton-to-protect-canadian-sovereignty-we-need-transparency-about-foreign-influencehttps://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/burton-to-protect-canadian-sovereignty-we-need-transparency-about-foreign-influence

 

In assembling its sphere of influencers, Beijing targets occupations that retired politicians and senior civil servants tend to move to, after careers spent serving the public trust. These could be people who are compensated by the Chinese regime through board memberships or other paid associations; or who receive income from Canadian companies that do business with China; who are associated with law firms who represent Chinese firms or Canadian firms who do business with the Chinese regime; or indeed who receive income from Canadian public policy think-tanks that in turn are funded by China-associated sources such as Canadian companies who do business with the Chinese regime.

Obviously, the ability of these Canadians to continue receiving benefits from Chinese sources will not be helped by anything that encourages public support for policies aimed at squelching the malign activities of Beijing’s agents. In the face of credible reports of illegal activities overseen by Chinese diplomats in Canada, they keep their own counsel, be it about election interference, Chinese “police stations,” military researchers entering our country on falsified visa applications whose mission is to obtain sensitive Canadian technologies, or harassing Canadians including those of Uyghur and Tibetan origin who speak their minds about China’s human rights violations.

China hungers for Canada’s resources – that’s why CIC is flighty in Glencore-Teck tussle: Charles Burton in the Globe and Mail

 China hungers for Canada’s resources – that’s why CIC is flighty in Glencore-Teck tussle: Charles Burton in the Globe and Mail

 

https://macdonaldlaurier.ca/china-hungers-for-canadas-resources-thats-why-cic-is-flighty-in-glencore-teck-tussle-charles-burton-in-the-globe-and-mail/

 

When CIC invested $1.7-billion in Teck stock in July, 2009, it looked like another step in Beijing’s overall strategic plan to lock down global resources while they were cheap. But the picture is more complicated than that.

As a sovereign wealth fund that manages part of the People’s Republic of China’s foreign-exchange reserves, CIC is fully integrated into the Chinese Communist Party-state’s corporate, military and security apparatus, subordinate to the overall vision of the party. As General-Secretary Xi Jinping has put it, “government, military, civilian, and academic; east, west, south, north, and centre, the party leads everything.”

CIC’s leadership org chart shows the board of directors and the “supervisory board” (that is, party committee) as both being on the same plane at the top. That would seem to make them equals, but it would be naive to suppose that the supervisory board does not dictate to the board of directors. In autocratic political systems, some boards are definitely more equal than others, and the CIC’s priorities are whatever the Chinese Communist Party says they are.

Like all China institutions, CIC is programmed by the party to serve the regime’s geostrategic goals throughout the world. However, being beholden to the party-military state is much more than a master-servant relationship; it is a symbiotic, interactive bond. While the idea is to prudently husband China’s foreign investment and make money, CIC’s raison d’être is not primarily economic profitability but to serve other Chinese regime purposes as well.

Burton and Shahrooz: Exactly whose interests would be revealed in a Foreign Influence Registry Act?

 Burton and Shahrooz: Exactly whose interests would be revealed in a Foreign Influence Registry Act?

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2023/04/23/exactly-whose-interests-would-be-revealed-in-a-foreign-influence-registry-act.html

 

The path to achieving FIRA is fraught with challenges, not least because so many respected private-sector Canadian leaders — who associate with both major political parties — have through naivete or greed become beholden to regimes hostile to Canada’s interests. Now these enablers find themselves quietly urging parliamentarians to let this pesky influence registry matter quietly slide out of sight.

There is also concern that any legislation meant to neutralize foreign subversion of Canada’s institutions will fall short of our allies’ strong measures, being kept weak so as not to not expose any ex-politicians now benefitting from significant income streams from Chinese regime-related sources, which have been described as “life transforming amounts of money.”

As CSIS has exposed, the primary culprits behind the rise of foreign interference in Canada are China, North Korea, Iran and Russia. China’s United Front Work Department has been the most active, launching disinformation campaigns aimed at undermining any legislative attempt to challenge Beijing’s influence operations in Canada.