Burton and Seaboyer: We need to stop China from buying influence in Canada. Here's how our laws need to change right now

Burton and Seaboyer: We need to stop China from buying influence in Canada. Here's how our laws need to change right now

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/justin-trudeau-isnt-meeting-chinas-threat-to-our-democracy-heres-one-thing-he-could-do/article_0b1a6710-e54c-11ee-8254-0f4ef6ff58cb.html

 

When Chinese investors acquire foreign companies, they're opening a door for spying. In every Canadian business bought by Chinese money, Beijing establishes a Chinese Communist Party committee — operating in Canada. With every acquisition, the reach of Chinese intelligence services expands. Those Chinese "police stations" operating in Canada were just the tip of the iceberg.

Beijing's intelligence services harvest the data of Canadians to feed AI-enabled apps that precisely guide barely detectable Chinese influence campaigns in Canada.

When Chinese investors acquire foreign companies, they're opening a door for spying. In every Canadian business bought by Chinese money, Beijing establishes a Chinese Communist Party committee — operating in Canada. With every acquisition, the reach of Chinese intelligence services expands. Those Chinese "police stations" operating in Canada were just the tip of the iceberg.

Beijing's intelligence services harvest the data of Canadians to feed AI-enabled apps that precisely guide barely detectable Chinese influence campaigns in Canada.

With complex technologies constantly evolving, one way of protecting Canadians from sophisticated foreign influence is to stop authoritarian undemocratic regimes from corporate acquisitions in Canada.

C-34, for instance, currently includes a classified (read: secret) review process that allows discretionary rulings by cabinet ministers. Regardless of which party is in government at any given time, this step is clearly vulnerable to foreign persuasion and interference. Canadians need open, transparent processes in determining which investments are accepted and which are denied or have strict conditions attached.

 With complex technologies constantly evolving, one way of protecting Canadians from sophisticated foreign influence is to stop authoritarian undemocratic regimes from corporate acquisitions in Canada.

C-34, for instance, currently includes a classified (read: secret) review process that allows discretionary rulings by cabinet ministers. Regardless of which party is in government at any given time, this step is clearly vulnerable to foreign persuasion and interference. Canadians need open, transparent processes in determining which investments are accepted and which are denied or have strict conditions attached.

Canada and other U.S. allies tensely envision Trump 2.0: Charles Burton in the Toronto Star

Canada and other U.S. allies tensely envision Trump 2.0: Charles Burton in the Toronto Star

https://macdonaldlaurier.ca/canada-and-other-u-s-allies-tensely-envision-trump-2-0-charles-burton-in-the-globe-and-mail/

If he regains the presidency, Trump’s plan to make America great again includes 10 per cent tariffs on all imports. Canada — America’s third-largest supplier — wouldn’t be getting a bye.

Replacing reciprocal free trade with a protectionist wall would inflict pain in all directions, including for American consumers, who end up paying more for many goods. For Canada’s export-driven economy, the fallout could mean unemployment for thousands of households, devalued stock markets (including the nest eggs of millions of retirees), and internal regional infighting that makes the 2022 truckers’ convoy look like a high school debate.

Concerns about Trump go beyond fiscal. With the world’s second-largest land mass but a small tax base (just over one-tenth the population of the U.S.) Canada cannot realistically defend its massive territory without the collaborative assurance of a united NATO. Losing America’s resources and leadership would be devastating to the alliance’s ability to defend its member nations.
 

 

Burton: Taiwan’s election results don’t ease the sense of looming tragedy

Taiwan’s election results don’t ease the sense of looming tragedy

 

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-taiwans-election-results-dont-ease-the-sense-of-looming-tragedy/

China’s hostility was deepened by the fact that democratic elections were held at all. On China’s heavily censored social media, searches for “Taiwan election” yield a notice reading “According to relevant laws, regulations and policies, the content of this topic is not displayed.”

But what makes Beijing even more concerned is that Taiwan’s new President Lai Ching-te, earlier in his political career, was an unabashed advocate for Taiwan making a unilateral declaration of independence. Mr. Lai toned this down in his recent campaign speeches, professing to continue his predecessor’s less confrontational line with Beijing. But a very plausible danger from this week’s election result stems from China’s conviction that, under Mr. Lai, there will be no “return of Taiwan to the embrace of the motherland” through peaceful negotiation. And China will not stand idly by if it perceives Mr. Lai as manoeuvering internationally to bring about de jure affirmation of the reality that Taiwan is de facto an independent state that is being denied sovereign national rights under international law.

Burton and Seaboyer: China's meddling in Taiwan is an alarming warning for Canada

China's meddling in Taiwan is an alarming warning for Canada  

 

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/chinas-meddling-in-taiwan-is-an-alarming-warning-for-canada/article_e48b66ba-abf0-11ee-bf98-47971997da48.html

Beijing openly wants the DPP displaced and the KMT returned to power. Last month a senior Chinese Communist Party official chaired a meeting of Chinese state and party agencies to support this end. The upshot so far: lifelike, computer-fabricated videos depicting candidates saying things they never said, or carefully edited clips of politicians saying things in unguarded moments they wish they hadn’t said.

China has also created a network of “Trojan horse” fake social media groups, purporting to support one party or another, that spew fake scandals and conspiracy theories to discredit the DPP. There is also evidence of individual citizens being tracked. For instance, if someone buys an ebook on Taiwanese politics, AI detects not only when the purchase was made but when the person is actually reading it. They are then micro-targeted with AI-generated messaging that undermines what they have just read.

Canada's turn is coming, and we must likewise tolerate no foreign interference in electing governments that guide the country on the world stage. Canada’s election outcomes should be determined by Canadians alone.

 

Institut pro politiku a společnost: Interview with Charles Burton, Canadian expert on China policy

 

Charles Burton on Bill C-34: Testimony to the Commons Standing Committee on Industry and Technology

 

CDN response to Chinese interference? Pathetic and ineffective. / Charles Burton, MLI in Parliament

 

The China Problem - CNAPS panel discussion featuring Charles Burton, Miles Yu at Hudson Institute

 

Burton: Canada must face the facts: China is now closed for business

 

Canada must face the facts: China is now closed for business

 

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-canada-must-face-the-facts-china-is-now-closed-for-business/

 

To mute domestic disgruntlement over the economy, Mr. Xi might play the nationalism card through military engagement in the South China Sea and Taiwan as soon as 2027. As well, the regime has been reaffirming its Leninist core through renewed predominance of state-controlled enterprise over successful capitalists, to the extent that large Chinese companies have developed PR plans to respond to sudden “disappearances” of their chief executives.

Foreign businesspeople embroiled in arbitrary commercial disputes are increasingly denied exit from China until they comply with demands from Chinese state counterparts. And there are ever more controls and restrictions on security of business data, including bans on foreign businesses in China sending information to servers outside the country.

Then there are growing concerns about China’s political stability, as evidenced by the purge in 2023 of the Foreign Minister, the Minister of Defence and a range of senior military figures. This can’t be good.

Burton: China likely to escape scot-free in persecution of two Canadians

 China likely to escape scot-free in persecution of two Canadians

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/china-likely-to-escape-scot-free-in-persecution-of-two-canadians/article_644384da-7778-5830-b3a6-56483b4a07f8.html

While few specifics are known about Spavor’s claims, media reports depict a connection to Kovrig’s former job at Canada’s embassy in Beijing, and later with the International Crisis Group think tank, roles in which he would allegedly meet with people in China, engage them in his fluent Mandarin, and mine the conversations for nuggets of insight into China’s political or economic affairs.

Chinese authorities, of course, don’t like such activities. One expects that Kovrig and his superiors, both in government and the ICG, would have been well aware that this type of work would irritate Beijing, thus the danger of arbitrary detention on trumped-up charges was always there whenever he visited China without the protection of a diplomatic passport. And so it was.

One particularly troubling aspect of this sort of activity is the risk it presents to people who might unknowingly be sources for these information-gathering practices. Apparently Spavor and Kovrig routinely got together for drinks and sessions of good-humoured conversation. But friendships with diplomats imply that observations shared in a bar can end up the next morning in a report to Ottawa, and on to the Five Eyes. Was this possibility lost on Spavor? Was Kovrig perhaps not as forthcoming as he could have been about the full dimensions of their chats?

Burton: Sapped of both hard and soft power, Canada needs action to keep up in a dangerous world

Sapped of both hard and soft power, Canada needs action to keep up in a dangerous world

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-sapped-of-both-hard-and-soft-power-canada-needs-action-to-keep-up-in-a/ 

Speaking to an international crowd of leaders, ministers and other representatives who had gathered earlier this month in Beijing for a forum that marked 10 years of China’s Belt and Road Initiative global infrastructure program, Chinese leader Xi Jinping declared that “changes of the world, of our times, and of historical significance are unfolding like never before.”

Quite right. Will the Russian invasion of Ukraine be resolved without war with NATO? Will armed conflict in the Middle East, fomented by Iran, spiral into a regional war? Would China open a third front by invading Taiwan? If the atrocious provocations to war by Iran, Russia and China develop simultaneously on three fronts – setting off a world war in Asia, the Middle East and Indo-Pacific – where will Canada stand?

Burton: For the foreign-interference inquiry to be effective, Justice Hogue needs the right tools

For the foreign-interference inquiry to be effective, Justice Hogue needs the right tools

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-for-the-foreign-interference-inquiry-to-be-effective-justice-hogue/

 

For Canadians, the crucial outcomes of this whole exercise could be captured in a few questions: Will any more Chinese diplomats involved in election interference be expelled from Canada? Will their proxies working here be held to account and see their day in court? Will we end up getting an effective foreign influence transparency registry to gain insight around any persons of influence in our Canadian democracy who have conflicts of interest by receiving benefits from a foreign state or its representatives (e.g. agents of the United Front Work Department of the Chinese Communist Party)? Will we get more clarity on why the government projected such an indifferent response to alarming reports of foreign malign, including activities detailed in a large number of federal government intelligence assessments?

Mr. LeBlanc said Justice Hogue will bring “fresh eyes” to topics that she otherwise has no demonstrated credentials to address. She is a respected and capable jurist, but will clearly need a lot of support, including leading experts with deep knowledge in the field, in order to fulfil this critical mission. If not, she could fall into the trap that evidently bedevilled her special-rapporteur predecessor David Johnston, who had to rely on “curated access” to top-secret documents and less-than-thorough debriefings from senior bureaucrats and politicians who might be worried that their denials of any evident ineffectiveness in countering Chinese interference in Canada’s democracy will not stand up to scrutiny.

 

Burton: China’s growing economic angst is another political threat for Xi

China’s growing economic angst is another political threat for Xi

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-chinas-growing-economic-angst-is-another-political-threat-for-xi/

 

The end of the economic boom threatens China’s “post-Tiananmen bargain” in which citizens tolerate marginalized civic freedoms and rule of law in return for continuously improving living standards. Suddenly, Mr. Xi seems politically vulnerable. His rule has been markedly more repressive than those of his recent predecessors – reversing Deng Xiaoping’s 1980s initiatives of “opening and reform” and exhortations to “liberate thought” against Maoist dogma – and because Mr. Xi has purged all his political rivals over the past 10 years, when things go wrong in this era, the buck stops with him.

If Mr. Xi has indeed compromised in his ability to weather political damage because of his handling of the economy, his mishandling of COVID, or sudden disappearances of his senior officials, then these will only add to longer-term grievances that have quietly accumulated during his rule: the persecution of #MeToo protesters, China’s growing income gap, the economic privileging of “red nobility” elites, the unfair and corrupt legal system, pervasive state surveillance and strict censorship of social media.

Against this backdrop, unemployed youth who feel resentful and badly done by could, as Chairman Mao put it in quite a different context, be the spark that sets off the prairie fire. There is much precedent for this in Chinese history.

 

The Strategic Thinkers Series | 16 | Identifying the China Threat | Robert Spalding & Charles Burton

The Strategic Thinkers Series | 16 | Identifying the China Threat | Robert Spalding & Charles Burton

Interview with Charles Burton: Two Former Mounties Charged: Unpacking Chinese Foreign Interference in Canada

 

Interview with CTV News Channel on Charges Against Ex-Mountie

 

Burton: Is anybody out there protecting us from China’s agenda?

 Burton: Is anybody out there protecting us from China’s agenda?

 https://www.ipolitics.ca/opinions/is-anybody-out-there-protecting-us-from-chinas-agenda

 

As if to underscore Ottawa’s paralysis, Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino’s much touted public consultations on creating a Foreign Interference Transparency Registry has so far has gone nowhere. Likewise, Canada’s much-delayed Indo-Pacific Strategy statement last spring — which seemed designed to reassure our allies that Canada will stand up and respond to China’s threat to world peace — has apparently ended up in the bottom of a drawer in the Prime Minister’s office, along with other feel-good statements of intent. And Canada’s dismal 1.29 percent of GDP spending on NATO means we’re not only stiffing those allies but leaving our Arctic essentially undefended, as China is already doing the type of surveillance activities that would precede the deployment of nuclear submarines in our northern waters. 

Ottawa has made no clear commitment to help defend Taiwan, whose sovereignty and freedom has been under growing threat from Beijing year by year. China has also been incrementally making South Korea more susceptible to economic coercion, as their economies increasingly intertwine. For Beijing, the allure of a unified pro-China Korean peninsula would be a huge geostrategic game changer, and bode very badly for Canada and the free world.

Unfortunately, so long as vested interests in Ottawa quietly do Beijing’s bidding while they remain in positions of public trust (so as not to jinx any post-political career law firm appointments or lucrative board memberships), China will continue to enjoy what amounts to veto power Canadian sovereignty and security.

 

An honourable man in the wrong place at the wrong time: Charles Burton in iPolitics

 An honourable man in the wrong place at the wrong time

 

https://macdonaldlaurier.ca/an-honourable-man-in-the-wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time-charles-burton-in-ipolitics/

 

After a long and distinguished career, now an elderly gentleman in his 80s, this rapporteur assignment is likely David Johnston’s last significant act of public service. With his Harvard and Cambridge pedigrees from the early 1960s, he is the product of a Canada that was politically dominated by a small elite of men whose attitudes of noblesse oblige to women, the lower classes and Indigenous people were matters of honour.

The former Governor General and one-time university president is a lay reader in the Anglican Church and proponent of the YMCA ideals of “muscular Christianity.” Even in youth, when he was a highly accomplished athlete, Johnston’s notion of fair play and a “man’s word is his bond” made him the ideal candidate for the archaic role of representative of Her Majesty the Queen in Canada, which he carried out with great pride.

 Let’s face it, Johnston’s dismissal of news media reports about leaked intelligence reports as “misconstrued” is not based on the kind of rigorous investigative tactics that the situation demands. During his interviews, nobody was speaking under oath and they unlikely felt intimidated by Johnston’s genteel questioning. When he looked them in the eye and asked, “were you aware of the reports about Chinese government sponsored interference in Canada’s democratic process?” and they all responded that they were not, Johnston may have been quite inclined to conclude there was no need for deeper interrogation, and that it would indeed be dishonourable and insulting to question anyone’s denial.

Burton: Beijing doing the wrong thing could be right for Canada

Beijing doing the wrong thing could be right for Canada

 https://www.thespec.com/opinion/contributors/2023/05/17/beijing-doing-the-wrong-thing-could-be-right-for-canada.html

 

These are not good times for Canadian politicians or businesspeople with interests in maintaining the “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” charade that has characterized Canada-China relations. If anything, Beijing — which declined an opportunity to defuse the latest crisis — seems primed for confrontation.

Charles Burton's Interview with Tenzin Tsundue