The Decibel - CSIS documents reveal a web of Chinese influence in Canada

Episode Date: February 27, 2023

Documents from Canada’s spy agency CSIS – viewed by The Globe and Mail – show how China was influencing Canada’s 2021 federal election by promoting candidates favourable to the regime, how it warned “friendly” Canadians about investigations and targeted Canadians with tactics like cyberattacks, bribery and sexual seduction.These documents highlight a troubling web of China’s interference in Canadian political, financial and academic institutions. Robert Fife, The Globe’s Ottawa bureau chief, explains why these documents matter and what we can learn about how China is trying to influence Canadian affairs.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

We've been hearing a lot about China's possible influence over Canadian elections. All Canadians can have total confidence that the outcomes of the 2019 and the 2021 elections were determined by Canadians and Canadians alone at the voting booth. Justin Trudeau knew about this interference and he covered it up because he benefited from it. He is perfectly happy to let a foreign authoritarian government interfere in our elections as long as they're helping him. This all stems from a Globe and Mail story

about documents from CSIS, Canada's intelligence agency. Those documents raise concerns about election interference, as well as Canadians being targeted through hacking, bribery, and sexual seduction. But these documents are also part of a wider pattern, of China trying to gain influence in Canada on all fronts. The Globe's Bob Veith and Stephen Chase broke this story. Bob has seen these CSIS documents, and today he'll tell us why they're so important. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail.

Bob, it's so great to see you. Thank you so much for joining me. Oh, happy to be here. So you've been reporting on these documents from CSIS. Can you just start by telling me, what exactly are they? These are secret and top secret intelligence briefs that deal with Chinese interference operations in the 2019 and 2021 election campaigns. These are documents that have not only been shared with senior officials, including the Privy Council office, which reports to the prime minister. But these are intelligence reports that are also being shared largely with our Five Eyes intelligence allies, which is the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Great Britain.

And some of these reports have also been shared with French and German intelligence. I think this is largely because they are having similar problems with Chinese interference operations in their countries and also in electoral process. So it's pretty detailed stuff. And I didn't realize the depth of the interference operations until I was able to view those documents. Yeah. And you said secret and top secrets. Are those two different categories then? Yeah, there is. Secret is shared more widely amongst senior government officials and with our Five Eyes intelligence and other intelligence agencies,

but a much smaller group of people would see the top secret documents. Okay. Bob, why is China attempting to interfere with Canada's elections? Like on a broad scale, why would they want to do this? Well, they're doing this in a lot of other countries as well. And what they want to do is mute criticism of China. They have got a lot of problems. Look, they have set up labor camps for Uyghurs. They are treating Tibetans like second-class citizens. And they are threatening

Taiwan. So anybody who criticizes them, they're very sensitive about that. So they don't want people in parliament around the world criticizing their human rights record, for example. They also want to be able to establish relations with members of parliament and people in the business community, frankly, who can pick up intelligence for them, give them information that would be useful to them. I'm glad you brought this up because I wanted to ask you about something else that the documents talk about, and that's about China targeting specific Canadians. Who were they targeting here, Bob, and why? Well, the documents lay out how China tries to target influential Canadians here, but also those who may be going to China.

So visa offices, including at the Bank of China, have been told to please to alert the consulates when a politician or a government official or a business person is traveling to China, because they may be, quote, work targets. Wow. And CSIS lays out what they do. There is blue for, we would use cyber attacks to get into their computers or into their cell phones or into their hotel rooms.

Gold is for bribery, trying to bribe people through various means. And yellow is using what they call honeypots, which is sexual seduction of people to try to get influence. This is incredible. There's a color-coded system for these different ways that they're targeting people. That's correct, according to these documents. So if you go over there, you should be extremely careful. I spoke to a former CSIS officer who said that – who has his own company now. He says, look, we advise people, business people particularly, if you go over there, do not bring your personal computer. Do not bring your – bring a burner phone. Don't leave documents in a hotel. And be very careful that you don't get set up in some kind of a honey trap when you're out in a bar or a restaurant. Yeah.

And so once China has hacked their phones or set up something in their hotel room or lured them into some sort of compromising situation, like what happens then? What do they do? Well, I mean, they may have the person say they've got them in a honey trap or they've agreed to be bribed. And, you know, you're one of two things. Either you express opinions that are sympathetic to China or try to play down criticism of China, or you gather information and pass it on to them. They also, interestingly enough, also, because the CSIS had begun to warn members of parliament about foreign interference back in 2021, CSIS said that they picked up intelligence that China was telling their friends of China in the business community and elsewhere to be very careful not to approach members of parliament at this particular time because ceases was investigations were going on.

Really? Do we know who these quote unquote friends were or are? They don't identify them in the documents, but I have been told by national security sources some of the names, which I'm not at liberty to write about, but maybe I will at some point. Wow. Bob, how did you get access to these CSIS documents? Well, I'm not going to tell you very much about that for obvious reasons. I'm being careful with this because the whistleblowers who have spoken to us would risk being prosecuted under the Security of Information Act. Those are serious, like serious, serious charges would be leveled against them. So the individuals who came forward to alert us to this are taking a great risk. We have been writing a lot on Chinese interference operations in Canada for quite a long time.

And I think largely because of the work we've done, a number of people reached out to us with a great deal of concern that the interference operations by Chinese diplomats and their proxies in both election campaigns have not seemed to be taken very seriously by the highest levels of the Canadian government. And so we were able to view some of these intelligence reports. And so just to be clear, you viewed them. You don't actually have them in your possession then? No. I mean you can't have secret and top secret documents you're open to being prosecuted. Obviously, what you're talking about here, these are sensitive documents about national security. There's probably a reason why they're not public.

Why did the Globe feel that it was important to publish the information that was in these documents? Well, first of all, I think that Canadians should know about this. I think these are kind of information that should have been presented to parliamentarians. Now, look, we have not reported on some of the things in those documents. But there's no reason why Canadians should not be told the extent of Chinese interference in the Canadian electoral process. The best way to deal with this kind of interference is sunshine and transparency. Sunshine and transparency. weren't particularly happy with the liberals, but they felt that they were the best alternative to the other parties. We'll be right back. So these are some big revelations here that we're talking about. This is very orchestrated, very particular things that are being done. Can I just ask you

broadly, Bob, because you're talking about these revelations about the 2021 federal election, that there was some kind of involvement here in the election. What did we learn specifically from the documents about what was happening here? So it's the way they use influential people in the Chinese Canadian community. A lot of these organizations and cultural groups have very strong connections to the consulate and the people involved in the consulate. And so they get them to get the message out to people like you really shouldn't be supporting this conservative candidate

because he's anti-Chinese, for example. They are able to – they have had success according to these documents with the Chinese language media and social media platforms such as WeChat. It goes everything from disinformation campaigns on social media and in Chinese language newspapers to cash donations to preferred candidates, to having friendly employers hire international students who are studying in Canada and paying them to work as volunteers on campaigns, which is a big deal because in election campaigns, having volunteers to work is really, really important. To other illegal operations, cash donations, of course, are illegal,

but you would get somebody to contribute to a campaign, and then once they get the tax receipt back, they are reimbursed privately for the money that the tax receipt did not make up for. So these are illegal operations. And by the way, I should say, they're doing this in other countries as well. Australia has woken up to this and have been very, very concerned about very, very similar activities. The documents do talk about one MP in particular, Kenny Chu, who was a conservative MP in Richmond, British Columbia. What happened to him? Well, let's go back a little bit. Mr. Chu is a immigrant from Hong Kong, and he was elected

to parliament in 2019. And he had been an outspoken critic of China's crackdown on Hong Kong dissidents. There was a lot of social disinformation, both in Chinese Canadian media, but also on social media that was saying that one of the measures that he wanted to bring in, which was a creation of a foreign agent registry, was anti-China and would have meant that all Chinese Canadians would have had to register, which is, of course, not true. What it means is that if you are a former politician or a lawyer or a lobbyist or somebody in the media who is getting paid by the Chinese government, you'd have to register or face legal sanctions and fines. Kenny Chu was defeated in the 2021 election campaign.

The consul general at the time bragged about how she helped defeat him and another conservative MP. And she called Mr. Chu a vocal distractor of the Chinese government. She said that the loss of Mr. Chu, quote, proved their strategy and tactics were good and contributed to achieving their goals while still adhering to the local political customs in a clever way. Bob, how widespread was this influence? Like, did it actually change the overall results of the election in 2021? Robert Chisholm No, I mean, look, how do you know what people are going to do when they go into a voting booth?

Nobody knows that. And when the prime minister says it didn't affect the overall outcome of the election campaign, well, he's right. I mean, in 2020, one rather. The liberals won 160 seats. The conservatives won 119. Aaron O'Toole then, the conservative leader, said they thought the conservatives lost up to nine seats because of Chinese interference in the election campaign. But it doesn't matter whether it's one or two or nine. We can't abide by foreign governments interfering in our elections campaigns.

This is huge stuff here, Bob. And I think it's important to also situate the fact that these documents are really part of a broader campaign from China, too. So let's talk about this big picture for a moment here. What else is China doing in Canada to gain influence? Well, this has been going on for a considerable period of time, and it's not unusual to Canada. China's overall goal is to become the world's biggest economic and military power. As it opened up to the West, it quickly has become the world's second largest economy

and the world's second biggest military. And a large part of that was done by obtaining Western technology, both economic as well as military. And so they have been, over the many years, technology, both economic as well as military. And so they have been over the many years working with universities to get leading edge science and technology to help the Chinese military, but also their economy. They have been trying to buy up Canadian companies, both in the technology field, but also in the resource field, whether it's critical minerals or oil and gas. We know, for example, that they've tried to use cyber warfare to break into the National Research Council to obtain leading-edge science. That's happened on a number of occasions.

Like a cyber attack, essentially. Cyber attacks. And they also tried to steal information from the Finance Department, the Bank of Canada as well through cyber attacks. That's another way of doing it. So it's pretty broad based. Bob, I want to ask you about the academic side of things, because I know you have written a lot about what's happening at universities here. But researchers at Canadian universities are partnering with researchers from the Chinese military, the researchers from China's National University of Defense Technology. I guess I just want to ask you, though, what really is so concerning about this? Because I think when we think about research, we know there's often international partnerships between universities. That's medical research, for example, that is going to benefit the whole world. research for China's military scientists and everything from artificial intelligence to the most sophisticated crypto theory,

a lot of phonetics, all of this sort of stuff that is leading edge. This is research that's going to help China's military, which is an adversary of Canada and the Western world. That's what's so significant about it. There's been a lot of talk about the allegations that were in your story. How have politicians responded here, particularly Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and conservative leader Pierre Polyev? What has been their response? Well, the opposition parties have been very frustrated because they've been trying to

delve into this in a parliamentary committee. And what CSIS has done and what the government has done is to provide documents that are so blacked out. There's nothing in there. It doesn't tell you anything. All blacked out based on national security grounds. The prime minister's position since we reported this last Friday was at first thing was not expressing concern about this, but saying that CSIS needs to track down, hunt down these whistleblowers. And then he started saying, well, there is nothing new about this. There's nothing secret about this.

I've been telling you, you know, the government has been telling you for a while that China is interfering in our election campaigns. Has the government said that? They have said that China has been interfering in the election campaign, but not the way we found out about it. None of this stuff was ever told to us. And then on Thursday, he took another tact saying that there were many inaccuracies in the leaks. We are very concerned with the leaks, particularly because there are so many inaccuracies in those leaks.

But that's an entire other question. And Trudeau didn't specify what these inaccuracies were, isn't that right? No, he hasn't. I hope that we'll have an opportunity to ask him. And Trudeau didn't specify what these inaccuracies were, isn't that right? No, he hasn't. You know, I hope that we'll have an opportunity to ask him. Bob, what has China said about these documents? China has said that we are smearing the country, that, of course, they would never interfere in Canadian election campaigns, and that we must stop this. Lagging their fingers at us.

Okay. Just lastly here, Bob, we know there's a parliamentary committee looking into potential election interference here. What else has the government said that they'll do to counter China's influence in Canada? Well, I mean, they have beefed up cybersecurity to try to stop disinformation campaigns. They have taken measures to try to reduce the influence of foreign money in campaigns. And then they've talked about – they will study whether to do a foreign agent registry which frankly there's no reason to study it.

Just do it. And there are other things they could do. They could give – change the CSIS Act so the spy service can be more forthright in what they say about foreign interference, not just Chinese, but Russian or other foreign governments that may be interfering in election campaigns. And they need to change the criminal code so that charges can be laid for people who are involved in any kind of foreign interference. But what's at stake here is our democracy. There has to be a red line where China has to realize that you cannot try to interfere and

defeat people who you do not like because you think they're anti-Chinese government. That's just not acceptable. And we have to draw a red line on this. We have to be much more vigilant and much more open about what is going on. Canadians need to know what is going on. Manika, this is all about transparency. The more transparent we are, the better, the safer our democracy is. That's why these documents are so important. That's why I do not think that they need to be withheld from the Canadian public.

Yes, some of the stuff has to be withheld, the methods of how they went about obtaining this intelligence. But it should be out there so Canadians understand it. Bob, this was a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. Well, thank you. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wellms. Our producers are

Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer and Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening and I'll talk to you tomorrow.