On a cloudy morning in September 2019, members of Canada’s Liberal Party trickled into the Armenian Community Center in Don Valley North, a district in northern Toronto, to choose their party’s nominee for that fall’s federal election. It was a key vote: Polls had the Liberals up by over 20 points, which meant whoever took the nomination would all but cruise to victory in the fall. The race had been close between the two frontrunners: Bang-Gu Jiang, a real estate lawyer, and Han Dong, a former provincial lawmaker.

Canada has long boasted a large Chinese population — 1.7 million at the last census in 2021, or about 5 percent of the population — but the demographics of Don Valley North are especially concentrated. One-third of the district is East Asian, and almost a quarter of its population speaks Chinese. In the primary campaign, Dong was seen as having a slight edge in part because he had secured major endorsements from the China-friendly community, including from a former ambassador to China and a Liberal Party kingmaker who boasts about his ties to Beijing.

This edge grew on election day, as the buses started to arrive. 

Dong’s campaign had rented buses to help elderly party members get to the polls. But according to a declassified parliamentary report, citing intelligence from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), as many as 200 Chinese international students also arrived on buses to vote for Dong. ¹Canada’s political parties determine their own eligibility rules for nomination races. In 2019 and 2021, residents of a district above the age of 14, regardless of their citizenship or permanent residency status, were allowed to vote. Many of the students lived outside of the boundaries of Don Valley North, according to the report, but even more shockingly, CSIS’s intelligence alleged that officials at the Chinese consulate had threatened to revoke students’ visas if they did not vote for Dong. 

The Liberal Party doesn’t disclose final vote tallies, but according to the CSIS assessment, the Chinese students “played a significant role in Mr. Dong’s nomination, which he won by a small margin.” 

Two weeks later, CSIS briefed representatives from the ruling Liberal Party about the day’s events. Those representatives in turn briefed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau the following day. 

And then, nothing happened: Dong ran and won in the subsequent general election, and easily won re-election in 2021. (Dong, who did not respond to requests for comment, has denied knowledge of Chinese interference in his campaign.)

Erin O’Toole, who served as leader of Canada’s opposition Conservative Party from 2020 to 2022, says Trudeau, as leader of the party, “absolutely should not” have allowed Dong to run in the general election. “To see the cavalier way the Trudeau government handled this issue shows why we’re in this predicament,” he says.

Canada’s predicament is that the busing incident is just one of several alleged Chinese foreign interference cases that have captured Canada’s attention over the past two years. On Tuesday, Justice Marie-Josée Hogue, a Quebec appeals court judge, published a doorstopper, 858-page report after a year-long public inquiry into foreign interference. The “Hogue Inquiry,” as it has come to be known, confirmed that “there are a number of foreign states who are actively working to secretly, and often illegally, meddle in [Canada’s] democratic institutions” using a wide range of strategies, “from co-opting domestic associations to evading election finance rules.” 

The report also found that Chinese media outlets spread false claims about the Conservative Party during the 2021 federal election, including that it would ban WeChat and break diplomatic relations with China — what Hogue described as “information manipulation” that poses “the single biggest risk to our democracy. It is an existential threat.”

“Above all, what I found is that the government has been overall a poor communicator when it comes to foreign interference,” Hogue added, in a press conference on Tuesday. “Most Canadians first learned about foreign interference through media reports… this should not have been the case.” 

Taken together, the incidents represent a very public and politically embarrassing string of missteps by the Liberal Party, Canada’s ruling party since 2015. A scathing report published last year by a parliamentary national security committee concluded that foreign governments, especially China, “view Canada as a permissive environment to pursue their strategic interests” and described a “persistent disconnect between the gravity of the threat and the measures taken to counter it.” 

Hogue affirmed that assessment, stating that “the means used to communicate information to certain decision makers, including elected officials, proved imperfect, sometimes very much so. Certain documents never got to where they were supposed to go, and there seems to be no good reason why.”

The governing Liberals are now grappling with how to respond. A general election is required by October of this year, but it may come sooner if the opposition Conservatives succeed in passing a no-confidence motion. The Conservative Party is smelling blood, having held a commanding lead over the Liberals in the polls for over a year. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced earlier this month that he would step down as leader of the Liberal Party after concluding he “cannot be the best option” in the next election. 

The primary criticism against Trudeau has centered on the economy — including a cost of living crisis, stagnant productivity and rising unemployment — but observers say he was also under fire for the perception that his government wasn’t taking foreign meddling seriously. 

[The country has] always felt that the concerns about immigration could be managed and the positives far outweigh the negatives. That sentiment is now clearly beginning to change, and it’s going to be a difficult debate going forward.

Wesley Wark, an expert on national security at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, an Ottawa-based think tank

The prime minister stunned the public inquiry in October, for instance, with an eleventh hour accusation that members of the Conservative Party were also abetting foreign interference. (He declined to name names.) According to Gib Van Ert, an Ottawa-based national security lawyer who represented a Conservative Party MP at the inquiry, lobbing the allegation at the last minute — on the final day of the inquiry’s witness hearings — underscored how Trudeau’s government has continued to treat foreign interference “as a political football.”  

All democracies struggle with foreign interference, of course. Australia had its reckoning with Chinese meddling in 2016, after a senator was accused of receiving extensive financial support from a Chinese billionaire in return for supporting Chinese positions on the South China Sea. The U.K. is currently wrestling with how to implement a foreign agents register, which has been fiercely opposed by pro-China business groups. 

But for Canada, which defines itself by its multicultural identity, the issue has been a political lightning rod for the last two years. With the Hogue Report and the changing leadership in Canada, analysts say a critical shift in how Canada sees national security is now underway. 

“[The country has] always felt that the concerns about immigration could be managed and the positives far outweigh the negatives,” says Wesley Wark, an expert on national security at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, an Ottawa-based think tank. “That sentiment is now clearly beginning to change, and it’s going to be a difficult debate going forward.” 

Ironically, when Trudeau first came into office in 2015, he promised “an era of greater co-operation and mutual benefit” with China; instead, he is leaving office with mistrust of China at record levels and almost 40 percent of Canadians feeling he has mismanaged the relationship. 

As the real world effects of Canada’s long-simmering China problem come into focus, Canada finds itself in an uncomfortable position: The country wants to reduce its dependence on China, its second largest trading partner, but doing so requires deepening its relationship with the United States — and President Donald Trump. This won’t be a pleasant task: Trump has repeatedly mocked Canada, taunting it as the 51st state, and is threatening to impose 25 percent tariffs on its exports on February 1. 

But observers say Canada has no other choice at the moment. 

“Over the last year, the quiet discussion in Ottawa has been what to do if Trump wins, because we don’t want to get offside with [the U.S.],” says Paul Evans, a professor at the University of British Columbia. Recent actions related to China in Ottawa, he notes, are “part of a pattern of seeing where we can align with the United States and signaling it as loud as possible.” In the weeks following Trump’s second election victory, for instance, Ottawa sanctioned Chinese officials complicit in repression in Xinjiang and ordered the closure of TikTok’s Canadian offices. 

Michael Kovrig, a senior adviser to the International Crisis Group and Canadian citizen who was detained in China for 1,019 days from 2018 to 2021, says that it is Canada’s own negative experiences with China that have caused “Canada-China political relations to remain as frosty as an Ottawa winter.” But Kovrig notes that the country can’t take on the “China challenge” alone, in part because of its own lack of leadership and institutional expertise on national security.

“Canadians don’t think they really need to [pay attention to national security],” says Kovrig. “That needs to change. Assuming the U.S. doesn’t do things that are so insanely beyond the pale [under Trump], what you’ll see is a Canadian government desperately trying to ingratiate itself with President Trump.”

Jeopardizing the Fundamentals?

Nine years ago, while then-candidate Donald Trump was accusing China on the campaign trail of “raping” the U.S. with unfair trade policy and threatening 45 percent tariffs, a freshly elected Trudeau government in Ottawa was barreling down a much different path: Trudeau wanted a free trade deal with China. 

That summer, the prime minister traveled to Beijing with his daughter in tow — a nod to his own first visit to China beside his father, Pierre. In 1970, the elder Trudeau, who also served as prime minister, broke with the U.S. in formally recognizing the People’s Republic at the height of the Cultural Revolution, a full nine years earlier than Washington. 

It was a seismic victory for China, but UBC’s Evans, who wrote a book on Canada-China relations, notes that it wasn’t intended as a provocation to the Americans. 

“The U.S. has always been a factor in Canadian China policy,” he says. “Even when we went out ahead of the Americans, we very carefully calculated that we wouldn’t jeopardize the fundamentals.”

In 2016, Justin Trudeau seems to have made a different calculation. With a 65 percent approval rating and fawning international recognition, Trudeau played into “Trudeaumania” with his responsible statesman image, especially as it contrasted with the newly elected Trump. “My role, my responsibility is to continue to govern in such a way that reflects Canadians’ approach and be a positive example in the world,” he said in 2017. 

With the Trump administration’s increasingly hostile approach towards China coming into focus, Beijing welcomed Trudeau’s overtures with open arms. Then-premier Li Keqiang hailed the dawn of a new “golden era” between the two countries, and Trudeau’s government even agreed to begin negotiations on an extradition treaty with China — a bold step considering western nations’ longstanding concerns about human rights abuses and the lack of rule of law in China. At a business forum in Montreal in September 2016, the two countries announced deals resolving several trade disputes as well as a deal for Canada’s SNC-Lavalin to build a nuclear plant in China. Trudeau pledged to “bring stability and regularity back to the table.” 

What wasn’t mentioned, at least publicly, in these chummy interactions was China’s increasingly muscular exertions of power on Canadian soil. The same week that Li was in Montreal, Canadian media reported that Chinese agents were increasingly entering the country under false pretenses and coercing Chinese expats in Canada to return home and face prosecution. The extrajudicial actions were part of President Xi Jinping’s “Operation Fox Hunt,” an initiative that began in 2014 and which former FBI director Christopher Wray has called “a sweeping bid to target Chinese nationals… across the world who are viewed as threats to the regime.” 

Although Operation Fox Hunt has been tied to over 120 countries and regions, including high profile cases in New York City, experts note that Canada has been a longstanding target: A report last year by Safeguard Defenders, a human rights group, estimated that Canada was tied for first for successful forced returns to China. (It is tied with the U.S. despite having one-tenth the population.)

Mehmet Tohti, a Uyghur activist who has resided in Canada since 1998, told The Wire China he has felt the long arm of China’s security forces for as long as he has been in Canada. 

“The ways and forms of intimidation have changed, but never stopped,” he says. Initially, “the intimidation and harassment mainly focused on cyber, malware and fishy emails.” But in 2006, as Tohti began campaigning for the release of Huseyin Celil, a Canadian Uyghur detained in China, unmarked cars began following him and loitering around his home. 

Although Tohti reported the incident to CSIS and was prominently profiled in a Canadian magazine, China’s agents both continued and became more brazen in their tactics.

In January 2023, days before Tohti was scheduled to appear in Parliament ahead of a vote on resettling Uyghur refugees in Canada, he says he received a phone call from “Chinese state police” with a message about his family in China, whom he had not had contact with for years. His mother and his two sisters, he was told, were dead. It was meant as a warning, he says, about the cost of continuing his advocacy in Canada. 

China’s years-long intimidation of Tohti is a cut-and-dry case of foreign interference. But the national turn in attitude only happened relatively recently, when the “two Michaels” were detained. After the December 2018 arrest of Huawei’s chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou in Vancouver, Beijing retaliated by arresting Kovrig and Michael Spavor, two Canadians in China. The two men were interrogated for up to eight hours a day, denied access to lawyers or consular officials, and held in cells where the lights were kept permanently on. In June 2020, they were charged with espionage.

“The ‘two Michaels’ affair,” says Evans, “fundamentally changed the atmosphere in Canada.”

Indeed, it didn’t simply reveal how Beijing would treat Canadians on Chinese soil, it also exposed how quickly Beijing would resort to economic coercion. When Ottawa refused to let Meng go — she was facing extradition for conspiracy to commit fraud in order to circumvent sanctions against Iran — Beijing banned imports of Canadian canola and beef, delivering a $1.8 billion hit to the Canadian economy.

By 2020, Ottawa had formally abandoned any prospect of a free trade agreement with China. 

“For 1,019 days, Canadians read about the kidnapping of the two Michaels. We experienced hostage taking and economic coercion from China. And when that crisis was resolved [in 2021], we immediately were in the phase of Covid and wolf warrior diplomacy,” says Vina Nadjibulla, vice president of the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada, a think tank. The collective experience, she says, hardened Canadian attitudes towards China. “I don’t think we’ll ever fully go back.”

With President Joe Biden taking office in the U.S., Trudeau started following the U.S.’s lead on China policy. Canada, for instance, banned Huawei from its 5G network in 2022 (three years after the U.S. did it under President Donald Trump) and rolled out its first-ever Indo-Pacific Strategy (a trade and security policy for Asia). It went on to beef up its foreign investment review powers, making it easier to block Chinese investments especially in the country’s large mining sector, while positioning itself as a reliable critical minerals supplier to the United States. And last year, Canada followed the Biden administration in slapping 25 percent tariffs on Chinese steel and aluminum as well as 100 percent tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles. 

“Most Canadian policymakers have been broadly aligned with the Biden administration’s perspective on the China challenge and how to address it,” says Kovrig, emphasizing that “the primary driver is [Chinese] behavior, not American behavior.”

Yet Canada didn’t sober up to the reality of China’s activities on its own turf until February 2023, when The Globe and Mail began publishing a series of reports based on leaked intelligence from an anonymous whistleblower. Captivating Canadian attention, the news was less that China had tried to meddle in Canadian affairs and more that the ruling Liberal Party was seemingly indifferent about it. In May, for instance, The Globe reported that in the leadup to the 2021 federal election, then-public safety minister Bill Blair waited almost two months to approve a wiretapping warrant to surveil Michael Chan, the Liberal Party fundraiser and political kingmaker who has a close relationship to the Chinese consulate in Toronto. In a statement last October, Chan said surveillance of him was related to allegations that he “engineered the removal” of Han Dong’s predecessor. Chan denied any involvement.²CSIS has not disclosed the wiretapping warrant request.

The warrant application went unanswered for 54 days without Blair’s knowledge, the minister told the Hogue Inquiry, a delay that Hogue described as inexplicable in her final report. 

“Nothing in the evidence really explains the highly unusual delay,” wrote Hogue. “It seems to me that everyone involved dropped the ball.”

That finding compounds even more worrying conclusions from a parliamentary committee last year, which found that Canada’s foreign ministry “frequently dismissed CSIS reporting on foreign interference activities” in part because it regarded them as “regular diplomatic behavior.” As a result, top decisionmakers, including the prime minister and law enforcement officials, were not even informed about many incidents. 

Stephanie Carvin, an associate professor at Carleton University in Ottawa and former national security analyst for the Canadian government, notes that this is a longstanding and institutional problem in Canada because “we don’t have a mature security and intelligence culture.”

“We’re blessed as a country: bordered by three oceans and a secure border with the U.S., so we’ve never really had to put security first,” she says. “Prime ministers generally have not felt the need to read intelligence regularly … and Canada has not traditionally had a national security council. There was no body to force intelligence into cabinet level discussions.”

Reports on intelligence, she adds, often “go into a black hole.” (In 2023, Canada created a national security council as a forum for “sharing analysis of intelligence.”)

Michael Chong, the Conservative Party’s shadow foreign affairs minister, has felt the consequences of this black hole personally. In 2021, Chong, whose father immigrated from Hong Kong, passed a motion in parliament to recognize China’s repression of the Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang as genocide. (The U.S. State Department had done so a month earlier.) Ahead of the vote, CSIS intelligence reported that the Chinese consulate in Toronto was collecting information on Chong’s family in Hong Kong, in preparation for imposing “further potential sanctions” and “to make an example of this MP and deter others from taking anti-PRC positions,” according to The Globe and Mail, which broke the news citing leaked documents two years later.

Despite the government’s knowledge of these activities, it never warned the lawmaker. Chong found out about the threats to his family from The Globe’s report.

“What happened should be a wake-up call for the whole of government,” Chong said in a statement at the time. “An authoritarian state targeted the family of an elected MP to try to change the course of a domestic debate about our country’s foreign policy, and the government knew this and did nothing.”

Van Ert, a lawyer for Chong, told The Wire that previous inquiries into foreign interference have failed to enact change because they’ve treated the issue as “an information flow problem.”

“That’s not true,” he says. “Information was flowing, but the people it was flowing to weren’t paying attention.”

POST-HOGUE

Defenders of the government argue that part of the reason for its inaction is the difficulty of defining what, exactly, foreign interference is. At the Hogue Inquiry in October, for instance, a senior foreign ministry official said that he didn’t consider China’s decision to research Chong and his family and impose sanctions to be foreign interference, but rather part of a legitimate diplomatic campaign.

Emile Dirks, a fellow at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, a watchdog group, notes that it can be challenging to distinguish between foreign influence and foreign interference. 

Two years ago a lot of Liberals saw [foreign interference] as an exaggerated, hyped-up threat. But there is a new consensus in Ottawa. It’s a change in the Canadian official mindset.

Paul Evans, a professor at the University of British Columbia

“Put simply, foreign influence is benign, foreign interference is malign,” he says. “But differentiating between them is difficult or charged because people come to this conversation with their own preexisting beliefs or commitments. For example, some people think the Confucius Institutes are a form of soft power projection, while others look at it as an example of interference.”

There’s also the complicating, gray zone factor of how influence can morph into interference. China, he says, has been very good at developing close connections between Party offices and diaspora communities overseas. For the most part, he says, these relationships are benign, but they “can be weaponized as targeted foreign interference.” 

Indeed, for many in Canada, incidents like the buses of students in Don Valley North have illustrated this weaponization. “[T]his incident makes clear that nomination contests may be gateways for foreign states who wish to interfere in our democratic processes,” wrote Hogue, in her final report.

She reserved particular criticism for the way that the Liberal Party managed political contests at the time: The eligibility criteria for voting “adopted by the Liberal Party are not particularly stringent nor are there verification measures.”

As Canada barrels towards fresh elections, the Liberals are at last responding to those critiques. This month, the party tightened its rules to block non-Canadians from voting in nomination races. Observers say it is emblematic of a shift in attitude in Ottawa. 

“Two years ago a lot of Liberals saw [foreign interference] as an exaggerated, hyped-up threat. But there is a new consensus in Ottawa,” says UBC’s Evans. “It’s a change in the Canadian official mindset,” he adds, not just to foreign interference, but its relationship with China more broadly. 

Moving forward, the question will be what Canadian officials do about it. Many, it seems, are turning to the U.S. and attempting to use China as a bridge to the new White House.

Doug Ford, the Conservative premier of Ontario, has argued that Canada and the U.S. could create a “Fortress Am-Can” if they worked more closely together on trade and energy to counter China. In order to decouple from China, he wrote earlier this month in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, “America will need allies, and Canada can help.” 

Jonathan Wilkinson, Canada’s energy minister, has argued the same. In an interview with The Financial Times this month, he said Trump’s tariffs were a distraction from the real threat. China, he said, “has strategic control of a number of different assets, and particularly…critical minerals.” He made the case for an energy alliance between the U.S. and Canada, and said Canada was potentially interested in buying U.S. submarines and other military equipment.

But it’s not clear whether the new Trump administration will respond favorably to such offers. In addition to President Trump’s tariff and annexation threats, many in his administration have signaled a lack of trust in their northern neighbor, not least because of its positions on China, dating back to Trump’s first term in office. 

O’Toole, the ex-Conservative Party leader, says the wedge with Washington was worsened by Trudeau’s pursuit of the free trade agreement. 

“Washington views us as being offside,” he says. “We were already a bit out of step with Obama, but then with Trudeau going to China and ignoring American concerns, we were seen as stepping away from the unique partnership we had. We’re now paying the price for being out of step.”

By 2023, other Republicans were watching Canada’s foreign interference scandal with unease. Mike Waltz, Trump’s national security advisor, has said on X that the election interference stories are “VERY disturbing” and a “MASSIVE scandal.” 

Marco Rubio, Trump’s new Secretary of State, sponsored foreign interference legislation as a senator and long pressured Canada to follow the U.S.’s lead on China issues, including banning Huawei’s 5G infrastructure and blocking imports made with forced labor. And this month, even though secretaries of state traditionally meet with close allies like Canada, Mexico or European countries first, Rubio chose to meet with his counterparts from the Quad (Japan, Australia and India) — a clear signal of how he will prioritize countering China’s influence. 

There is also the longstanding complaint in Washington that Canada doesn’t spend enough on defense to make its NATO obligations. Canada has the sixth largest gross domestic product of NATO’s 32 members, but its defense spending as a percentage of GDP falls in 28th place. Last year, Trudeau promised to reach the NATO target of 2 percent of GDP by 2032, but that may be too late for some: In November, Senator Jim Risch, (R-ID), who now chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called Canada’s defense spending timeline an “eternity.”

As one of Canada’s largest business lobbies recently reported, “Senior officials from the United States have repeatedly warned that Canada’s preferential access to the U.S. export market — a market which supported the livelihoods of more than three million Canadian workers in 2022 — could be jeopardized if the government of Canada fails to move with urgency to meet its NATO commitments.”

Carleton University’s Carvin notes that Canada’s lack of investment in national security resources is compounding. After Chinese meddling came on the radar, for instance, she says the plan was to task the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) — Canada’s federal police force — to do more to combat foreign interference. But now, after Trump complained about Canada’s weak border security, “suddenly all of RCMP’s resources are going to the border. So what’s going to happen to foreign interference?”

Canada is “in a better spot legally than 2019” with regards to foreign meddling, she says, but with the RCMP and CSIS chronically understaffed and underfunded, “capacity wise, we’re possibly worse off.” 

To steel the country against future meddling, Hogue put forward 51 recommendations, half of which she said could be implemented quickly, “perhaps even before the next election.”

Some have already been put in place: a foreign interference bill enacted in June, for instance, has already made it easier for the intelligence services to warn and disclose information to targets of foreign governments, like Michael Chong. It also established a foreign agent registry for the first time.

But Hogue’s other proposals will demand not just more time, but political will. As the country girds for elections — as well as a potentially destructive trade war with the U.S. beginning on Saturday — many observers who spoke to The Wire expressed anxiety that the lessons of the foreign interference inquiry risk being lost to an already tumultuous political moment. 

“The chaos,” says Kovrig, “will be sucking up the bandwidth in the prime minister’s office.”

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