Foreign interference in Canada/stretched RCMP

[MarkOttawa]

Start of a post:

Yes, Justin, There is a Serious Foreign Interference Threat in Canada–and, by the way, the RCMP is Stretched to the Limit and Beyond in a Number of Fields

It certainly is time that the Liberal government started taking national security rather more seriously–particularly China’s nefarious activities within our overseas Chinese community, both those living here and those here temporarily such as the some 80,000 students [image at top refers to Chinese meddling in Australian politics]...
https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2020/03/12/yes-justin-there-is-a-serious-foreign-interference-threat-in-canada-and-by-the-way-the-rcmp-is-stretched-to-the-limit-and-beyond-in-a-number-of-fields/

Mark
Ottawa

 

[Kirkhill]

One high-profile Chinese researcher, Feihu Yan of the People’s Liberation Army’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences, worked for a period of time at the Winnipeg lab. Dr. Qiu also collaborated on Ebola research with Major-General Chen Wei, the Chinese military’s top epidemiologist and virologist.

Dr. Qiu’s name appears as a co-author on more than 120 scientific research papers published between 2000 and 2021. A significant number were collaborations with Chinese scientists, and much of the research was funded by Chinese government bodies.

She and her husband lost their security clearances in July, 2019, and the RCMP were called in to investigate. Dr. Qiu, who headed the vaccine development and antiviral therapies section at the lab, and Mr. Cheng were finally dismissed in January, 2021.

Four months before the scientists were expelled from the lab, access-to-information documents show Dr. Qiu played a role in shipping two exceptionally virulent viruses - Ebola and Henipah - to the Wuhan facility.

Opposition parties urge immediate release of uncensored Winnipeg lab documents

Committee of MPs says documents appear to have been redacted not for national-security reasons, but to save Public Health Agency of Canada from embarrassment

www.theglobeandmail.com

When your lab partner is a Major General that works at a military academy of a hostile power perhaps one should be cautious sending them Ebola through the mail.

JFHC.

And Andrew Coyne's take....

Why did the government call an election in August, 2021, in the middle of a pandemic, just as Afghanistan was falling, and with more than two years left in its mandate? A good argument could be made that it was to shut down a Commons committee looking into the mysterious dismissal of two Chinese nationals from a top-secret Winnipeg research laboratory.

At the urging of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the two scientists – Dr. Xiangguo Qiu, head of vaccine development at the National Microbiology Laboratory, and her husband Keding Cheng – had their security clearance revoked and were escorted out of the facility by RCMP officers in July, 2019. They were fired in January, 2021.

Opinion: The government’s ‘national security’ claim for withholding documents from Parliament is exposed as a sham

We now know that any threat to national security was not posed by disclosure of the documents, but by the activities the documents describe

www.theglobeandmail.com

 

[daftandbarmy]

Opposition parties urge immediate release of uncensored Winnipeg lab documents

Committee of MPs says documents appear to have been redacted not for national-security reasons, but to save Public Health Agency of Canada from embarrassment

www.theglobeandmail.com

When your lab partner is a Major General that works at a military academy of a hostile power perhaps one should be cautious sending them Ebola through the mail.

JFHC.

And Andrew Coyne's take....

Opinion: The government’s ‘national security’ claim for withholding documents from Parliament is exposed as a sham

We now know that any threat to national security was not posed by disclosure of the documents, but by the activities the documents describe

www.theglobeandmail.com

Pass me the tinfoil, I'm gonna need more!

 

[OldSolduer]

Pass me the tinfoil, I'm gonna need more!

Where is Maggie Thatcher when you need her? I think she'd have grabbed JT by the ear and scolded him severely.

 

[Retired AF Guy]

Where is Maggie Thatcher when you need her? I think she'd have grabbed JT by the ear and scolded him severely.

I think she would have grabbed him a lot lower on the body...

 

[RangerRay]

Seems the Tories lost a great candidate due to Iranian disinformation.

Terry Glavin: Canada is losing the fight against foreign interference

Pro-democracy activists boycott inquiry while allegations of more foreign electoral interference emerge

nationalpost.com

This is the end, beautiful friend.

From the crumbling parapets you can just make out dark shapes, moving in the rubble of global neoliberalism.

therealstory.substack.com

About Kaveh Shahrooz, the Conservatives, and the Persian diaspora.​

In explaining what the hell had just happened, and why the Richmond Hill Conservative nomination recruitment cutoff date wasn’t left until at least after Nowruz, the “issue” Kaveh says the Conservatives don’t understand is this:

Tehran runs a grey-zone and hybrid-warfare strategy targeting the NATO countries. Much like Beijing’s approach, “elite capture,” disinformation and mischief-making in the Iranian diaspora feature prominently in Tehran’s tactical toolbox.

Everything Tehran does is in service of its own filthy-rich elites, and those elites are wholly beholden to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is the military-industrial complex that controls Iran’s crony-capitalist economy. The IRGC also runs a multi-front alliance with Moscow and Beijing to strengthen a galaxy of proxy armed fronts throughout the Greater Middle East, including the terrorist groups Hezbollah, the de facto Houthi government of Yemen, and Hamas.

What the Conservatives don’t seem to understand is how successful Tehran has been in manipulating the anti-Khomeinist diaspora against itself by exploiting the usual curse of factionalism that besets pretty much all movements of exiled democrats.

The expatriate Persians may be especially afflicted by this ailment.

Unity in Disunity​

As the uprising was well underway following the September, 2022 death of Mahsa Amini in in the custody of Iran’s hated morality police, there were hopeful signs that the fractious Iranian diaspora was getting its act together, after failing to effectively unite behind a succession of Iranian uprisings going back years.

Last March, several key diaspora figures coalesced behind the Mahsa Charter of Solidarity and Alliance for Freedom, which led to the Alliance for Freedom and Democracy in Iran (AFDI). The AFDI united a spectrum from the “left” to the “right” among anti-regime diaspora groups.

The charter’s key signatories included the prominent Iranian-American women’s rights activist Masih Alinejad, the monarchists’ long-deposed “crown prince” Reza Pahlavi and Canada’s Hamed Esmaeilion, the leading voice for the families of the dead from the Ukrainian airliner the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps shot down in 2020. The singers’ list also included the 2003 Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, Abdullah Mohtadi from the leftist Komala Party of Iranian Kurdistan, and several Iranian-born personalities from Europe.

Several of these opposition figures gathered in Toronto last March, shortly after they’d signed the charter. But even by then, the ad-hoc alliance was fraying. One of the first to bolt was Canada’s Esmaeilion, who found himself constantly badgered, online and in person, by fringe supporters of Pahlavi. Over the following months, key figures began to drop away. The alliance never really recovered.

In an analysis for the Atlantic Council, the historian and author Arash Azizi doesn’t fault Pahlavi. “However, critics say Pahlavi hasn’t done enough to distance himself from many of his chauvinistic supporters who don’t practice the liberal message he preaches,” Aziz wrote. “Some supporters predictably claim this to be a case of some ‘bad apples.’ But the evidence doesn’t support this view.

“This isn’t just about masked protesters and online trolls . . . some of his prominent supporters preach a far-right nationalism that is aggressively exclusionary to those they call the “1979ers,” which seems to include all of Iran’s leftists and republicans.”

Mohammad Reza’s regime was overthrown in the 1979 revolution that ended up saddling Iranians with the ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as supreme leader. The Ayatollah’s Islamist theocracy rules by torture and trucheon to this day. Azizi’s conclusion: it’s unlikely that the expatriate Iranian opposition will figure a way out of its “decades-long pattern of political irrelevance” any time soon.

In the days leading up to what you can think of as the Conservative Party’s decision to ditch Kaveh Shahrooz, what the party brass saw on the horizon were the thunderclouds of a massive disinformation and propaganda campaign that was already targeting Sharooz. They also saw nasty squalls of backbiting and rumour-mongering from within the diaspora itself, and from within the Conservative fold.

So maybe the Conservatives just chose to cut their losses, you could say. Maybe it’s just how things are done in politics. After all, the Conservatives are in politics to get elected. Is that cynical?

It certainly didn’t help that some of the calls were coming from inside the house.

When the knives come out​

Some of the nastier objections to Kaveh’s candidacy, as you would expect, came by way of social media accounts of dubious provenance. Not without reason, Kaveh says quite a few were conscripted from the Khomeinist regime’s vast army of twitterbots.

Weirdly, some came even from Australia. The Australian crank “National Conservative, Monarchist, Anti-Communist” windbag David Votoupal declared Shahrooz to be unfit to serve as a Canadian MP because Kaveh belongs to “a class of Iranians who prefer Western ‘values’ to Iranian ones, and care nothing for Iranian history, culture and identity.”

The weird turned pro on February 3 with a bizarre public intervention by Ontario Conservative MPP Goldie Ghamari, who posted texts on Twitter that Shahrooz had sent her innocently asking for her advice and counsel about running his campaign (see here and here).

I’d been in correspondence with Ghamari for quite a while by then. She’d asked for advice on how to get opinion pieces published in the National Post. We’d swapped notes on Hamas sympathizers. That sort of thing. But when she went after Kaveh, I told her she’d let a lot of people down and that I was finished with her.

Her response, among other weird things, was that Kaveh Shahrooz is a supporter of the Mojahedin-e-Kalkh. This is a dangerous libel (I’ll get into why below). I also know it to be false, because I know Kaveh.

Ghamari also circulated a Farsi-language diatribe making the same claim that also accused the former Liberal justice minister Irwin Cotler of the same thing. I know that to be false, too, because I’m quite familiar with Cotler. He founded the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, where I’m a senior fellow.

In my brief exchange with Ghamari, this was the giveaway: “Ask him why he rejects the democratically elected Lion and Sun flag that represents the people of Iran. He never holds it. Recently he’s taken some pictures with it to save face. But he never holds it. Ask him why and see what answer he gives you.”

The Shah’s Nostalgic Zealots​

If this strikes you as excedingly petty and weird, it’s because Goldie Ghamari is a monarchist, which is to say she’s a supporter of Iran’s “crown prince” Reza Pahlavi, whose father Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was the shah of Iran. And theres nothing wrong with that.

I’ve never had any cause to quarrel with Iranian monarchists. I’ve met perfectly nice Iranian monarchists. Most of them seem like good people. You can spot them at rallies by their flag, the Lion and Sun flag from the old regime. But some, like Ghamari, allow their enthusiasms to degenerate into something approaching a fanaticism that even the “crown prince” Reza Pahlavi has tried to disavow.

There is a core of monarchists who seem to split their time between activism opposing the Khomeinist regime and attacking anti-regime leaders who are not monarchists. Like Masih Alinejad, the courageous, high profile Iranian-American women’s rights activist. And like Kaveh Shahrooz.

In their campaign against Kaveh, quite a few monarchists have rallied around the failed comedian and alt-right “journalist”Daniel Bordman, who was for some reason extremely dyspeptic about Kaveh’s bid for the Conservative ticket in Richmond Hill. Kaveh is a “detestable man,” says Bordman. When Kaveh dropped his bid for the Conservative ticket, Bordman crowed: “I'm proud to have confronted this charlatan.”

Here’s the odd thing. Daniel Bordman is best known for having been successfully sued for defamation and ordered by Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice to pay a whopping $500,000 to former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole’s campaign chair, Walied Solimon.

It was such a slam-dunk case that in its summary judgment the court said there was no need to consider Soliman’s defence, which described Bordman is a “hatemonger, a racist, and a member of the alt-right community of demagogues, hatemongers, conspiracy theorists, and Islamophobes.”

What is the deal with these people and their obsession with Kaveh Shahooz?

You tell me.

Why did Poilievre want Kaveh Shahrooz to run in Richmond Hill?​

This is the easiest question to answer. Poilievre asked Kaveh to run because he would have been spectacularly electable.

Kaveh Sharooz is a recognizable name in the riding, and he came with a lot of big-tent appeal to the riding’s Liberal-leaning voters. He’d even made a run for the Liberal nomination in Richmond Hill just prior to the 2015 election that brought Justin Trudeau’s Liberals to power.

He’d been beaten in a dirty campaign waged by Majid Jowhari.

While Jowhari has been taking pains to cover his tracks lately, he came on the scene as an open enthusiast for re-establishing relations with Tehran and inviting the Komeinist elites’ dirty money into Canada.

Until it became slightly unfashionable to do so, Jowhari was given to praising Trudeau’s obsequious approach to China asthe “model” Canada should adopt in its relations with Iran, taking in “economical, environmental, social, cultural, research and innovation” issues. This would allow Ottawa to address “sensitive issues such as human rights, in a non-obtrusive way.”

Kaveh broke with the Liberals for good in 2017. That’s when Stephane Dion - the Liberal foreign minister at the forefont of the push to re-establish the diplomatic ties with Tehran that Conservative Foreign Minister John Baird had broken - refused to endorse a Conservative motion condemning the genocide committed by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) against the Yazidi minority in the Sinjar Mountains of Northern Iraq.

Kaveh’s a well-respected member of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s board of experts and an adviser to the Cyrus Forum For Iran’s Future. He’d led the successful multipartisan campaign establishing Canada as the first UN member state to recognize the Khomeinist regime’s 1988 massacre of thousands of political prisoners as a crime against humanity.

Over the years, Kaveh had become a good friend and supporter of Israel. He’d been a tireless campaigner for Magnitsky Sanctions on Khomeinist officials and for forcing Ottawa to list the IRGC as a terrorist organization.

Despite all this, Kaveh wouldn’t have been a “single-issue” candidate. He wasn’t simply a function of “diaspora politics.” He’d developed enviable credentials as a champion of Iranian democracy and a solid reputation as an international human rights lawyer, but Kaveh was more than ready and able to champion Poilievre’s “common sense” approach to the Richmond Hill riding’s bread-and-butter anxieties.

In the end, the party brass decided Kaveh wasn’t important enough to hold onto, even though Poilievre had gone out of his way to recruit him. The shiv was put between Kaveh’s ribs by Conservative headquarters, specifically by the party’s director of political operations Jeremy Liedtke. Kaveh’s full public statement is here.

I was more than willing to report Liedtke’s side of it. I’d told Conservative HQ that I was a couple of hours from deadline and I needed a response from him. You might think that was asking too much in too little time, but in the ordinary course of business in this racket, it isn’t. In any case, it’s 36 hours later and still, nothing.

The Conservatives do not want to talk about this, at all. And no wonder.

The eccentric followers of Maryam Rajavi​

The Mojahedin-e-Kalkh, who Bordman, Ghamari and the rest persist in falsely claiming is the diaspora grouping that commands Kaveh’s secret loyalty, is otherwise known as the People’s Mojahedin of Iran (PMOI) which is the primary constituent part of the National Council of the Resistance in Iran (NCRI).

Born in the mid 1960s as a Third World armed-struggle force that blended Islam and Marxism with terrorism, the MeK-PMOI-NCRI ended up evolving into a kind of messianic movement devoted to their beloved Maryam Rajavi, wife of MeK leader Massoud Rajavi, who disappeared 20 years ago and is believed dead. Now headquartered in Albania, the NCRI long ago renounced terrorism and is committed to parliamentary democracy.

The NCRI can reasonably claim to be the best disciplined and best-resourced of all the anti-regime elements in the Iranian diaspora. But that doesn’t matter to most Iranians of the left or the right. The monarchists remember the group’s terrorism in the 1970s. And Iranians also remember that the NCRI’s MeK sided with Saddam Hussein during the bloody Iran-Iraq war of 1980-1988, in the hopes that an Iraqi victory would lead to an NCRI government in Tehran.

The NCRI is loathed as well in many diaspora activist circles. It was the only group that the Alliance for Freedom and Democracy in Iran could not countenance as a constituent.

Kaveh’s offence: He had long campaigned to have Ottawa list the IRGC as a terrorist group, and when the Conservatives finally did so in 2012, they also followed the lead of the U.S. and the Europeans and removed the MeK from Canadian terrorist listings.

The IRGC’s Qods Force, its secretive high command foreign-operations branch, remains unmentioned on Canada’s terrorist list, for reasons no one in Ottawa can explain.

Can Poilievre’s Conservatives walk while chewing gum?​

The Conservative-Liberal race in Richmond Hill would have been a winnable donnybrook - it may still be winnable - but a Sharooz-Jowhari grudge match would likely have been dominated by stuff Poilievre and his crew aren’t interested in, and aren’t very good at talking about.

This involves a mindset Conservatives need to shake. It’s really not that complicated.

A Conservative government will need to pay attention to international relations and the palm-greasing work Canada’s enemies are doing in this country’s political and corporate establishment, along with the dirty strongarming work those same police states are up to in certain diaspora communities.

This doesn’t have to detract from the attention Conservatives would want everybody paying to “domestic” concerns about the Liberal record, inflation, crime, the carbon tax, and so on. Conservatives should be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.

The crew around Poilievre may not be very interested in the world. But the world is very interested in Canada, and the world is writhing in the disarray of the neoliberalism’s collapse. And Iran is extremely interested in this country.

Even before the Trudeau Liberals came to power, the regime’s elites had made Canada an offshore playground and an investment bolthole for themselves. After 2015, they had a lot of Liberal help in doing that.

And Tehran is still very interested in Richmond Hill.

Stuff like this makes me think PP and the Tories won’t take foreign interference, influence and intimidation campaigns seriously unless they can beat the Liberals over the head with it.

 

[dapaterson]

Stuff like this makes me think PP and the Tories won’t take foreign interference, influence and intimidation campaigns seriously unless they can beat the Liberals over the head with it.

Ignoring issues unless you can use them to bludgeon your opponents with them is not unique to any one political party.

 

[brihard]

I have never personally been of the belief that we have ever really had a government or an opposition-hoping-to-form-government who have really intended to take national security seriously. I haven’t seen the legislative or regulatory steps needed to close massive gaps in our laws, and I haven’t seen resourcing of security and intelligence organizations sufficient to the task at hand. It seems like constant triage.

 

[OldSolduer]

I have never personally been of the belief that we have ever really had a government or an opposition-hoping-to-form-government who have really intended to take national security seriously. I haven’t seen the legislative or regulatory steps needed to close massive gaps in our laws, and I haven’t seen resourcing of security and intelligence organizations sufficient to the task at hand. It seems like constant triage.

I tend to agree with you. FWIW the Igor Gouzenko case in September 1945 sort of set the standard for Canadian security and intelligence work. It also signaled that Canada was a soft target and continues to be a soft target.

 

[brihard]

I tend to agree with you. FWIW the Igor Gouzenko case in September 1945 sort of set the standard for Canadian security and intelligence work. It also signaled that Canada was a soft target and continues to be a soft target.

Liberal democracies generally are. Our cherished freedoms do, unfortunately, present vulnerabilities to malign foreign actors.

 

[OldSolduer]

Liberal democracies generally are. Our cherished freedoms do, unfortunately, present vulnerabilities to malign foreign actors.

Yes you are correct - I should have included that.

 

[medicineman]

I have never personally been of the belief that we have ever really had a government or an opposition-hoping-to-form-government who have really intended to take national security seriously. I haven’t seen the legislative or regulatory steps needed to close massive gaps in our laws, and I haven’t seen resourcing of security and intelligence organizations sufficient to the task at hand. It seems like constant triage.

I think that the tracks with the vast majority of Canadians being apathetic towards national security...frig, even my Mrs, when she was on ship, couldn't believe that she had to be deck security with a C7 during harbour ingress/egress, since you know, Canadian ship, who'd want to blow them up (other than some of the sailors already on them)?

 

[lenaitch]

Matters of security have always been 'small s' in Canada. 'We're nice and don't keep secrets, and certainly don't snoop on anybody else'

Liberal democracies generally are. Our cherished freedoms do, unfortunately, present vulnerabilities to malign foreign actors.

One of our biggest weak points is our ability to prosecute or otherwise judicially deal with bad actors when the evidence or its source is sensitive. This includes both the criminal courts and the security certificate process. I suppose this is a problem with all liberal democracies to one degree or the other. Even our parliamentary processes for dealing with sensitive information seems to lack authority or much 'gravitas'.

 

[RangerRay]

The Yanks don’t seem to have this problem. When this shit happens there, people are named and prosecuted.

 

[FSTO]

I have never personally been of the belief that we have ever really had a government or an opposition-hoping-to-form-government who have really intended to take national security seriously. I haven’t seen the legislative or regulatory steps needed to close massive gaps in our laws, and I haven’t seen resourcing of security and intelligence organizations sufficient to the task at hand. It seems like constant triage.

The Louis St Laurent government immediately after Mackenzie-King resigned. The momentum somewhat continued with Dief and the early Pearson times. But since then? All social programs all the times.

 

[OldSolduer]

The Yanks don’t seem to have this problem. When this shit happens there, people are named and prosecuted.

The Yanks also were born out of a rebellion and revolution.
Canada seems to think we’re immune to foreign influence….

 

[quadrapiper]

The Louis St Laurent government immediately after Mackenzie-King resigned. The momentum somewhat continued with Dief and the early Pearson times. But since then? All social programs all the times.

How much of that's courtesy US influence? Not necessarily sinister, THEY KILLED THE ARROW TO KEEP US DOWN nonsense, but corporate nudges to avoid competition? Canada came out of WWII with a fairly healthy defence manufacturing sector.

I wouldn't necessarily blame social programs so much as this perverse desire to be seen as global good guys, which started somewhere around the Suez crisis.

 

[brihard]

I’m referring to national security more on the police and intelligence side, less so the overlap with national defence- just to add context to my comment.

 

[Haggis]

The Yanks also were born out of a rebellion and revolution.
Canada seems to think we’re immune to foreign influence….

Canada was born through convening.

No foreign power has overtly attacked Canada on home turf in recent history causing the type of damage usually associated with "war". The closest we came to a punch up at home with anybody was the Turbot War.

The Dutch get it and treat CAF veterans better that they are treated at home. Once the (insert belligerent nation) puts troops on Canadian soil and or kills some of us here at home, maybe Canadians will "get it".

 

[Haggis]

I’m referring to national security more on the police and intelligence side, less so the overlap with national defence- just to add context to my comment.

Many nations include their border police, national police and coast guards budgets as defence spending. If you include the Public Safety portfolio in "defence", then maybe we'd hit our 2%.