The allegations kept mounting in Canada: Election-meddling by China, an Indian-backed assassination on home soil, and a campaign to harass Iranian dissidents. Is Canada especially vulnerable to foreign interference?
Michael Chong said it did not take long for him to become a target of Beijing.
In testimony before US lawmakers on Capitol Hill last year, the Canadian Conservative politician described how an alleged intimidation campaign against him was born after he spoke out against China’s human rights record in parliament.
He said that a Chinese official in Canada began gathering details about his relatives living in Hong Kong shortly after, and that a smear campaign against him was launched on China’s most-popular social media platform, WeChat.
“My experience is but one case of Beijing’s interference in Canada,” he said. “Many, many other cases go unreported and unnoticed, and the victims suffer in silence.”
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One glaring problem, Mr Juneau said, is the out-of-date act governing the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (csis). It is almost 40 years old, designed with the Cold War in mind, “when the fax machine was the new thing”, he said.
Because of this, he said, the nation’s primary intelligence agency has been limited in its operations, focused on sharing information solely with the federal government.
This means possible targets are often left in the dark.
That was spotlighted by Mr Chong’s story. He only discovered that he had been an alleged target of Beijing through the media, despite csis having monitored threats against him for at least two years.
The problem was that it was not a peaceful protest. Freedom of expression does not include inflicting hearing damage or keeping innocent citizens from sleeping in their homes by creating noise disturbances overnight, all night, for multiple nights.
I think the biggest thing the protests “exposed” was just how much damage we’ve done to our education systems over the last few decades…lol
Then why did they need to change laws and enact emergency powers to deal with them?
If it wasn’t a peaceful protest it should have been easy to handle with existing laws.
The local police were not enforcing the law. It really should have been easy to handle, but there were key sympathizers in the local police force (I believe including the chief).
It was under local jurisdiction, but local jurisdiction was not doing their job. The only option to protect the citizens was for either the provincial or the federal government to step in (which isn’t supposed to happen except in emergencies), and there’s no way a Conservative premier was going to take the fall for that.