Playing the "racism card" is not going to forestall the inevitable reckoning. So we should all just grow up and get on with it.
Among the outlandish and sinister responses to recent revelations about Beijing’s emissaries interfering in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections for the purpose of re-electing a Liberal government, the conjuring of bogeymen has been especially destructive to any clear public consensus about what’s at stake here and what’s really going on.
Two bogeymen stand out as the most monstrously ridiculous.
One apprehends Chinese-Canadians as an undifferentiated mass of Beijing-aligned aliens whose hostility to Canadian values drives them in a slow and steady encirclement of this country’s democratic institutions. Fortunately, this is a tale from the crypt so outlandishly bigoted that it takes some work to find anyone, anywhere, giving voice to it. You certainly won’t find it in the mainstream news media.
The other posits a conspiratorial web of white racists lurking in the shadows behind the recent and justifiably shocking stories about China’s cloak-and-dagger operations in Canada. The idea is that shadowy anti-Liberal partisans are determined to make a gallows for Chinese immigrants out of the long-stalled foreign-influence registry.
This bogeyman theory is just as unhinged as the first one, and yet it’s ubiquitous in respectably mainstream “discourse.”
The claim is that a foreign-influence registry along the lines of the Australian or the American model threatens to revive century-old Chinese exclusion laws. The proposition is that reports about Beijing’s long reach into Canadian political life are really just camouflage for racist smears and recapitulations of old and enduring anti-Chinese prejudices.
Both bogeymen rely on broad public confusion about what Canada’s “Chinese community” is, or rather, what it has become.
In the real world, Statistics Canada data shows that the number of Canadian residents who claim a Chinese ethnic origin grew from 1.3 million people in 2006 to nearly 1.8 million people last year. The surge in newcomers is largely a consequence of wealth-migration schemes that have attracted well-to-do immigrants from the People’s Republic of China. Two years ago, for the first time in history, Cantonese and Taishanese gave way to Mandarin as the dominant non-official language spoken in the Greater Toronto Area and Metro Vancouver.
Beijing’s hyperactive United Front Work Department expends massive resources in cultivating deep ties to the super-rich elements in the Mandarin bloc, while at the same time bullying and intimidating the diaspora’s reformists, Uyghur refugees, pro-democracy Hongkongers, Falun Gong adherents and defenders of Taiwanese autonomy.
This brazen strategy of transnational oppression tends to get overlooked, while the racist anti-Liberal partisan bogeyman keeps popping up. In the National Post this week, Adam Zivo provides several examples of this tendency, most notably the CBC’s platforming of nine pseudo-left academics and their lurid claims that racism or the threat of a racist backlash is either behind the recent spotlight on China’s election interference operations, or just around the corner, waiting to engulf the country.
Just how we got to this point is a bit of a puzzle. But when it took off as a national phenomenon can be arbitrarily pegged at Jan. 9, 2019. In an essay in the Hill Times, China’s ambassador to Canada at the time, Lu Shaye, claimed that Canadian anger about Beijing’s abduction of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor was “due to Western egotism and white supremacy.”
This is a lashing-out tactic Beijing’s emissaries routinely employ in order to shut people up — express concern about Beijing’s unseemly influences in the establishment circles of a western country and you’re a racist. It’s a grossly dishonest defence mechanism that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau himself stoops to deploy as a matter of routine.
Two years ago, responding to Opposition questions about an RCMP investigation into the presence of scientists associated with the People’s Liberation Army at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, Trudeau insinuated the questions were motivated by racism: “I hope that my Conservative Party colleagues are not raising fears about Asian Canadians,” Trudeau said.
Last month, following an explosive report that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service had warned Trudeau’s senior campaign officials that Don Valley North MP Han Dong was a “witting affiliate” of a Beijing-funded election-campaign network, rather than confirm or deny the reports Trudeau did it again: “One of the things we’ve seen unfortunately over the past years is a rise in anti-Asian racism linked to the pandemic, and concerns being arisen around people’s loyalties.”
It’s true enough that racists exploited the widespread disgust with Beijing’s deliberate disinformation and censorship about the origins of the coronavirus in Wuhan, and ethnic Chinese communities in Canada suffered for it. But it takes a great leap into conspiracy theory to warrant the conjuring of century-old bigotries to explain away genuine alarm about Xi Jinping’s exploitation of western weaknesses in his militarized designs for a world order unrestrained by the universal rights norms established at the close of the Second World War.
The bogeyman-conjuring is a propaganda device. One of its most habitual users is Senator Yuen Pau Woo, who has gone so far as to raise the spectre of a recrudescence of the 1923 Chinese exclusion laws and the notorious Chinese head tax in his efforts to undermine the push for a proper foreign-influence registry law.
While this idea appealed to some historically illiterate white “social-justice” hobbyists, ethnic Chinese activists who are targeted by the United Front’s intimidation tactics, and others who spent years fighting for head tax redress, were less than impressed. The veteran Vancouver campaigner Bill Chu had this to say about Woo and his claim: “I can’t see how he can complete his statement with a straight face.”
But Woo says many things with a straight face that we’re expected to accept as normal and reasonable contributions to the debate about Beijing’s long reach into Canadian political life.
Woo is himself one of the most devoted defenders of the Beijing regime in Canada. His maiden speech in the Senate counselled against Canada siding with international law in the matter of Xi Jinping’s arbitrary and illegal annexation of the South China Sea. Woo assisted in the blocking of a Senate resolution condemning the ongoing genocide of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Praised by the Chinese embassy as a person of vision, Woo has consistently opposed Senator Leo Housakos’ Bill S237, the Foreign Influence Registry and Accountability Act.
Now that Trudeau has recently caved to pressure, announcing a consultation process that will conclude in late May on a proposed Foreign Influence Transparency Act, Woo seems to have been driven to extraordinary flights of rhetoric. In the Ottawa Citizen this week Woo was at it again with a tortured-logic rebuke of “a frenzy of insinuations about disloyalty” that he claims is underway following revelations detailing Beijing’s election interference operations.
The reports “have been based on selectively leaked classified documents from anonymous sources” that should be understood as rumours, Woo says. A deep-state plot, in other words. “And what of the revelations? They are based largely on the observation that Canadian politicians, myself included, have had interactions with Chinese officials in the country.”
This is rubbish. Beijing’s influence operations in Canada have been underway for years, “compromising officials, elected officials and individuals at all levels of government, within industry, within civil society, using our open and free society for their nefarious purposes.” That is not some anonymous CSIS tipster talking to some imaginary racist journalist. It is not a rumour. It’s an otherwise commonplace account from Adam Fisher, the CSIS director general for intelligence assessments, at a recent House of Commons committee meeting.
There is nothing fundamentally new in what security-agency whistleblowers have been revealing lately. It’s the shocking details that are newsworthy, but those details are not just coming from anonymous sources. They’re found in reports the Trudeau government has inexplicably ignored from the National Security Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians, and reports from the Privy Council’s Intelligence Assessment Secretariat, and public reports from CSIS, going back years.
And those reports expose the disgrace of quite a few upstanding senators and cabinet ministers and corporate chief executives and news organizations who have been asleep at the switch while all this has been going on, in plain sight, for years.
The conjuring of bogeyman is not going to forestall the inevitable reckoning, so we should all just grow up and get on with it.
Terry Glavin is an author and journalist.