cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/11997018

Ottawa’s confidential RCMP deal with Beijing’s Ministry of Public Security ignores the Hogue Commission’s own verdict and Taiwan’s hard-won warning.

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Ottawa’s January trade deal with Beijing let 49,000 Chinese electric vehicles a year into Canada at a 6.1 percent tariff, down from 100 percent, in exchange for China cutting its canola seed tariff to roughly 15 percent from 75.8 percent. Buried in the same strategic partnership is a confidential agreement between the RCMP and China’s Ministry of Public Security, the 2-million-strong apparatus Beijing uses to police dissent at home and track its diaspora abroad. Hub contributor Graeme Gordon‘s interview with Jürgen Kremb, the former Der Spiegel Beijing bureau chief now researching Chinese intelligence from Taipei, shows Canadians exactly what that ministry does when no one is watching.

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Taiwan is the control group. Kremb puts the number of people working for Chinese intelligence on the island at 60,000 to 70,000, well above the National Security Bureau’s dated estimate of 5,000 and the military investigative bureau’s 30,000; criminologist Puma Shen says 100,000. Taiwan’s critical infrastructure absorbs 2.6 million cyberattacks a day. One of its largest newspapers, the China Times, and the cable channel CtiTV belong to a businessman whose food-processing fortune was made on the mainland, and Beijing’s Taiwan Affairs Office phones the newsroom each afternoon with instructions. Kremb’s verdict is blunt: “The war has already started.”

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Under Xi Jinping’s national security law, every Chinese citizen and company is obliged to assist the intelligence services when asked, and refusal invites pressure on family back home. The agent who surveilled the Taiwanese president’s son in the United States worked as a real estate agent and trained at Beijing’s University for International Relations, a spy school. Kremb describes Taiwan as “a sort of testing field” for methods later deployed against the broader democratic world, Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia included. The Ministry of Public Security has already opened illegal Chinese police stations in Canada, Europe, and Australia.

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Canada does not need a foreign scholar to tell it this. The Hogue Commission concluded that China is the most persistent and sophisticated interference threat to Canadian democracy, operating through proxies, diplomats and United Front networks. Mark Carney named China as Canada’s biggest security threat on the campaign trail, then stood in Beijing less than a year later to announce a “new world order.” On a Toronto sidewalk outside the Chinese consulate, a man in a Chinese-flag jacket told Falun Gong demonstrators the ground was “Chinese territory” and that under the Anti-Secession Law, “I could shoot you.”

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Ottawa should publish the RCMP agreement with the Ministry of Public Security, bar any data-sharing touching Canada’s diaspora communities, and make continued co-operation conditional on the verified closure of Beijing’s police stations on Canadian soil. With Donald Trump calling a stalled $14-billion Taiwan arms package “a very good negotiating chip,” Canada cannot outsource its vigilance to Washington. Taiwan’s experience shows Beijing does not need to fire a shot to hollow out a democracy. A country that invites the ministry in writes the first chapter itself.

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