Sam Cooper

The Bureau’s review of national security records suggests that despite this high-level awareness, no public action—and likely no significant action at all—was taken to mitigate PRC interference before or after the Vancouver election. This mirrors what critics describe as a broader pattern of inaction in the Trudeau government’s response to threats against the 2019 and 2021 federal elections.

Newly appointed Prime Minister Mark Carney’s chief of staff, former Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino, received an explosive “restricted distribution report” several days after Vancouver’s 2022 mayoral election, following his department’s apparent inaction on repeated warnings from CSIS months earlier about Beijing’s alleged efforts to unseat incumbent Kennedy Stewart and elect a new Chinese-Canadian candidate, federal documents obtained by The Bureau indicate.

Public Safety Canada records—including an October 21, 2022, Canadian Eyes Only brief distributed to Mendicino and then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s national security advisor Jody Thomas—confirm that in May 2022, CSIS provided Stewart with a “defensive briefing” on electoral interference by the People’s Republic of China. These documents shed new light on Stewart’s subsequent claims that CSIS informed him they had escalated concerns to Ottawa, only to be met with indifference.

One of the redacted intelligence documents, a March 2023 CSIS Issues Management Brief—prepared for Trudeau’s Privy Council Office—addresses Stewart’s explosive statement in a CBC interview that month, in which he alleged that CSIS officers told him: “We’ve been sending reports up the chain and nobody’s paying any attention.”

Mendicino and his predecessor, former Public Safety Minister Bill Blair, have taken up key positions in Prime Minister Carney’s nascent administration, which has pitched itself as an emergency cabinet formed to respond to escalating tensions with Washington. President Donald Trump has imposed sweeping tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China, citing their alleged failures to stem fentanyl trafficking that he says is devastating American communities.

Yet, as Carney’s government navigates an increasingly volatile geopolitical landscape—marked by rising tensions and the growing risk of armed conflict between Washington and Beijing—new intelligence records analyzed exclusively by The Bureau reveal troubling national security vulnerabilities that persist from Trudeau’s regime into Carney’s.

The documents suggest that the same passive approach to Beijing’s interference—critics say characterized Bill Blair’s tenure as public safety minister, particularly in the months-long delay in 2021 of a national security warrant targeting a Liberal powerbroker and potentially implicating members of Trudeau’s caucus—persisted under Mendicino.

Public Safety Canada, Marco Mendicino, and Prime Minister Carney’s office did not respond to detailed questions for this story.

Among the newly reviewed records obtained by The Bureau, the October 21, 2022, post-Vancouver election report stands out for its high classification, restricted circulation, and sensitive content, highlighting the severity of threats in British Columbia—a key hub for Beijing’s United Front election interference and diaspora repression operations.

Labeled “Caution: Restricted Distribution Report,” the document explicitly states, “This report contains sensitive information. Distribution must be confined exclusively to,” Mendicino, his deputy minister and chief of staff, and Trudeau’s national security advisor.

While much of the record remains heavily censored, key excerpts reveal its significance.

The document explicitly references PRC electoral interference, detailing Beijing’s “long history of mobilizing support for preferred candidates at all levels of government.” It further warns that the PRC “is known to target and/or leverage family as part of its FI (foreign interference) and other threat activity.”

“The Minister of Public Safety is scheduled to meet with [redacted] team on Monday, October 24, 2022,” it says. “CSIS is providing pertinent information regarding [redacted] for the Minister’s attention in advance of the meeting.”

A related intelligence report, dated March 30, 2023, and obtained through access-to-information requests, details how Ottawa internally handled Stewart’s post-election allegations that warnings from CSIS’s Vancouver China desk were ignored. The briefing states:

“Former Vancouver Mayor, Kennedy STEWART, told CBC News that when he was interviewed by CSIS in May 2022, CSIS told him: “‘We’ve been sending reports up the chain and nobody’s paying any attention,’ thus being the ‘reason to approach’ him.”

While a series of redacted paragraphs prevents full confirmation of this allegation, the visible portions of the report confirm that Stewart was briefed by CSIS. More importantly, the document underscores the extensive scope of such briefings across Canada, revealing the breadth of China’s foreign interference activities—and, in hindsight, the Liberal government’s failure to act until media exposure forced scrutiny of this and other alleged election interference cases in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections.

“The officers informed STEWART that, because CSIS assesses the threat posed by foreign interference is growing, CSIS is increasingly carrying out this kind of outreach across the country,” the document states. “Similar briefings are being offered to elected officials and candidates at all levels of government—federal, provincial, and municipal—across the political spectrum.”

The document appears to partially support claims that CSIS officers in Vancouver were frustrated by Ottawa’s inaction on their intelligence warnings—a concern echoed by Toronto-based China desk officers regarding Bill Blair’s handling of a national security warrant in 2021. This aligns with evidence presented to Ottawa’s Hogue Commission, which examined allegations that Trudeau’s government failed to act on CSIS’s urgent warnings about China.

Stewart’s case only surfaced after reporting by The Globe and Mail on leaked intelligence documents, which The Bureau has also reviewed.

The Globe’s reporting revealed that CSIS documents showed China’s then-consul-general in Vancouver, Tong Xiaoling, sought to mobilize the Chinese diaspora to support a specific Chinese-Canadian candidate in the 2022 municipal election. According to CSIS intelligence, Tong also aimed to assess and potentially “groom” individuals who would be favorable to Beijing’s interests.

Following The Globe’s report, Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim reacted angrily, asserting that claims his campaign had benefited from Chinese consulate interference would not have been made “if I was a Caucasian.” BC Premier David Eby backed Sim, calling on CSIS to provide clarity on the allegations.

A January 2022 document, cited in The Globe’s reporting and also obtained in full by The Bureau, says that China’s Consul General in Vancouver “stated that they needed” to rally Chinese diaspora voters in Vancouver’s 2022 mayoral election “to come out and elect a specific Chinese-Canadian candidate,” because “the candidate will rely on those votes.”

What The Globe didn’t report, however, is the CSIS record’s allegation that Tong had previously interfered.

“This report demonstrates CG Tong’s continued interest in involving herself in Canadian electoral processes to benefit the PRC,” states the document obtained by The Bureau.

This could be significant, as a related October 2022 CSIS Intelligence Assessment—obtained exclusively by The Bureau—appears to reference the Vancouver election without naming the city or specific individuals. The report states:

“CSIS intelligence from November 2021 and late April/early May 2022 found a People’s Republic of China consulate was clandestinely supporting a particular mayoral candidate in an upcoming municipal election.”

The assessment goes further, detailing how “the Consulate has mobilized the leadership of three co-opted Chinese-Canadian community groups to provide material and financial support for this candidate.”

In what may be the most damning passage, the document states:

“It is noteworthy that the PRC Consulate supported this same mayoral candidate in the 2018 municipal election and used the same community groups to clandestinely channel this support.”

Stewart, who narrowly defeated Ken Sim in Vancouver’s 2018 mayoral election before losing his re-election bid to Sim by a decisive margin, has suggested that PRC-backed actors with influence in Vancouver’s real estate sector seemingly targeted his campaign by undermining his fundraising efforts.

In interviews with The Bureau, Stewart said that in late May 2022, CSIS warned him that China was likely to interfere in Vancouver’s upcoming municipal election and that Beijing-controlled or influenced Chinese-language media outlets in British Columbia were instrumental.

The Bureau’s analysis of intelligence documents obtained through an access-to-information request on the Vancouver election supports Stewart’s account. A March 21, 2022, CSIS Intelligence Assessment detailed the PRC’s “sophisticated, pervasive, and persistent” electoral interference efforts, warning that Beijing’s activities “undermine Canadian sovereignty” and that PRC-controlled media could “exacerbate the spread of misinformation.”

“A large number of Chinese speakers of foreign citizenship—and of some politicians seeking their votes in liberal democracies—regularly use social media platforms that are subject to PRC censorship (i.e., WeChat),” the CSIS assessment states, adding that “WeChat’s design as a platform can exacerbate the spread of misinformation.”

“The Political Chain”

Back in March 2023, in an interview with CBC regarding the Globe and Mail’s report on the Vancouver election, Stewart was asked whether the alleged comments from CSIS briefers in May 2022 suggested inaction at a level higher than CSIS leadership in Ottawa.

“They went over the basics but also asked a lot of questions about what we were noticing,” Stewart said. “When I asked them why they were briefing me, they said, ‘We’ve been sending reports up the chain and nobody’s paying any attention.’ So they thought somebody should know.”

The CBC interviewer pressed him on the implications:

“Sending reports up the chain, but nobody paying attention. That’s exactly what they said to you? Did they give you a sense of where the chain was—whether this was the CSIS chain or the political chain? Do you have any idea what they meant by that?”

Stewart’s response underscored the tight-lipped nature of the briefing.

“I don’t. It was highly unusual. I mean, I was a mayor of a city—why was CSIS briefing me? That’s for them to answer.”

CSIS did not respond by deadline for this story on Tuesday afternoon.

Meanwhile, other documents reviewed for this story show that a May 17, 2022, CSIS Issues Management Brief, labeled “Secret,” flagged concerns about PRC interference and was distributed to Public Safety Canada. It stated that CSIS would engage officials and candidates likely to be targets of clandestine foreign interference. While redacted, the timing and description align with Stewart’s recollection of his CSIS briefing.

Four months before Vancouver’s election, a classified eight-page document dated June 15, 2022, was circulated among a select group of Ottawa’s top national security and intelligence officials, including Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino. Though entirely redacted, the document reveals— in hindsight—that the officials receiving this briefing held direct oversight of national security and foreign interference mitigation and were responsible for informing Prime Minister Trudeau of serious concerns. Mendicino, now Chief of Staff to Prime Minister Mark Carney, was the principal recipient due to his oversight of CSIS and the RCMP. “Please share with Minister Mendicino,” the document states, instructing his office to provide feedback via a secure form.

Another recipient, Dan Costello, Senior Foreign and Defence Policy Advisor to the Prime Minister, had direct responsibility for national security coordination at the highest political level. Likewise, Jody Thomas, as Trudeau’s National Security and Intelligence Advisor, was responsible for coordinating intelligence and briefing the Prime Minister. Rob Stewart, then Deputy Minister of Public Safety, played a key role in intelligence briefings on foreign interference. Also included in the circulation was Janice Charette, then Clerk of the Privy Council and Canada’s highest-ranking civil servant, now reportedly leading Mark Carney’s transition team. Nathalie Drouin, Deputy Clerk of the Privy Council, was another key figure involved in intelligence and security policy. David Morrison, then Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, oversaw diplomatic intelligence related to China’s activities in Canada.

The Bureau’s review of national security records suggests that despite this high-level awareness, no public action—and likely no significant action at all—was taken to mitigate PRC interference before or after the Vancouver election. This mirrors what critics describe as a broader pattern of inaction in the Trudeau government’s response to threats against the 2019 and 2021 federal elections.

Meanwhile, a related 2023 CSIS Intelligence Assessment, obtained by The Bureau through access to information, confirms that the PRC poses the greatest national security threat to Canada, engaging in espionage, foreign interference, economic infiltration, and cyber operations. The assessment details China’s strategic efforts to exploit trade and investment ties, shape Canadian economic policy, and target government and corporate sectors for intelligence collection. It also underscores that China’s cyber operations are part of an aggressive geopolitical strategy, undeterred by repeated public exposure of its activities.

Beyond China, other states identified as engaging in foreign interference and cyber threats include Russia, India, and Iran—though none match the PRC in the scale and impact of their activities against Canada.

From EnergyNow.ca

By Jim Warren

A minority Liberal victory in our upcoming federal election has the potential to take anti-Ottawa sentiment on the prairies to a whole new level. That’s because a Carney government can be expected to frustrate the legitimate aspirations of millions of Western Canadians. It’s what Liberals do.

Obviously, one of the most pressing economic concerns of the oil producing provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan is the collection of Liberal policies which are restricting growth in Canada’s non-renewable resource sector. Liberal anti-oil and anti-pipeline measures have hamstrung the capacity of the producing provinces to increase the revenue generating capacity of the oil and gas sector. They have restricted the ability of prairie people to benefit from the ingenuity, sweat and capital they have invested in their resources industries. The right to those benefits was supposedly guaranteed under the Canadian constitution.

It is far from clear that a Carney government would get behind developing increased export capacity for oil and gas. Previous statements Carney has made in support of new pipelines were clearly disingenuous. He supported a revival of Energy East when speaking in Kelowna. He went so far as to suggest the emergency powers of the government could be used to get it built. But during the French leadership debate he said Quebec would be given the power to veto any such project. Carney’s handlers should tell him it is impossible for both statements to be true at the same time.

Furthermore, Carney has expressed no intention of dismantling the labyrinthine approval processes and the legalized disruption of construction which makes export pipelines impossible to build (at least without incurring jaw dropping cost overruns). If those policy measures remain in place any pipeline given some sort of special approval, could still remain vulnerable to legal challenges and retroactive cancellation and shut down.

Let’s say special emergency approval for a pipeline is granted but the Impact Assessment Act (Bill C-69) and other onerous environmental regulations are allowed to remain in place. Couldn’t construction still be delayed or the line re-routed whenever a bird nest, arrowhead or rare plant is found on the right-of-way? Will protesters who block construction be treated with kid gloves or more like horn-honking truckers? Those are the sorts of issues that contributed to the $34 billion in cost overruns that plagued construction of the TMX.

There are, no doubt, measures a federal government could take to minimize these sorts of threats. Nevertheless, many of us expect a Carney government would not be prepared to provide truly bullet proof guarantees to new pipeline projects. The Liberals and their core supporters are too deeply invested in climate alarmist ideology to allow for the unfettered completion of pipelines or continued growth in oil and gas production.

The Liberals have already shown us who they are. They were very reluctant to enforce the law against environmental protesters during the period leading up to the cancellation of the Northern Gateway and the Keystone XL. In fact they awarded federal grants to activist organizations that helped organize protests and anti-pipeline court challenges.

Retroactive cancellation of previously approved oil production projects is a tactic recently embraced by environmental groups like Greenpeace in the UK. The Liberals’ allies in the environmental movement can be expected to apply a similar approach to new and pre-existing pipelines in Canada. The activists will no doubt be able to rely on grants from the Liberal government to fund their efforts.

There are approximately 75,000 people directly employed in extracting and transporting gas and oil on the prairies and about twice that number whose jobs rely indirectly on the sector. Several hundreds of thousands more understand how the ripple effects of the changing fortunes of the resource sector affect their province’s economies. For the past nine years those people’s interests and complaints have been ignored, frustrated and attacked by the Liberals and their allies in the environmental movement.

If the past is prologue, it is a safe bet the prairie West will be ignored and abused again should the Liberals pull off a minority election win. Their backers in the Bloc and NDP will insist on it. However, rejecting the reasonable aspirations of a large minority or majority of the citizens in the two major oil producing provinces is guaranteed to produce a precipitous decline in national harmony.

It is true there are large numbers of low information voters and woke supporters of environmental extremism in some of the big cities in the West. They are likely to elect a Liberal or two to the next parliament. But they do not represent the views of the people who create most of the wealth in the West—the people who risk their own capital and help build a more vibrant economy, as well as most of the people whose jobs involve sweating. Annoying these people, in order to garner support among the environmentally sanctimonious in Montreal and Toronto, will not make for a stronger, more united Canada.

Similarly, there are tens of thousands of farm operators who are vehemently opposed to Liberal backed measures that will limit their use of fertilizer and penalize them for owning cattle. Saskatchewan’s potash miners won’t take kindly to the imposition of export taxes on their products to save jobs in Ontario and Quebec. These are all capable people—and they don’t take being pushed around lightly.

Central Canadian fantasies about placing export taxes on Western oil shipped to the US, have already angered people in the producing provinces. Anti-Ottawa feelings on the prairies would surpass the boiling point if a Carney government actually attempted to do it.

An all too common response of federal Liberals and the talking heads in the mainstream media to spikes in Western alienation is to smugly claim, “They’ll get over it.” Don’t count on it.

Following a Liberal election win, expect court challenges over the abrogation provincial rights under the constitution and outright defiance of federal policies detrimental to Alberta and Saskatchewan. The federal government may face the prospect of having to arrest popular politicians for refusing to comply with unfair federal policies.

Cabinet Ministers in Saskatchewan have already said they would risk imprisonment for refusing to charge the carbon tax on natural gas used for home heating. The Saskatchewan government has also refused to comply with Liberal regulations requiring coal-fired power plants to be shut down by 2035. They have indicated the province can simply not afford to transition to renewables or nuclear within such a tight time frame.

Carney has had nothing to say about rescinding inane one-size-fits-all federal environmental regulations. Included in the class of mindless federal policies are plans to force people from the colder parts of the prairies to purchase electric cars and heat pumps even though they don’t function properly here in winter. We can expect many prairie people to resist the compulsory transition to EVs. And, as is the case with Liberal gun control laws, governments on the prairies are likely to ensure federal rules are lightly enforced.

More significantly, Carney would be confronted by a campaign to make significant changes to Canadian federalism that will provide greater autonomy to the prairies provinces. An additional bottom line demand will be the creation of constitutionally guaranteed energy corridors, allowing for the construction and protection of pipelines from the prairies to Canada’s coasts.

We are at a critical inflection point in our history that could influence the economic fortunes of Alberta and Saskatchewan for the rest of this century. There is a good chance that during the last half of this century renewable energy will be displacing non-renewable energy at a rate that reduces global demand for oil and gas. If this turns out to be the case, failing to get new pipelines built in the next decade will virtually guarantee a significant portion of Canada’s proven oil reserves will remain forever stranded. Hundreds of billions in potential revenues could been lost. That is, by the way, one of the goals shared by Mark Carney and the alarmist factions of the environmental movement.

Barring substantive reforms to federalism, including meaningful concessions to the producing provinces, the prospects for national harmony and less fractious federal-provincial relations are bleak. A Conservative majority victory in the upcoming federal election is clearly more likely to result in fair treatment for Alberta and Saskatchewan than a win for the Carney Liberals. Mark Carney doesn’t appear to realize heightened levels of alienation in the producing provinces have the potential to raise discontent to levels not seen since the days of the National Energy Program.

The next election could well be our last chance to ensure the producing provinces are permitted to maximize their constitutionally guaranteed capacity to generate non-renewable resource revenues.