2025 Federal Election
Researchers Link China’s Intelligence and Elite Influence Arms to B.C. Government, Liberal Party, and Trudeau-Appointed Senator
Sam Cooper
“The PRC uses its UFWD in Canada and around the world to stifle criticism and manipulate Canadian communities. These activities constitute a threat to Canada’s sovereignty and to the safety of Canadians.”
A powerful new investigative map released by diaspora researchers traces political ties reaching from Chinese Communist Party-controlled intelligence networks to the highest levels of British Columbia’s government. The visual exposé centers on Senator Yuen Pau Woo and his pivotal role in welcoming Chinese state-linked entities into Canadian institutions—an effort that resonates in a secretly recorded 2020 meeting obtained by The Bureau, in which Woo assured United Front figures he would help shield them from critical scrutiny.
These same United Front entities have been credited by Beijing for their role in promoting Chinese Canadian candidates during federal election campaigns.
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Woo was appointed to the Senate by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2016, with an official announcement citing his work with the same entities now identified by diaspora researchers as Chinese-influenced trade lobbies.
The map, titled “From Ottawa to Victoria,” is part of the ongoing Dotting the Map series from Canadian Friends of Hong Kong and Found in Translation, two diaspora-led civil society groups. Built from open-source records, the map draws direct lines between United Front-aligned business, political, and media organizations and prominent Canadian leaders, including Senator Woo, former BC Liberal Premier Christy Clark, ex-minister Teresa Wat, Premier David Eby’s advisor Ding Guo, and Rise Media journalists.
The researchers caution that no individual named in their report is alleged to be knowingly involved in Chinese influence activities. Rather, the mapping effort is designed to educate voters by highlighting verified affiliations to Chinese state or military-linked organizations.
Rise Media—as reported by The Bureau—played a key role in supporting Mark Carney’s current Liberal candidate Parm Bains in the 2021 contest, in which Bains upset Conservative incumbent Kenny Chiu. That Richmond riding is one of the top three examples of Chinese election interference overturning Conservative candidates, according to former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole.
At the center of the new Dotting the Map diagram is Senator Woo, shown helping open pathways for China Poly Group, a state conglomerate tied to the People’s Liberation Army, and Poly Culture, its cultural diplomacy arm. The map shows that under the Liberal Christy Clark government—with Woo’s active involvement—British Columbia approved multi-million-dollar partnerships with numerous shadowy Chinese entities via HQ Vancouver, a Canadian “public-private” entity created to draw foreign investment into Canada.
Woo’s name is also linked through board roles and event partnerships to the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada and various CCP-aligned think tanks, including those tied through joint programming to the International Liaison Department, a CCP foreign intelligence arm.
According to the map, Woo co-organized a 2010 event in Canada with Henry Huiyao Wang, founder of the Centre for China & Globalization—a think tank under the ILD that directly advises the Chinese State Council. Wang and Woo co-wrote articles and maintained overt links through the Asia Pacific Foundation during Woo’s tenure as president and CEO.
According to political scientist Anne-Marie Brady, the ILD is “tasked with gathering intelligence on foreign politicians and political parties, and developing asset relations with them.”
In Justin Trudeau’s October 2016 appointment notice, Woo is credited for works including:
“As President and CEO of the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada from 2005 to 2014, he led a major expansion of the organization and spearheaded the ‘National Conversation on Asia’, a three-year cross-Canada campaign to highlight the growing importance of Asia in the world and for Canada. Currently, he serves as President of HQ Vancouver, a public-private partnership established to promote British Columbia as a head office location for global firms.”
According to the map, Teresa Wat, while serving as a minister in Christy Clark’s Liberal government, extended Belt and Road cooperation to British Columbia, joined Huawei and a local telecom firm in 5G research initiatives, participated in multiple PRC-affiliated delegations, and came from a background in Chinese state-linked media. She is also listed as having facilitated the involvement of Chinese real estate tycoons in provincial-level discussions on infrastructure and housing.
The map identifies Ding Guo, founder of the Canada Committee 100 Society (CCS100), as a critical node. Guo is shown as a journalist from Shanghai who transitioned into a leadership role in B.C. Chinese-language media and political mobilization.
As previously reported by The Bureau, in December 2021, then-Attorney General David Eby approved a $20,000 provincial grant to CCS100, citing its anti-racism and Chinese diaspora engagement goals. The grant was awarded while Guo served as a Chinese community advisor to Eby. A February 2021 report from a Chinese Communist Party organ cited CCS100 among several Canadian groups praised for “voter education, mobilization, and fundraising” efforts during the 2019 election cycle.
Premier Eby also awarded Ding Guo the King Charles III Coronation Medal, the researchers found.
Kenny Zhang, also named in the map, is shown occupying a dual role as a former executive director of HQ Vancouver and head researcher with Ding Guo’s CCS100. He was affiliated with Rise Media, which promoted Liberal candidate Parm Bains over MP Kenny Chiu during the 2021 federal election campaign—and Zhang was also awarded a King Charles III Coronation Medal by Senator Yuen Pau Woo.
The Bureau’s publication of the “Woo Tape” forms part of the evidentiary spine of the researchers’ latest map. All three—Ding Guo, Kenny Zhang, and Senator Yuen Pau Woo—were present in this groundbreaking piece of evidence.
In the May 2020 recording, Senator Woo tells CCS100 leaders, including Ding Guo, that he will help protect their organizations from scrutiny in Canadian public discourse, including inside Parliament.
The remote-online meeting, captured on audio and visual files held by The Bureau, included figures tied to United Front-linked institutions and media outlets aligned with PRC narratives. In the meeting, Woo states: “Whether you belong to an organization, that happens to be listed as a United Front organization, should not be a litmus test.”
He continues: “I am fighting very hard,” against this type of criticism.
The statements closely mirror the PRC’s own foreign messaging, which frequently defends its overseas political networks as benign civic or cultural organizations.
When The Bureau sent detailed questions to Senator Woo regarding the recording, Woo advised that questions should be directed to the Hogue Commission.
The Bureau also provided the tape-recorded evidence to CSIS and asked the Service to comment on whether the statements are relevant to Woo’s intervener status in the Hogue Commission.
“Individuals purposefully aligning themselves with United Front Work Department (UFWD) designated organizations should understand its ongoing actions targeting members of Canadian communities with harassment, manipulation or intimidation,” spokesman Eric Balsam wrote, in a statement that didn’t name Senator Woo. “The PRC uses its UFWD in Canada and around the world to stifle criticism and manipulate Canadian communities. These activities constitute a threat to Canada’s sovereignty and to the safety of Canadians.”
The researchers’ findings—meant to educate voters during a Canadian election in which Prime Minister Mark Carney has already been boosted by disinformation from elite Chinese Communist Party intelligence entities—take on added significance in light of sections of the map that link Senator Woo, the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada, and affiliated organizations to the International Liaison Department (ILD).
The ILD is a powerful arm of the Chinese Communist Party that experts identify as a covert influence and foreign intelligence agency operating globally on behalf of Beijing’s political interests.
In his 2022 book, Spies and Lies: How China’s Greatest Covert Operations Fooled the World, author and analyst Alex Joske details how the ILD has historically conducted clandestine activities aimed at shaping foreign perceptions and policymaking in favor of the CCP. His research shows that the department plays a central role in executing covert influence operations targeting political, business, and academic elites abroad.
Meanwhile, as previously reported by The Bureau, a report that praised Premier David Eby’s advisor Ding Guo for helping mobilize Chinese Canadian voters in 2019 also highlighted the importance of the Liberal Party leader’s outreach to the Chinese community in that contest. It noted that “Trudeau Jr. personally went to seek votes at a Chinese supermarket in Markham, an area of Toronto where Chinese people live, demonstrating that Chinese votes play an important role in the general election.”
The report, published by ACFROC (a United Front-linked organization), also emphasized the key role of WeChat in rallying voters. It said 41 federal election candidates seen as “of special interest” to Beijing were nominated by different parties in the 2019 race—an increase from “only 27 and 23 in 2015 and 2011.”
Charles Burton, a respected China expert and Mandarin-language analyst, reviewed the report for The Bureau. He said the document “identifies 41 ‘distinguished’ Chinese candidates nominated in 2019, so I judge that the use of ‘distinguished’ implies identification of candidates potentially useful to the United Front’s aims.”
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Dan McTeague
Cards on the table, I’m skeptical of the current state of the polling in this election. My sense is that Mark Carney and the Liberals’ numbers are, at least in part, a byproduct of sympathetic pollsters over-sampling their key demographics, and those being trumpeted to high heaven by the publicly-funded media. That, coupled with voters’ justifiable annoyance at Donald Trump’s “51st State” cracks and tariff threats, has contributed to an illusion of enthusiasm, a sense that they are running away with this thing.
That said, one polling data point has struck me as being both real and important. A recent Abacus Data poll showed that, when you cut out all the distractions, Canadians’ biggest concern remains our inflated cost of living. And that is an issue which clearly favors Poilievre and the Conservatives.
That’s because the dire state of our economy can largely be laid at the feet of the Liberals, who’ve been running the show for the past decade. Yes, they’ve made a change at the top, but not much of one. On top of being a globe-trotting member of the “Green” Elite, and champion of environmentalist banking, Mark Carney was a Liberal advisor for years, a key part of the Trudeau “brain trust” — trust me, I use that term loosely — that cooked up a whole raft of economy smothering “Green” policies which have done nothing to reduce global carbon emissions, but have succeeded in lightening our wallets.
Under Trudeau, our annual GDP growth noticeably shifted from the 3% range towards the end of the Harper years to the 1% range more recently. Household debt-to-income ratios rose steadily in the same period, while real household spending per capita dropped 2-3% below 2019 levels by 2024, as costs and interest rates went up. Disposable income growth has been outpaced by inflation and taxes, and bankruptcy filings have risen 40% since just 2019.
Canadian food prices have exploded by 35-40%, with family spending up over 50% over the past decade. Consequently, food insecurity rose to 23% by 2023, from around 8% in 2015, and Food Banks Canada has reported a 78% surge in usage from 2019 to 2023.
Meanwhile, Canada’s national debt, which was just over $600 billion when Justin Trudeau was handed the federal credit card, has roughly doubled, reaching over $1.2 trillion by the time he left. And provincial debt has risen by about $1 trillion in the same period.
It’s a frightening financial snapshot. And many of these negatives can be attributed to the Liberals’ war on oil and gas, which remains — however much Carney might wish otherwise — the backbone of our national economy.
So much of the Liberals’ time and effort in government has been spent kneecapping the resource sector, and for purely ideological reasons. From Bill C-48, the Oil Tanker Moratorium Act of 2019, which significantly reduces our ability to sell oil and gas abroad, to Bill C-69, which added mountains of red tape for infrastructure projects, so much so that it was nicknamed the “No More Pipelines” Act.
You’ll remember that the Supreme Court ruled the “No More Pipelines” act largely unconstitutional two years ago. Even so, Carney recently said he has no intention of repealing it, prompting Poilievre to tweet out, “This Liberal law blocked BILLIONS of dollars of investment in oil & gas projects, pipelines, LNG plants, mines, and so much more,” with an excellent infographic attached, listing the various cancelled energy projects throughout Canada since the Liberals came to power.
And then of course, there’s the Consumer Carbon Tax, which started out at $20 per tonne of CO2 emitted in 2019, small enough that many Canadians barely noticed they were paying it, but increased every year until it hit $80 per tonne.
By that point it became so noticeable and unpopular that the Liberals felt they had no choice but to “cancel” it (“zero it out” is more accurate), before it could reach the $170 by 2030 which they’d planned. Still, it remains on the books, ready to be raised again, without a vote, if Carney so chooses.
Even if he doesn’t, Carney has doubled down on the Industrial Carbon Tax. While the Liberals claim this is an improvement because it isn’t paid by working Canadians, only by big evil “polluters.” Of course, they said something similar about the Consumer Tax, that by some financial wizardry, we regular folks would get back more than we paid in, which turned out to be total bunk.
Meanwhile, the Industrial Tax makes our lives more expensive in essentially the same way as the Consumer Tax. It raises the cost of doing business, of heating our homes, of filling up our car, of our grocery bills. It just does so by a less direct route, by taxing businesses instead of individuals, so that we pay when the price of goods and services goes up in response.
The Industrial Carbon Tax, much like Trudeau’s Clean Fuel Regulations, is ultimately a hidden tax, and that suits Carney just fine. He’d prefer that we not know who to blame as our cost of living skyrockets.
The Liberal Party’s economic record over since 2015 has been atrocious, and it will be no different under Mark Carney. He is complicit, and he continues to support policies which would make us poorer, like Bill S-243, the “Climate-Aligned Finance Act,” which Carney testified before the Senate in support of last year. That bill sought to make it nearly impossible for banks to invest in, or loan money to, oil and gas projects in Canada, and tried to force financial institutions to appoint board members ideologically opposed to fossil fuels.
Canada needs to change course, and soon. As things stand, it will be tough for even a good captain to navigate us through the rough seas the Liberals have steered us into over the past ten years. A few more, and with Mark Carney at the helm, might make that impossible.
Dan McTeague is President of Canadians for Affordable Energy.
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From the Fraser Institute
In the preamble to the Paris Agreement, world leaders loftily declared they would keep temperature rises “well below 2°C” and perhaps even under 1.5°C. That was never on the cards—it would have required the world’s economies to effectively come to a grinding halt.
The truth is that the “net zero” green agenda, based on massive subsidies and expensive legislation, will likely cost more than CAD$38 trillion per year across the century, making it utterly unattractive to voters in almost every nation on Earth.
When President Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement for the first time in 2017, then-Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was quick to claim the moral high ground, declaring that “we will continue to work with our domestic and international partners to drive progress on one of the greatest challenges we face as a world.”
Trudeau has now been swept from the stage. On his first day back in office, President Trump signed an executive order that again begins the formal, twelve-month-long process of withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement.
It will be tempting for Canada to step anew into the void left by the United States. But if the goal is to make effective climate policy, whoever is Canada’s prime minister needs to avoid empty virtue signaling. It would be easy for Canada to declare again that it’ll form a “coalition of the willing” with Europe. The truth is that, just like last time, that approach would do next to nothing for the planet.
Climate summits have generated vast amounts of attention and breathless reporting giving the impression that they are crucial to the planet’s survival. Scratch the surface, and the results are far less impressive. In 2021, the world promised to phase-down coal. Since then, global coal consumption has only gone up. Virtually every summit has promised to cut emissions but they’ve increased almost every single year, and 2024 reached a new high.
Way before the Paris Agreement was inked, the Kyoto Protocol was once sold as a key part of the solution to global warming. Yet studies show it achieved virtually nothing for climate change.
In the preamble to the Paris Agreement, world leaders loftily declared they would keep temperature rises “well below 2°C” and perhaps even under 1.5°C. That was never on the cards—it would have required the world’s economies to effectively come to a grinding halt.
The truth is that the “net zero” green agenda, based on massive subsidies and expensive legislation, will likely cost more than CAD$38 trillion per year across the century, making it utterly unattractive to voters in almost every nation on Earth.
The awkward reality is that emissions from Canada, the EU, and other countries pursuing climate policies matter little in the 21st century. Canada likely only makes up about 1.5 per cent of the world’s emissions. Add together Canada’s output with that of every single country of the rich-world OECD, and this only makes up about one-fifth of global emissions this century, using the United Nations’ ‘middle of the road’ forecast. The other four-fifths of emissions come mostly from China, India and Africa.
Even if wealthy countries like Canada impoverish themselves, the result is tiny — run the UN’s standard climate model with and without Canada going net-zero in 2050, and the difference is immeasurable even in 2100. Moreover, much of the production and emissions just move to the Global South—and even less is achieved.
One good example of this is the United Kingdom, which—like Prime Minister Trudeau once did—has leaned into climate policies, suggesting it would lead the efforts for strong climate agreements. British families are paying a heavy price for their government going farther than almost any other in pursuing the climate agenda: just the inflation-adjusted electricity price, weighted across households and industry, has tripled from 2003 to 2023, mostly because of climate policies. This need not have been so: the US electricity price has remained almost unchanged over the same period.
The effect on families is devastating. Had prices stayed at 2003 levels, an average family-of-four would now be spending CAD$3,380 on electricity—which includes indirect industry costs. Instead, it now pays $9,740 per year.
Rising electricity costs make investment less attractive: European businesses pay triple US electricity costs, and nearly two-thirds of European companies say energy prices are now a major impediment to investment.
The Paris Treaty approach is fundamentally flawed. Carbon emissions continue to grow because cheap, reliable power, mostly from fossil fuels, drives economic growth. Wealthy countries like Canada, the US, and European Union members have started to cut emissions—often by shifting production elsewhere—but the rest of the world remains focused on eradicating poverty.
Poor countries will rightly reject making carbon cuts unless there is a huge flow of “climate aid” from rich nations, and want trillions of US dollars per year. That won’t happen. The new US government will not pay, and the other rich countries cannot foot the bill alone.
Without these huge transfers of wealth, China, India and many other developing countries will disavow expensive climate policies, too. This potentially leaves a rag-tag group led by a few Western European progressive nations, which can scarcely afford their own policies and have no ability to pay off everyone else.
When the United States withdrew from the Paris Agreement in 2017, Canada’s doubling down on the Paris Treaty sent the signal that it would be worthwhile spending hundreds of trillions of dollars to make no real difference to temperatures. We fool ourselves if we pretend that doing so for a second time will help the planet.
We need to realize that fixing climate change isn’t about sanctimonious summits, lofty speeches, and bluster. In coming weeks I’ll outline the case for efficient policies like innovation, adaptation and prosperity.
Bjørn Lomborg
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