Sam Cooper

The evolving nature of these operations may signal a broader effort to influence not only Canada’s general elections but also to shape the selection of the country’s next unelected Prime Minister.

Canada’s election security watchdog has uncovered a coordinated disinformation campaign linked to the People’s Republic of China targeting Chrystia Freeland, a leading candidate against Mark Carney for the Liberal Party leadership.

A statement released Friday by the Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections Task Force (SITE) revealed that the digital attack was launched on WeChat, a dominant Chinese social media platform, and amplified through at least 30 accounts linked to pro-Beijing influence networks. Experts have previously identified these sources as aligned with PRC-backed information operations.

Freeland has faced some pressure within Liberal circles for asserting that Carney is the favored candidate of Trudeau’s elite staff and the Liberal establishment, after making the statements in a CBC interview.

SITE has briefed the Liberal Party’s executive and Freeland’s campaign team on its findings, emphasizing that it will continue monitoring foreign digital threats that seek to manipulate Canada’s democratic process.

“We will continue to monitor the digital information environment for foreign information manipulation and shine a light on hostile foreign state-backed information operations,” SITE said.

The findings recall a similar interference effort detected during the 2021 federal election, as documented in evidence before the Hogue Commission. At the time, analysts determined that an online disinformation campaign had sought to discourage Canadians of Chinese heritage from supporting the Conservative Party and its leader, Erin O’Toole. The campaign particularly targeted Kenny Chiu, the former Conservative candidate for Steveston-Richmond East, falsely portraying him as anti-China in a coordinated messaging effort across WeChat and Chinese-language media.

In both cases—the 2021 campaign against Conservative candidates and the emerging attack on Freeland—SITE observed coordinated messaging patterns originating from WeChat accounts and Chinese-language news sources tied to Beijing.

During the 2021 election, SITE assessed that false narratives about Chiu and the Conservative Party were widely circulated through WeChat, Douyin (TikTok’s Chinese counterpart), and other digital platforms. Three of the first Chinese-language news accounts to spread the false claims were members of a media partnership with China News Service, a PRC state-run agency operating under the United Front Work Department, Beijing’s key overseas influence arm.

SITE’s findings suggest a similar strategy may now be in play, with Freeland’s leadership campaign becoming a new focal point for online manipulation. The disinformation campaign generated significant engagement, with WeChat articles attacking Freeland drawing more than 140,000 interactions between January 29 and February 3, 2025. SITE estimates between two to three million WeChat users globally may have been exposed to the narratives. The false claims appear to have originated from WeChat’s most popular news account, an anonymous blog previously linked by experts at China Digital Times to Beijing’s influence network, according to SITE’s statement.

SITE’s analysis suggests PRC-linked actors may have viewed the 2021 effort as successful, particularly given the defeat of Chiu and other Conservative candidates in ridings with large Chinese-Canadian populations. If Beijing perceived that operation as effective, it could explain why a similar approach is now targeting an internal leadership race within the governing Liberal Party.

The evolving nature of these operations may signal a broader effort to influence not only Canada’s general elections but also its leadership contests—ultimately shaping the selection of the country’s next unelected Prime Minister.

This story is developing. The Bureau will provide further updates as more details emerge.

By John Leake

USAID gave Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance $207 million between 2009 and October 2019, right when SARS-COv-2 began to spread

With revelations emerging about USAID’s spending spree on friends and pet projects, I was reminded of the following April 2023 exchange between Senator Rand Paul and Samantha Power, Administrator of USAID from 2021 to 2025. I vividly remember the vexation I felt as I listened to the recording on my evening jog the next day. Note how she repeatedly looks Senator Paul directly in the eye and insists that USAID has disclosed the grant documents he has repeatedly requested, even though he repeatedly admonishes her that he KNOWS she isn’t telling him the truth because he has never seen them.

Note as well that in October 2019, when USAID officially ceased funding PREDICT, papers like the New York Times lamented that, bereft of such funds, the program would not be able to predict emerging infectious diseases.

A great deal of evidence indicates that this was precisely the time it became apparent that a novel SARS coronavirus was circulating in Wuhan, almost certainly the result of GoF research conducted as part of the PREDICT program.

In other words, PREDICT predicted nothing—it actually created the monster.

Yet another irony was a letter that Elizabeth Warren—the Supreme Self-Righteous Bloviator of the Senate (SSBS)—wrote on January 20, 2020 to the then Administrator Mark Green, demanding to know why PREDICT funding had been cut off.

I would bet a considerable sum that at least someone in USAID knew in October 2019 about the circulating monster that PREDICT had created with the assistance of the $207 million the agency had given the program over a ten year period.

The evidence is clear: USAID has long been a rogue agency that should indeed be brought under direct State Department Control with new, stringent transparency requirements about its activities and long prison times for people like Samantha Power who conceal the agency’s activities and then lie to Senators about them.