From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Lee Harding

Immigrants are beginning to question the sacrifices they made to come to Canada, signalling deeper problems facing the country

Whenever I meet someone who immigrated to Canada from a warm place, I am always remarkably impressed. The choice to deliberately leave a pleasant, warm homeland to endure our cold winters says a lot. Overall, living in Canada is apparently better, and that should make us grateful. But what should concern us is how that upside is becoming less apparent all the time.

I recall almost a decade ago sharing a meal with Filipinos. One showed me a picture of the oceanside home he left behind where he could successfully catch fish every day without leaving home. Why would he ever leave a place like that? The answer was jobs.

It’s remarkable how Filipinos can do any job with a smile and, regardless of how little it might pay, send money to their family in their country of origin. I once told a young Filipino working at a McDonald’s to keep the change from my purchase because he was sending money back to his family. He smiled with a bit of surprise that a stranger like me would know that. He also gave me back my change, just to stay honest.

Older stock Canadians used to be like Filipinos, characterized by faith, family, hard work and gratitude. I’m afraid all four aspects have eroded in mainstream Canadian culture in recent decades, especially in the past 10 years.

At my gym two years ago, I met a Sikh named Jagjeet Singh and asked him how he liked Canada. He said when he arrived in 2019, the country was paradise on earth. Now, he said, it was turning into a s___hole. My memory fails on some of his exact observations. I only recall his disdain for the Trudeau government and the NDP leader whose name sounded a lot like his own.

While immigration to Canada remains robust, some newcomers are souring on Canada for very good reasons. This is worthy of our attention.

Maclean’s has featured several stories about immigrant struggles over the past two years, including Eleanor Zhang’s. The international student started her studies at Dalhousie University in Halifax in 2016. Back then, rent was $700 a month, people were friendly, and life was good.

By 2021, she felt things had turned for the worse. The city’s population had grown by 9.1 per cent in five years. Congested traffic left drivers angry. Her friends shared stories of their cars being broken into and items stolen. Zhang’s rent was $1,670 per month, and her grocery bills had skyrocketed. For the first time, she saw people living in the park.

Zhang wanted to start her own gift shop, but commercial spaces were so expensive that she saw little room for profit. She had fallen in love with Canada but also fell out of it. Her pursuit of a prosperous life took her back to Beijing.

Canada used to be a patriotic country with robust free speech, a respectable military, strong family and moral values, an abundance of private sector jobs and quality education and health care. Today, not so much.

Some Canadians are aware of this decline and want a new direction, while others remain aloof, ignorant and insulated from the country’s erosion. Our last election offered fresh proof of the deep generational, occupational and regional divides in Canada.

The problem is, we have to build a country together. It is hard for a people so divided against itself to stand.

Like the story of Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, this holiday season is a good time to reflect on our past, present and future. We’re not what we were, and we could get worse, but we can also get better. As Scrooge found out, it’s not too late to turn things around and lay hold of the best Canada possible.

Lee Harding is a research fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Lee Harding

Alarming claims out of P.E.I. point to deep foreign interference, and the federal government keeps stalling. Why?

Explosive new allegations of Chinese interference in Prince Edward Island show Canada’s institutions may already be compromised and Ottawa has been slow to respond.

The revelations came out in August in a book entitled “Canada Under Siege: How PEI Became a Forward Operating Base for the Chinese Communist Party.” It was co-authored by former national director of the RCMP’s proceeds of crime program Garry Clement, who conducted an investigation with CSIS intelligence officer Michel Juneau-Katsuya.

In a press conference in Ottawa on Oct. 8, Clement referred to millions of dollars in cash transactions, suspicious land transfers and a network of corporations that resembled organized crime structures. Taken together, these details point to a vulnerability in Canada’s immigration and financial systems that appears far deeper than most Canadians have been told.

P.E.I.’s Provincial Nominee Program allows provinces to recommend immigrants for permanent residence based on local economic needs. It seems the program was exploited by wealthy applicants linked to Beijing to gain permanent residence in exchange for investments that often never materialized. It was all part of “money laundering, corruption, and elite capture at the highest levels.”

Hundreds of thousands of dollars came in crisp hundred-dollar bills on given weekends, amounting to millions over time. A monastery called Blessed Wisdom had set up a network of “corporations, land transfers, land flips, and citizens being paid under the table, cash for residences and property,” as was often done by organized crime.

Clement even called the Chinese government “the largest transnational organized crime group in the history of the world.” If true, the allegation raises an obvious question: how much of this activity has gone unnoticed or unchallenged by Canadian authorities, and why?

Dean Baxendale, CEO of the China Democracy Fund and Optimum Publishing International, published the book after five years of investigations.

“We followed the money, we followed the networks, and we followed the silence,” Baxendale said. “What we found were clear signs of elite capture, failed oversight and infiltration of Canadian institutions and political parties at the municipal, provincial and federal levels by actors aligned with the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department, the Ministry of State Security. In some cases, political donations have come from members of organized crime groups in our country and have certainly influenced political decision making over the years.”

For readers unfamiliar with them, the United Front Work Department is a Chinese Communist Party organization responsible for influence operations abroad, while the Ministry of State Security is China’s main civilian intelligence agency. Their involvement underscores the gravity of the allegations.

It is a troubling picture. Perhaps the reason Canada seems less and less like a democracy is that it has been compromised by foreign actors. And that same compromise appears to be hindering concrete actions in response.

One example Baxendale highlighted involved a PEI hotel. “We explore how a PEI hotel housed over 500 Chinese nationals, all allegedly trying to reclaim their $25,000 residency deposits, but who used a single hotel as their home address. The owner was charged by the CBSA, only to have the trial shut down by the federal government itself,” he said. The case became a key test of whether Canadian authorities were willing to pursue foreign interference through the courts.

The press conference came 476 days after Bill C-70 was passed to address foreign interference. The bill included the creation of Canada’s first foreign agent registry. Former MP Kevin Vuong rightly asked why the registry had not been authorized by cabinet. The delay raises doubts about Ottawa’s willingness to confront the problem directly.

“Why? What’s the reason for the delay?” Vuong asked.

Macdonald-Laurier Institute foreign policy director Christopher Coates called the revelations “beyond concerning” and warned, “The failures to adequately address our national security challenges threaten Canada’s relations with allies, impacting economic security and national prosperity.”

Former solicitor general of Canada and Prince Edward Island MP Wayne Easter called for a national inquiry into Beijing’s interference operations.

“There’s only one real way to get to the bottom of what is happening, and that would be a federal public inquiry,” Easter said. “We need a federal public inquiry that can subpoena witnesses, can trace bank accounts, can bring in people internationally, to get to the bottom of this issue.”

Baxendale called for “transparency, national scrutiny, and most of all for Canadians to wake up to the subtle siege under way.” This includes implementing a foreign influence transparency commissioner and a federal registry of beneficial owners.

If corruption runs as deeply as alleged, who will have the political will to properly respond? It will take more whistleblowers, changes in government and an insistent public to bring accountability. Without sustained pressure, the system that allowed these failures may also prevent their correction.

Lee Harding is a research fellow for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.