On July 14, 2014, a Facebook account belonging to Biwei Zhang, the woman now accused of spying inside NATO’s military command and of membership in a criminal organization, published a photograph of Justin Trudeau speaking from a stage at the Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel, in a ballroom holding several hundred guests seated at banquet tables, phones raised toward the podium.
Five years later, applying for a job in the federal public service, Zhang — by then a university student in Toronto, having come to Canada from China — wrote that she had volunteered on an election campaign for the Liberal Party of Canada. She did not say which one.
Zhang has been held in Belgium since late July, after an investigating judge placed a Canadian national under arrest on charges of espionage and participation in a criminal organization. Belgian investigators have not said which country she is accused of spying for, but Reuters named China, citing government sources. The allegations have not been tested in court, and she is appealing her continued detention.
She has been identified through online profiles by numerous outlets, and a federal source told the Canadian Press this week that officials in Canada are proceeding on the basis that the suspect is Zhang.
The case has raised substantial questions about how she was screened under Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government. Court records, as The Bureau first reported, show Zhang was found to have committed fraud in an application to the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), a finding upheld by the Federal Court eleven months before she took up her post at allied command — one of several markers visible in the public record and in her own online profile.
Jody Thomas, the former national security adviser to Justin Trudeau, told CTV News that Zhang’s case raises a lot of questions and that what was known at the time of her vetting has to be explored.
She said the government will have to do comprehensive “reverse engineering” to understand who Zhang truly is, pointing back to her first Canadian government job, in 2017.
But the July 2014 photographs analyzed by The Bureau pull that timeline back three years further, placing Zhang in proximity to the future Liberal prime minister Thomas would eventually serve — and to the Toronto fundraising networks Trudeau would later have to answer for, after accounts of sensitive CSIS investigations were leaked to The Globe and Mail and to this writer.
