I’ve been covering Beijing’s influence-peddling rackets in the highest levels of Canadian political, corporate and academic circles for well over a decade now, and I haven’t seen anything quite like this. There’s no way of sugar-coating it.
In recent weeks, Trudeau and Mendicino have gone to such creepy lengths to downplay, dismiss and even cover up the extent of Beijing’s election monkeywrenching that it’s become impossible to paper over a deep rupture that has opened up in the relationship between the Prime Minister’s Office and the senior ranks of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service.
That rupture will only get deeper now that Trudeau’s response to the revelations about the Chinese Communist Party’s 2021 election-jimmying operation is: CSIS needs to shut the hell up. The Globe’s access to the contents of those CSIS reports is “certainly a sign that security within CSIS needs to be reviewed,” Trudeau said last Friday. “And I’m expecting CSIS to take the issue very seriously.”
This isn’t how a government goes about its professed devotion to “transparency and accountability.” Count on it: the breakdown in the CSIS-PMO relationship is severe enough that intelligence officials are already familiarizing themselves with the “public interest” exemptions in the Security of Information Act – the 1985 successor to the Official Secrets Act. […]
It’s fairly routine for CSIS case officers to complain that the intelligence they procure goes up the line and nothing much seems to come of it. But what’s happening right now is not even close to routine. This is a much bigger deal than the calumny former CSIS director Richard Fadden had to endure back in 2010 after he disclosed that provincial cabinet ministers in B.C. and Ontario had come under Beijing’s sway.
Given the many smoking-gun details in the CSIS files made available to the Globe and Mail, it’s perhaps understandable that the Trudeau cabinet’s efforts to hush everything up has garnered less attention. The collapse in the CSIS-PMO relationship has gone mostly unnoticed. So let’s notice something here, shall we?
Related: Liberal Minister @marcomendicino won’t say if he knew about Foreign Police Stations before it was reported in the media.

