Commentary
Normally, when countries seek each other’s assistance on criminal matters, they first seek to establish a bilateral agreement on information exchange. Then, once this is achieved, they identify agencies of like-minded mandates to collaborate with each other. This is how mature nations conduct business among themselves.
Say, for example, that person A is wanted for a serious crime in China but travels/escapes to Canada. If the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Canada have an extradition treaty in place, the former can ask the latter (through the RCMP, for example) to arrest the suspect and hand him or her over for detention and trial (not that Chinese trials are free and fair but that is a completely different matter).
What China cannot and must not be allowed to do is to issue a “bounty” on the head of the person they want arrested and encourage people in Canada to take the law into their own hands, seize the individual in question, and frog-march him or her to the nearest Chinese diplomatic premise, thereby collecting the money. Nor should it encourage “proxies” to do its dirty work.
And yet that is exactly what happened when Liberal candidate Paul Chiang recommended that anyone could hand over Conservative candidate Joe Tay, who also happens to be a human-rights advocate, to the Chinese Consulate in Toronto and claim a bounty put on him by Hong Kong authorities. Not only is this questionable and possibly illegal, but it smells a lot like continuing foreign (i.e., PRC) interference in our electoral process. After all, if a candidate is sent back to China he can’t easily run for office, can he?
Despite initial party foot-dragging on whether this kind of act should be OK in Canada, Mr. Chiang eventually dropped out of the race and was replaced by former Toronto police deputy chief Peter Yuen. But for those who think that PRC fingers in the electoral pie were finally removed, think again: Mr. Yuen has also been associated with pro-PRC leanings.
Related Stories
The bigger question in all of this is why in heaven’s name are candidates for party status not vetted? Why do none of the parties put in place detailed procedures to ensure that their nominees at a minimum are not acting at the behest of a foreign power? How difficult can this be?
In truth, not hard at all.
We already have an organization, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), which has decades of experience in security vetting. This is normally associated with refugee and citizenship cases but could easily be expanded to include election candidates. After all, CSIS already investigates tens of thousands of those seeking status in Canada every year—the security screening branch is by far the busiest operational section in the agency—and adding a few hundred individuals every couple of years would not tax it onerously.
Of course, all parties would have to agree to this step, and we all know that consensus in politics is a rare occurrence these days. If one party were to sign up, however, and others decline, Canadians would know which one truly cares about national security and is serious about foreign interference (another topic broached on few occasions in election campaigns).
China should not get away with planting its people in our democracy, with or without party acquiescence. The ways to prevent this to the maximal extent are already in place, work relatively well, and need to be adhered to. That no one in Canada seems to want to protect our systems speaks volumes and tells our friends that we are the weak underbelly of the alliance.
This is not the Wild West. We don’t need leading officials urging our citizens to take the law into their own hands and become bounty hunters. Leave that function to cheap Netflix series, thank you.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
