Dominic LeBlanc, Minister of Public Safety, Democratic Instituions and Intergovernment Affairs speaks in the Foyer of the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, on May 6.Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press
Charles Burton is a former diplomat at Canada’s embassy in Beijing and a senior fellow at Sinopsis.cz, a global China-focused think tank based in Prague.
Last week, Minister of Public Safety and Democratic Institutions Dominic LeBlanc announced that the federal government would introduce Bill C-70 (An Act respecting countering foreign interference) in response to the initial report of Justice Marie-Josée Hogue’s public inquiry into foreign interference. That was a surprise – both the announcement itself, and how well the bill was drafted.
In recent years, many China watchers have developed a layer of cynicism, or at least low expectations, regarding pronouncements on China by Ottawa. For nearly a decade, many Canadians – myself included – have been calling for strict legislation to upgrade our safeguards in the name of detecting, disrupting and protecting Canadians against foreign interference threats. Even this spring’s testimony at the Hogue Inquiry, which prompted public demands for full transparency from anyone who influences Canada’s China policy – specifically, around whether or not they have a conflict of interest because they receive money or other benefits from Beijing – left many observers resigned to yet more rounds of “it’s complicated” from the Prime Minister and his cabinet.
Now, Ottawa has proposed a tough bill that would “deter foreign principals from making efforts to influence political or governmental processes in Canada in a non-transparent manner,” including by introducing the Foreign Influence Transparency and Accountability Act (FITAA), which creates a foreign-influencer registry.
What led to such a shift is itself murky. But it looks very much like this legislation will be passed mostly unamended through Parliament, regardless of which party wins the next election. Once you factor in normal timelines for reviewing and refining proposed legislation, and allow for an election in the next year, the Act could be implemented by 2027.
Concerns previously raised by some senior Liberals – that it will be comparable in its effects to the 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act or the internment of Japanese Canadians in the Second World War, or that it will fuel anti-Asian racism in Canada – have suddenly vaporized. (That speculation had always lacked evidence, anyway.)
It is apparent that much of the new legislation is patterned on Australia’s 2018 Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme Act. In the run-up to that law being enacted, several prominent Australian political figures resigned from China-related boards and consultancies, including Andrew Robb, who, as minister for trade and investment from 2013 to 2016, had been responsible for shaping the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement.
Months after stepping down from cabinet, Mr. Robb announced that he had joined the Landbridge Group, a Chinese company that in 2015 had been granted a 99-year lease on Port Darwin in northern Australia, as a “high-level economic consultant”; that role paid him nearly $800,000 a year. In 2019, just before Australia launched its foreign-influencer registry, it emerged that Mr. Robb had quietly resigned from his consultancy. Here in Canada, as our own new legislation nears implementation, we can expect similar resignations by prominent figures from Chinese boards and consultancies.
While FITAA won’t be in effect for some time, its abrupt promulgation should have a more immediate dampening effect on the operations of Beijing’s agents. Elite Canadians will suddenly realize that accepting lucrative positions on Chinese boards and consultancies will be seen as nothing more than a humiliating moral compromise: agreeing to the compensation, free trips to Beijing and business opportunities will require tacitly supporting whatever CCP foreign-policy outrage Xi Jinping comes up with, and being complicit in genocide in Xinjiang and other violations of international human rights law going on inside China.
Justice Hogue’s report earlier this month also noted that her mandate is to investigate potential foreign interference with “executive decision-making by Cabinet and its ministers in relation to their departments, including indirect foreign interference with ministerial decisions when such decisions are based on information originating at a lower level of government covertly influenced by a foreign state (or its proxy, agent, etc.).” One wonders if, in her final report in December, she will provide more damning insights into potential Chinese regime coercion of high-level Canadian government officials. The more revelations that come to the fore through the declassification of CSIS assessments, the more Canadians will wonder how high the rot goes.
Emily Brontë once described May as “the month of expectation, the month of wishes, the month of hope.” Hopefully, Justice Hogue’s promising initial report and Bill C-70 released this month will mark the opening of a new and sunnier era in Canada-China relations.