The Chinatown gate on March 9, 2023 in Montreal. Quebec RCMP said they were investigating two alleged secret police stations operated by Chinese authorities in the province.Ryan Remiorz
Look, we get it: Being in government can bury you under a crush of urgent and competing priorities, especially when you keep falling further behind in the polls and have a tax-raising budget to sell to skeptical Canadians who are happy to blame you for a laundry list of ills.
But there is nothing that excuses the Trudeau government’s failure to create a foreign-agents registry as part of a needed bulwark against meddling by China and other countries in the democratic life of this country.
With 18 months or less until the next federal election, and with all the evidence from the previous two votes of Beijing’s efforts to influence voters and riding outcomes in ways that favour the Chinese Communist Party, it is unfathomable that the government has yet to act on a remedy that it first floated in 2021.
Since then, the Liberals have held a public consultation on the merits of a foreign-agents registry in which the conclusion was, yes, we need one, but have taken scant action to make it so – even though they said the needed legislation would come last year.
They have also let two private members’ bills creating such a registry either die on the order paper or languish unloved in the current Parliament.
And yet, at the same time, they have seen the potential effectiveness of just such a law in the United States, where the Federal Bureau of Investigation last year used the 86-year-old Foreign Agents Registration Act to arrest Chinese agents suspected of trying to intimidate Chinese citizens in the U.S. – an activity that also appears to be taking place in Canada in so-called “police stations” operated by Beijing.
Previously, the FBI used FARA to pursue investigations into Russian agents involved in suspected election meddling and influence-peddling in Washington after the 2016 U.S. election.
The Liberals can also look for inspiration to Australia, which adopted the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme Act in 2018. Or to Britain, where the Foreign Influence Registration Scheme is scheduled to come into force this year.
In all three cases, the laws require anyone working, paid or otherwise, to influence governments, elections or citizens on behalf of the interests of a foreign power to register their presence and activities.
The laws include fines and jail sentences for foreign agents that fail to register. In the absence of other laws, it’s reasonable to believe that a foreign-agent registry would give the RCMP something to hang charges on against the operators of Beijing’s sordid illegal police stations in Canada.
It could also be used to deter proxies of the Chinese government that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) says sought to influence election outcomes in 2019 and 2021. According to CSIS, Canada is a “high-priority target” for Beijing, in part because the absence of a disincentive like a foreign-agents registry means China sees its activities in this country as “low-risk and high reward.”
So why hasn’t the Liberal government acted? Last year, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made a false comparison between a foreign-agents registry and the internment of Japanese- and Italian-Canadians during the Second World War.
In fact, there is no such comparison to be made. The registries in the U.S. and Australia have not led to the arbitrary rounding up of people based on their ancestry. Instead, those registries serve to protect the very diaspora groups targeted by foreign governments.
A properly written law would target malign actors without capturing innocent people who simply express an opinion or carry out normal activities. All the existing registries make exceptions for diplomats and their families, and for lawyers and business consultants acting for foreign governments or state-controlled companies. The U.S. registry makes exemptions for humanitarian fundraising, and for religious, scholastic, academic, fine arts and scientific pursuits.
The Liberal government has more than enough information to craft a well-balanced version of the law it has repeatedly promised but mysteriously never produced.
What it doesn’t have, and which Canadians don’t have, is a lot of time. If the Liberals want to create a foreign-agents registry that could have an impact on the election scheduled for October, 2025, they need to introduce the necessary legislation before the House rises in June.
Anything else will be, at this point, a dereliction of duty.