David Morrison, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, appears as a witness with representatives from Global Affairs Canada at the Foreign Interference Commission in Ottawa, on Oct. 4.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
Ottawa scrambled to deliver a tougher response to foreign meddling by China and India as it was confronted with revelations in The Globe and Mail and by a human-rights group about the targeting of MPs, the operation of illegal Chinese police stations and the slaying of a Canadian Sikh activist, the Hogue inquiry heard Friday.
Evidence and testimony at the public inquiry into foreign interference indicate these revelations last year forced Ottawa’s hand, leading to the expulsion of a Chinese diplomat in May and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s decision to go public with allegations that Indian agents orchestrated the killing of a Sikh Canadian leader on Canadian soil.
David Morrison, the deputy foreign affairs minister, told the inquiry that Mr. Trudeau and top foreign and security advisers tried to work quietly behind the scenes in the late summer of 2023 to get New Delhi to acknowledge that India agents had played a role in the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar that June, at a temple in Surrey, B.C.
But the Prime Minister decided to go public when he found out in September that The Globe had learned about India’s alleged role.
“The information did come out. It came out via leaks and it was after those leaks that the Prime Minister spoke in the House of Commons to say that Canada had credible intelligence about potential links between the government of India and the murder of Mr. Nijjar,” Mr. Morrison said.
Mr. Trudeau’s calling out of India led New Delhi to expel 41 Canadian diplomats, shutter three consulates in India, place a temporary ban on visas for Canadians and begin a disinformation campaign targeting the Prime Minister, he said.
Four people have since been arrested and face charges in Canada, but India continues to deny any involvement in Mr. Nijjar’s slaying.
“We are determined to continue working with the Indians to restore some semblance of the relationship that we had, but we need some accountability for what happened,” Mr. Morrison said.
China now more ‘audacious and sophisticated’ in foreign-interference operations, Hogue inquiry told
The inquiry, headed by Justice Marie-Josée Hogue, also heard that The Globe’s report on May 1, 2023, that Chinese diplomat Zhao Wei had targeted Conservative foreign affairs critic Michael Chong gave the government the justification to expel him.
“After The Globe article, it was quite evident that Mr. Zhao Wei’s position in Canada was untenable,” he said.
He added the department initially went to then-Chinese ambassador Cong Peiwu to urge him to withdraw the diplomat.
“The benefit of that would be that we wouldn’t have a tit-for-tat expulsion. That was an effort that ultimately failed,” Mr. Morrison said.
China refused the request and the Global Affairs Department subsequently discovered additional classified information on Mr. Zhao’s activities – unrelated to Mr. Chong – that further justified his expulsion.
“That piece of intelligence was of a higher level of classification,” Global Affairs official Philippe Lafortune testified. “It was completing the picture about how Zhao Wei functioned.”
Mr. Morrison also told the Hogue inquiry that he doesn’t consider China’s targeting of Mr. Chong and his Hong Kong relatives to be foreign interference. As The Globe reported, CSIS had warned Ottawa this was to gain leverage over Mr. Chong, who had upset Beijing by championing a motion criticizing China’s repression.
“The evidence is that Mr. Zhao Wei did not engage in foreign-interference activities with respect to Michael Chong,” he said.
Mr. Morrison also said that while China worked hard to defeat the 2021 House of Commons motion condemning Beijing’s repression of Uyghurs as genocide, he does not believe China’s actions on this constituted foreign interference, but rather a legitimate diplomatic campaign.
“China pulled out all the stops to try to swing the vote in its direction,” he said. Officials “called MPs, they called members of the diaspora communities whom they knew were contacts of MPs and they tried to influence MPs to vote against this motion.”
Mr. Morrison said it is normal for diplomats to gather information on legislators such as Mr. Chong, whom China had sanctioned for co-sponsoring the motion, passed unanimously by the Commons, that accused Beijing of committing genocide against Muslim Uyghurs.
After The Globe report in May, 2023, the government subsequently faced heavy criticism as to why Mr. Chong was not notified of the targeting when it took place in 2021. Mr. Trudeau then ordered a policy change to require the Canadian Security Intelligence Service to warn parliamentarians when it obtains information that they are being targeted by hostile foreign states.
The inquiry also heard that Ottawa had been unaware that China had set up illegal police stations in Canada, until it learned of these activities from Spain-based human-rights organization Safeguard Defenders.
The NGO revealed in 2022 that the Chinese government was secretly operating more than 100 illegal police centres in upwards of 50 countries, locations it said were part of Beijing’s growing transnational repression. The organization said that these operations monitor Chinese diaspora communities and play a role in coercing individuals to return to the People’s Republic of China to face criminal proceedings.
Although the RCMP had claimed they shut down the police stations, Global Affairs official Weldon Epp testified that the Chinese embassy informed them in November, 2022, that the stations were closed after Canada complained.
“They confirmed that these were shut down,” Mr. Epp said.