It’s a diplomatic reset that would have seemed unimaginable months ago. After years of mutual hostility, Canada and China are beginning to thaw their once-frosty relationship. But **former national security analyst and policy advisor Dennis Molinaro **says Canada’s failure to act on decades of Chinese intelligence warnings has hurt our country’s ability to meet current geopolitical challenges. He speaks with Piya Chattopadhyay about the long and complicated history of Canada-China relations – and the lessons that should be applied to today.
This is a podacst (19 min).
Dr. Molinaro is a researcher at the University of Ontario focusing on counter-intelligence, foreign interference, the history of intelligence and the use of emergency powers in peacetime.
Dennis Molinaro also wrote an opinion piece: China’s secret war in Canada
… the West’s interactions with nation-states such as the People’s Republic of China (PRC), they have been governed by a specific delusion for half a century. Canada … believed that if it did business with China, extended a hand of friendship, China would transform itself into a liberal-democratic country. Trade would lead to freedom. But Canada was wrong. Beijing never considered joining a liberal order and instead used Canada as a backdoor to the U.S. and as a means of exploiting resources and technology.
… The stories of secret PRC police stations in the news a little more than a year ago weren’t a new phenomenon. The PRC had been interfering and seeking to influence the political and civic life in Canada for decades. And Canadian leaders have done little to deter adversaries from operating here.
But how did such a situation arise? To date, Canadians have had diplomatic histories of the Canada-China relationship but an intelligence history wasn’t incorporated into them. That’s necessary if Canada hopes to have a realistic appraisal and understanding of the relationship.
… The China that Canada’s leaders saw and engaged with was one they invented in their own minds. They saw a potential market for wheat and potash. They saw a counterweight to the U.S. They convinced themselves that economic liberalization would inevitably lead to political freedom. They weren’t alone in this thinking, even the U.S. adopted it, though its defences against Beijing were more developed than Canada’s.
… But the truth was that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) used western openness to build its economy and modernize its military. They used western universities to train their scientists. The West dreamed of partnership while China planned for dominance.
… The regime in Beijing operates on a concept of transnational sovereignty. It believes anyone of Chinese descent, regardless of their citizenship, owes their loyalty to China. By this logic, it doesn’t respect Canada’s borders as it hunts its critics in Canada. It harasses the Uyghur community, Tibetans, the Falun Gong, and Hong Kong pro-democracy activists and Taiwan independence supporters. It uses threats against family members back home to silence dissidents in places such as Vancouver and Toronto.
… This is transnational repression. It’s a foreign state enforcing its political will on Canadian soil … The United Front Work Department is an arm of the Chinese Communist Party tasked with influencing foreign elites and controlling the PRC diaspora abroad. Its goal is to make foreign decision-makers sympathetic to Beijing’s interests, and it cultivates relationships with influential figures at all levels from school boards to Parliament. In return, it expects support for China’s interests and silence on its indiscretions. During the April 2024 Hogue inquiry into foreign interference, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service reported that it believed China interfered in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections.
…
Your comment perfectly demonstrates how liberal pedantry functions to obscure material reality. Your semantic argument about apartheid is superficially appealing but fundamentally ahistorical. Apartheid is not some unique cultural product of South Africa. It is a defined crime under international law, specifically the 1973 International Convention and the Rome Statute, which characterize it as inhuman acts committed to establish and maintain racial domination. To claim the term applies only to South Africa is as intellectually bankrupt as claiming genocide only describes the Holocaust.
The material conditions in Canada and the United States meet the legal definition precisely. First, the Indian Act creates a separate legal status for Indigenous people based on racial classification, directly mirroring South Africa’s Population Registration Act. Second, First Nations are confined to impoverished reserves comprising a fraction of the territory, a deliberate policy of segregation and underdevelopment identical to the Bantustan system. Third, Indigenous peoples continue to be systematically dispossessed of their land and resources without consent, as corporations and the state extract wealth for settler benefit. Fourth, the legacy of forced assimilation through residential schools and the ongoing removal of Indigenous children into state care constitutes cultural genocide. This is not ancient history. It is the active structure of the settler state.
Your attempted deflection regarding China only reinforces your bad faith. While Canada performs social progress, it presides over the ongoing genocide of Indigenous peoples. China, in contrast, has achieved unprecedented poverty alleviation and extends substantive equality to its ethnic minorities. Your moralizing about authoritarianism is the tired rhetoric of a declining empire, a desperate attempt to project its own inherent violence onto others. The real failure of values lies in defending a settler state built on and sustained by apartheid. Your narrow definition of the term is not scholarly rigor. It is an active act of colonial erasure.
I think the analogy would not be to say genocide refers to only the holocaust, but rather that “holocaust” refers to only the holocaust. Which I agree with, on the grounds that I rarely see people use the term “holocaust” generically, and when they do I assume it’s the same mistake as when people call all consoles “nintendos,” or when people think all Roman emperors are “Caesars.”
That said, apartheid is a generic term IMO.
I love that you wrote a book just to justify your willingness to completely ignore cultural context. The word is literally only ever invoked by the entire English speaking world to refer to, specifically, the system of segregation created in and for South Africa. It is literally the Afrikaan word for seperateness. You’re referencing documents created to define the crimes in South Africa, whose sole purpose is to specify that what was happening in South Africa is a crime against humanity.
You are literally evoking the etymology of the word to argue for the dismissal of the word’s context. And then, in a fit of irony, claim that I am the one arguing in bad faith. You truely cannot find a better display of psuedo-intellectualism on the internet.
This is a hilarious way to describe capturing it’s poorest citizens, shuffling them into work camps, and using them to prop up their economy. But hey, it’s easy to lie about a nation with a noose around the spread of information, so have fun cherry picking some state-sponsored lies to embarrass yourself further.
Also, you’re saying you had no interest in the original posts premise that Canada is selling out its values by connecting with China? Your only purpose here was to make a thinly-veiled jab at Canada, disregarding the purpose of this thread? Who’s here in bad faith again?
All this unhinged rant of yours really proves is that you love to use words with no regard for what they mean.
You continue to substitute etymology for material analysis. Your argument collapses the moment we distinguish between a word’s linguistic origin and its legal political definition. International law did not freeze the concept of apartheid in 20th century South Africa any more than it limited genocide to the Holocaust. The Rome Statute’s definition exists precisely to universalize the crime beyond its specific historical manifestation.
Your attempt to dismiss material reality with dictionary semantics demonstrates your utter lack of capacity to think logically. While you fixate on the Afrikaans word, Indigenous peoples live under the Indian Act’s segregated legal status, confined to underdeveloped reserves while their resources are extracted for settler capital. This is the literal structure of racial domination that international law defines as apartheid.
While you parrot debunked claims about Xinjiang that have been refuted by numerous international observers, you ignore Canada’s actual ongoing colonial violence. This isn’t even about defending China. It’s about your refusal to acknowledge that Canada maintains a settler state through systematic racial oppression.
The actual bad faith here is your insistence that we must only use South Africa as our reference point while ignoring that Canada perfected these techniques of Indigenous dispossession and control centuries earlier. Your semantic argument is just sophistry to avoid acknowledging that apartheid is the active architecture of every settler colonial state, including Canada.
The only one using words with no regard for what they mean is you. Take the L and run back to reddit where trolls like you belong.
Oh, Yog. Punching strawmen and proclaiming himself the heavyweight champion of the world. I never made any of the claims you seem to think I have made. I never even defended Canada’s treatment of indigenous peoples. Once again, you make shit up and then claim some kind of moral victory.
I can’t take the L when you don’t deliver one. The irony of declaring I should “run back to reddit,” while you’re using the tactics perfected in that space would be cute, if it wasn’t so dangerous. It’s like seeing an infant play with a gun, really.
You did get one thing right though: I am just trolling you, because that’s all you fascist tankies deserve. The only place China’s crimes have been “debunked,” are in your echo chambers; the rest of the world knows better. Now, in a little tit-for-tat, how about you crawl back to your precious .ml, where you can continue to ban dissenting opinions? It makes it so much easier to lie.
Oh Glide, you adorable little rascal. Should try reading the drivel your wrote when you’re sober. The only one doing straw man bullshit here is you I’m afraid. Thanks for confirming that you are just a racist troll with an axe to grind though. Life’s gonna get hard for human garbage like you going forward, and I’m here for it. If my presence here makes you uncomfortable, that’s tough. Get used to it little fash.
yawn
He even lies to himself.
oh hey remember how your racist ass slithered away when I actually provided sources on how full of shit you are? 🤣 https://lemmy.ml/post/39575573/22480188
No, but I do remember not wasting my time reading a pile of drivel from dubious sources.
Ah yes, dubious sources like Columbia International University, CTV, AP, and so on. 🤣
Not to disrespect your argument, but low key you’re using some real reddit-style language yourself. You’re kinda dodging making any points of substance and instead substituting in academic vocabulary to make it look like you have the upper hand. It’s a bit cringe and NGL kinda looks like AI.
What points am I dodging specifically? I’ve directly addressed the argument and pointed out with examples how sophistry is being used to obscure the fact that what’s happening in Canada is functionally indistinguishable from the apartheid in South Africa. I love how you attack my writing style while distracting from the substance of my argument.