Has Beijing-controlled media in Canada enabled election interference?

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This is just an excerpt from The Ezra Levant Show. To see new, ad-free episodes, which air Monday - Friday @ 8 p.m. ET | 6 p.m. MT, become a subscriber to RebelNews+. This episode originally aired on August 9, 2023.

On last night’s episode of The Ezra Levant Show, guest host David Menzies spoke with Andy Lee, Rebel News' China Affairs reporter about her deep dive into "Beijing-controlled media in Canada" that allegedly enabled election interference.

Andy told David the latest, spurred by a report from former Global News journalist Sam Cooper:

So Sam Cooper has received some more CSIS documents, leaked some CSIS documents that outline that there is a pro-Beijing campaign, it's apparently massively funded.

This isn't entirely surprising, and we've done some work and some original reporting on some of those media outlets that are tied to the Chinese Communist Party and the United Front Work Department.

So we did put out an article and I'm going to put out more on one establishment that's called Red Maple News. And the president of Red Maple News also works for Russia Today. She goes overseas. She goes to the political conferences for the United Front Work Department and she also volunteers for Justin Trudeau and has got some personal invites to Parliament Hill from Justin Trudeau.

She explained what is so different about Sam Cooper’s new documents:

But Sam Cooper's documents outline something a little bit new and that was that mainstream media has also been targeted in what he called a massively funded foreign influence campaign. So that was a bit of a bombshell revelation.

And again, not surprising that we've got Chinese-based news outlets and this volunteer who works for Trudeau, she does have an office in China. So, she is partly based out of China. So not entirely shocking that she would be cozying up to political leaders and trying to push some pro-Beijing messaging and things like that.

And doing some work for the United Front, not shocking, but a little bit shocking to find it in our domestic stations right here at home.

“Andy, has it [foreign interference] been effective for the liberals?” asked David. She answered:

It's very, very difficult to gauge. we know that interference happens. They say that it wasn't enough to affect the election results.

I think it’s very hard to gauge again because there is a lot of these electoral campaigns and things like that, that are pushed by people who might have ties to the Chinese Communist Party or ties to the United Front. And when I say that, I mean that this isn't under dispute. Some of them have got personal invitations that I've seen from Xi Jinping inviting them to meetings overseas like this.

So this isn't in dispute that they have dual loyalties if they're not outright here working for China. So a lot of them run hometown associations. We know that they stem from some main ones and then they branch off and there are hundreds of these, I mean, they consist of tens of thousands of members who are probably sympathetic to those causes.

I'm not going to say that every Chinese community association is for an operation, that's not the case at all. And a lot of them literally do good work in the community and that's how they sort of get away with this, is they fall into this gray zone where maybe they're not outright committing something that might be criminal in our country yet — unless we get some sort of stronger legislation.

But they do definitely have some underlying motivation and some loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party.