Did China and India meddle in the Conservative leadership race?
By Andrew Coyne
Guess who didn’t want to get security clearance for the intelligence reports for the CSIS documents?
Conservative Party officials could hardly contain their excitement. It was the summer of last year, in the middle of the federal leadership race. The party, they announced, had sold some 613,000 new memberships by the June 3 cutoff date – more than twice the previous record, set during the 2020 leadership race, and several times more than any other party had ever sold.
Observers struggled to explain this extraordinary surge in interest in selecting the leader of a thrice-defeated opposition party. Was it the candidates? Was it the party’s policies? Discontent with the governing Liberals? The ease of purchasing online?
It now appears there may have been another contributing factor. They may have had help. Reporting in recent weeks by the journalist Sam Cooper has revealed CSIS’s concerns that the governments of China and India were active participants in the race, notably as buyers of party memberships.
According to Mr. Cooper, a top-secret intelligence assessment from October, 2022, “strongly suggests” Beijing “financially infiltrated the federal Conservative’s 2022 leadership contest.” Specifically, Mr. Cooper quotes the document as saying China attempted, through proxies, “to elect a federal party’s new leader, purchasing party memberships to support an unidentified candidate, with the objective of tempering the federal party’s perceived ‘anti-China’ stance.”
Separately Mr. Cooper reports, based on the same document, that agents of the government of India also “appear to have interfered in the Conservatives’ 2022 leadership race.” He quotes CSIS as saying India provided ”support to an elected Canadian politician’s campaign for the leadership of a political party in Canada, by securing party memberships for that campaign.” |Read more https://archive.is/2023.12.13-114944/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-did-china-and-india-meddle-in-the-conservative-leadership-race/#selection-2283.0-2303.1 | archive.is/2023.12.13-114944/t…
October 2022 Intelligence Assessment suggests https://www.thebureau.news/p/indian-proxies-funding-canadian-politicians Indian Consulate interfered in Conservative Federal leadership contest
Canadian Mayoral candidate got clandestine financial support from community leaders mobilized by Chinese Consulate https://www.thebureau.news/p/exclusive-csis-report-says-china in 2022 and 2018: “Intelligence Assessment”
The Indian Consulate lobbied at least one MP to retract their support for Brown https://www.baaznews.org/p/cpc-leadership-race-indian-foreign-interference and also barred Brown from attending Indian community events during the CPC leadership race