Leftist Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney reacted with outrage on Thursday when confronted about why he had taken photos with the leaders of a Chinese influence operation in Toronto, claiming he did not know what the group was.
The Jiangsu Commerce Council of Canada (JCCC), an organization promoting greater Chinese influence in the Canadian economy, boasted in early April of engaging in an “in-depth” meeting with Carney and praised him as a “financial giant,” claiming that he “praised the pioneering role of the Chinese business” in green energy, e-commerce, and other sectors.
A reporter representing the Globe and Mail newspaper asked Carney about the meeting on Thursday, leading to Carney insisting, “I’ve never heard of this group… full stop.” The JCCC published photos showing its leaders shaking hands with Carney as proof of their engagement with the prime minister.
Carney insisted in response to the photos that he meets with “hundreds and thousands” of people, arguing that he cannot be held responsible for knowing who he meets with.
The JCCC scandal is the latest in a flurry of revelations showing that Carney has, throughout his career prior to becoming prime minister, built extensive relationships with various arms of the Chinese Communist Party. Carney had never held public office or run for any political position before being appointed prime minister of the country in March, the result of his widely unpopular predecessor Justin Trudeau resigning. He served as the president of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, advised Trudeau on his disastrous Wuhan coronavirus response, and most recently worked for Brookfield Asset Management, a finance firm.
As part of his work with Brookfield, Carney visited Beijing in October when Chinese state media claimed that he advocated for “further expanding its business in Beijing.” Brookfield also recently secured a sweetheart loan from a Chinese bank worth $276 million.
The JCCC controversy is based on a post that the advocacy group published on its website in early April that appears to have been deleted after the Globe and Mail unearthed it on Thursday. It is still visible on internet archives, however.
The Chinese-text post, titled, “A Financial Giant Is in Charge of the Maple Leaf Country,” claimed that the president of the JCCC, Xu Xiaoguang, and honorary president Jiang Rui held an “in-depth meeting” with Carney in which the prime minister said it was “necessary to actively expand trade relations with countries such as South America, the United Kingdom, and the Asia-Pacific region” to “expand international market opportunities outside the United States.”
Allegedly Carney “highly praised the pioneering role of the Chinese business community in emerging fields such as clean technology, digital trade, and financial technology.”
The report also repeatedly praised Carney, stating that he enjoyed “both international prestige and local affection” and expressing hope that he could advance Canada on “climate change response, Arctic channel development, and free trade.”
“I’ve never heard of this group, okay?” Carney snapped at reporters on Thursday. “Never heard of this group. Certainly didn’t have a set-up meeting with this group. Full stop.”
Carney disparaged the Globe and Mail, a left-leaning newspaper, and urged journalists to “check your sources before you write,” ignoring the fact that the source was an article published by the group featuring photos of Carney at the event he said never happened. He then pivoted to arguing that, even if he did meet with the individuals in question, it was unfair to expect him to know who he meets with.
“I go to events where there are hundreds and thousands — you know, thousands — over the course of a day, of different people there,” Carney explained. “That is not a meeting. If somebody happens to be in the room, takes a picture with me, that’s not a meeting, okay?”
The Liberal Party disclosed that they had pressured the JCCC to remove their article from the internet, which they appear to have done as of Friday press time.
The Globe and Mail reported that the JCCC has direct ties to China’s United Front Work Department, an agency tasked with spreading communist propaganda around the world, increasing China’s influence on foreign governments, and changing foreign attitudes to be more friendly to Beijing’s interests.
The U.S. House Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party described the United Front Work group as “a unique blend of influence and interference activities, as well as intelligence operations that the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] uses to shape its political environment, including to influence other countries’ policy toward the PRC [People’s Republic of China] and to gain access to advanced foreign technology.”
Jiang, the JCCC “honorary president,” reportedly spoke at a United Front event in 2019, the Globe and Mail unveiled, promoting China’s predatory Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in which China offers predatory loans to poor countries.
Carney’s presence alongside JCCC officials follows the revelation this week by Canada’s Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections (SITE) Task Force that the Chinese government was behind a series of Chinese-language posts on the Chinese social media network WeChat describing Carney as a “rock star economist” and a “tough prime minister” capable of confronting American president Donald Trump. SITE, a government agency, bizarrely refused to describe the posts as favorable to Carney and insisted they did not appear to have had an impact on the ongoing Canadian election campaign, but nonetheless accused China of “coordinated inauthentic behavior” to promote the content in question.
Carney is currently leading polls to retain the prime minister position in the April 28 election. The CBC’s average of polls, as of Friday, shows Carney with 43.9 percent of the vote compared to 37.5 percent for his top rival, Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre. Poilievre was up as high as 20 points over the Liberals in January before Carney was coronated prime minister.
