My Take | Much more than meets the eye in Ottawa’s expulsion of Chinese diplomat Zhao Wei
- Profound and intense foreign policy disagreement within the Canadian government over China has spilled into the public domain, resulting in frequent leaks to the press
When it comes to war, intelligence and national security, you can assume you will rarely ever get the full story. Canada’s expulsion of Toronto-based Chinese diplomat Zhao Wei will be no exception.
According to Ottawa, Zhao gathered information as part of a Chinese plan to harass or intimidate Conservative member of parliament Michael Chong and his family in Hong Kong in retaliation for his sponsoring a successful motion declaring China’s treatment of its Uygur Muslim minority as genocide in 2021.
The problem is, the story as told by the Liberal government of Justine Trudeau doesn’t quite add up. At the start of this month, the Globe and Mail, the national newspaper, published an exclusive on a top-secret report by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) that the relatives of an unnamed MP were potentially targeted by the Chinese.
Chong then complained he only learned about the Chinese attempt from reading the newspaper, and questioned why the CSIS didn’t warn him about it. Presumably, the Chinese plan was never carried out, for otherwise, Chong’s relatives would have told him about it.
According to the initial version of Trudeau’s office, the CSIS kept the file “in-house”. “We asked what happened to that information, was it ever briefed up out of the CSIS? It was not,” Trudeau told reporters after the Globe story broke.
“The CSIS made the determination that it wasn’t something that needed to be raised to a higher level because it wasn’t a significant enough concern.”