Juno News - The Chinese election interference scandal is far from over

00:00:00.000 In the ongoing saga of the Chinese Communist Party regime's interference into Canadian elections

00:00:05.640 in the past couple of campaigns, a lot of people have likened what's going on to a drip, drip,

00:00:10.480 drip story, meaning every day or sometimes several times a day there's a new drip to the story, a new

00:00:16.000 little nugget aspect that furthers the narrative, that tells us more information. And this has a lot

00:00:21.160 of observers asking just how many more drips are there? How many more aspects of this story

00:00:25.740 are there to come? And I think the answer is a whole lot more for two key reasons. Reason number

00:00:32.680 one is that original reporting in all of this told us that the Toronto Consulate of the Beijing regime

00:00:38.040 had backed 11 candidates in total, mostly Liberals, a couple Conservatives. Now, some of the reporting

00:00:44.980 we've seen more recently has been about one Liberal MP, Handong, one individual, one out of 11. We're

00:00:52.460 probably perhaps going to see stories soon about some of the 10 others and all the different details

00:00:58.040 and aspects about that. You know, one day of the story was just talking about Handong's personal

00:01:04.040 statement on the issue where he was denying a lot of the allegations. What's going to happen when more

00:01:08.600 names start coming out? Now, on that point, and here's where we get to item number two, names coming

00:01:13.680 out. How have things come out previously? Via CSIS documents that have been leaked. And clearly people

00:01:19.120 at CSIS are serious about this because they actually risk prosecution under a particular act

00:01:25.300 in Parliament by doing this. I mean, this is not something you're able to get away with as a small

00:01:30.180 feat, leaking CSIS documents. It's a serious thing. So they clearly felt it was serious enough for them

00:01:35.340 to risk having repercussions for doing this. And one of the small aspects of this that has been

00:01:41.760 overlooked is the information that they detailed about this in part came from wiretaps. Now, you can't just

00:01:48.860 easily, cavalierly go ahead and do wiretaps. You have to have a very serious, credible reason to

00:01:53.960 think that you're within your right to do wiretaps, number one. And number two, wiretaps are pretty

00:01:59.200 direct source. You're hearing things directly. They're not indirect or it's not looking at a Facebook

00:02:04.060 post someone made. It's hearing their own words. Very rigorous stuff. I have previously, throughout my

00:02:10.400 journalism work, gotten various access to information requests from the RCMP and other intelligence

00:02:15.880 places, heavily redacted documents. And sometimes you look at them and you realize, well, there's

00:02:20.160 really not that much substance here. Their intelligence gathering has been by secondhand,

00:02:24.520 thirdhand sources, reading documents, looking around and so forth. And that's all well and good.

00:02:28.580 That's a part of intelligence gathering. But wiretaps, it's very top-notch, credible stuff in terms of

00:02:34.220 hearing it from the horse's mouth. So I think there's more information on more individuals and probably

00:02:39.880 much more robust information as well that really says, hey guys, this is serious stuff. And for that

00:02:46.460 reason, I think we're going to see a lot more on this story.

Juno News - March 05, 2023