Juno News - March 05, 2023


The Chinese election interference scandal is far from over


Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

186.39471

Word count

527

Sentence count

28


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In the latest installment of the Chinese Communist Party's interference in Canadian elections, more details have been revealed about the Beijing regime's alleged involvement in our election campaign. And it's not hard to see where more information could come from.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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.