Western Standard - September 22, 2023


COOPER： The Chinese interference inquiry

Topics
CSIS intervention blocked
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Harper Sikh
HANNAFORD Four things that make no sense about Trudeau's India allegations MPC Daily Market Update Sep 26, 2023

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

147.99

Word count

500

Sentence count

27

Harmful content

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, the Bureau Chief at the Globe and Mail, Sheel Mohnot, tells the story of how the Indian intelligence agency, CSIS, tried to intervene in the assassination of a Sikh separatist leader in Vancouver, but couldn t.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 I've been tracking, as you know, sensitive, internal, confidential Canadian records for a while now.
00:00:07.160 These are what led to the bombshells about China's election interference.
00:00:11.320 But I learned from my documents and sources that the concerns of CSIS are, of course, China is the number one threat. 0.65
00:00:19.600 Russia, of course, is in that interference mix deeply and has been always. 0.75
00:00:24.560 But India as well.
00:00:26.320 A democracy, a huge economy.
00:00:28.880 But CSIS is concerned, deeply involved in both our electoral politics, our institutions, and perhaps more importantly, like China, they are using and targeting their large diaspora in Canada to interfere.
00:00:44.420 And so that when I knew that I had a lot of information on CSIS's blocked efforts to roll up and intervene against these Indian intelligence networks being run out of consulates in Canada.
00:00:58.200 And so when Mr. Trudeau dropped his bombshell, seemingly out of nowhere in Parliament, I knew it was time to bring out my evidence from documents that said, indeed, CSIS wanted to move forward with the threat reduction powers, as you recall, given to them by the Harper government, really to target and roll back terrorist networks.
00:01:20.040 In this case, CSIS was so concerned that Indian intelligence was so deep into communities in Vancouver that they wanted to intervene, target a diplomat there.
00:01:32.020 And it's a long story that I'll make short because I've repeated it over and over again.
00:01:38.320 Trudeau's government blocked this intervention because Global Affairs Canada values trade deals, diplomacy, political wins with other governments, in this case, India.
00:01:50.560 Other agencies, other departments in Ottawa were worried that this was too politically sensitive for CSIS to dive into Vancouver.
00:01:59.220 And also, as you recall, Prime Minister Trudeau's big trip to India was planned for 2018.
00:02:05.320 So in a nutshell, CSIS's plan to intervene was blocked in Ottawa and they did nothing in Vancouver.
00:02:11.900 So when I heard that now Mr. Trudeau is alleging India has ties to this assassination of a Sikh separatist leader in Vancouver, this was the Sikh community was the one targeted and infiltrated, according to CSIS.
00:02:27.340 They wanted to intervene.
00:02:28.760 They couldn't.
00:02:29.800 And so we can ask the fair question, do hostile state activities such as not only spying on Canadians,
00:02:36.940 but in this case, allegedly being close to or involved in an assassination, can these activities build up because Justin Trudeau's government hasn't intervened against India and more importantly, China?
00:02:51.040 So as you say, there's so much politics involved here.
00:02:53.860 But again, I want to stress, this is a story I've now reported at the Bureau after only a few months in operation again and again.
00:03:02.560 It refers to the Chinese so-called police stations in Canada.
00:03:05.820 Again, Trudeau's government warned since 2015, literally took no action until my stories brought really a lot of this activity to light.
00:03:15.160 At least now we're having a debate about it.
00:03:17.440 You can become a Western Standard member for just $10 a month or $99 a year for unlimited access.