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“C-70 is a total overreach,” says award-winning University of Victoria engineer Lin Cai, referring to the Countering Foreign Interference Act (Bill C-70) recently enacted by the Canadian government. 

“Instead of targeting genuine foreign interference, it creates a chill that discourages people of Chinese origin from engaging in common and mutually beneficial communication and collaboration,” she asserted in an exclusive interview. 

“C-70 is exacerbating a chill that has spread among researchers and scientists of Chinese origin, who are concerned about becoming victims, similar to those impacted by the US “China Initiative,” says Cai, referring to an FBI instigated program that racially profiled thousands of American researchers as potential spies, a program the Biden administration was obliged to abandon.

“Tenure-track professors in Canada are now navigating the anxiety of avoiding specific collaborations or subjects that might be interpreted as sensitive.”

Cai knows of what she speaks. New security restrictions imposed by the Canadian government placed her alma mater, the Nanjing University of Science and Technology, on a list of banned universities, prohibiting her from pursuing research partnerships with any scientist in that school on the premise that some researchers there may be conducting military research.

Such measures are counterproductive, says Cai. “Many talented graduate students and post-doctoral researchers from China no longer see Canada as a destination due to new research security measures.” 

Cai has lived in Canada for 25 years, raised her family here, and made major contributions to Canadian engineering. In 2019, Canada’s Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) honoured Cai as a Steacie Memorial Fellow. The College of the Royal Society of Canada admitted her as “an outstanding and internationally renowned researcher for her ground-breaking work on the development and analysis of wireless technologies supporting Internet-of-Things and multimedia applications.”

“Decoupling from China,” Cai says, “will mean Canadian high-tech companies and universities are losing talent, collaboration opportunities, and access to one of the most important high-tech markets. This will harm Canadian high-tech much more than it will affect China.”

A history of racial profiling

Cai is not the only researcher impacted by Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) encroachments. A forthcoming survey in Canadian Ethnic Studies, undertaken by professors Qiang Zha (York University) and Xiaojie Li (University of Arizona), reveals that among researchers familiar with emerging research restrictions, 40 per cent of the Chinese professors felt “considerable fear and/or anxiety that they were being surveilled by the Canadian government.”

The same survey also finds that CSIS’s fearmongering has already severely affected the career developments and lives of Chinese, and non-Chinese, researchers who work with Chinese colleagues. About 20 per cent of Chinese professors have modified the focus of their current research project and limited communications with collaborators in China; one out of ten of both Chinese and non-Chinese professors have prematurely or unexpectedly ended or suspended research collaborations with scholars in China over the past three years; and 31 per cent of Chinese professors who do not have Canadian citizenship are considering leaving Canada because of CSIS’s political encroachment on academic freedom.

That the research restrictions are in practice a form of racial profiling is not surprising given the track record of CSIS and the RCMP. They and other agencies have long been targeting racialized peoples and social activists as in the case of Maher Arar in 2002, to the harassment of Muslim communities in the so-called War on Terror, to the RCMP’s profiling of Indigenous activists in Project Sitka, to the recent crackdown on Palestine supporters based on RCMP/CSIS intelligence. 

Former CSIS officer Huda Mukbil reveals in her recently published Agent of Change how CSIS maintained the white ‘Old Boys’ Club’ culture: “It took me many years to learn and acknowledge that CSIS was perpetuating systemic biases against women, Muslims, racialized minorities, Indigenous peoples, and LGBTQ2S+ people…Publicly, discrimination was, and still is, evident in the way politicians demand answers, cough up resources, and change laws to increase surveillance powers only when the threat is from racialized groups…Ultimately, working for the service unveiled to me the discriminatory ways in which national security providers perceive and prioritize threats.”

Whose voices are heard in Parliament?

Racism is not the only problem. Anti-communism reminiscent of the McCarthy era that led to terrible purges has once again raised its ugly head. One influential group is the Chinese Canadian Concern Group on Chinese Communist Party’s Human Rights Violations, formed to protest the PRC crackdown on Hong Kong. On this group’s behalf, Gabriel Yiu and Mable Tong made submissions to the House of Commons and to the Senate welcoming C-70 but calling for even more stringent measures to hunt down suspected communists. Their latest missive to the Hogue Commission is a diatribe accusing anyone that might not agree with them as agents for China, a submission happily promoted by their friends in the Globe and Mail.

Yiu, who is an assistant to Jenny Kwan of the NDP, suggested that some groups should not have to register with the new foreign interference registry because “many of the entities representing these [diasporic] groups may do so as part of foreign entities funded by allied foreign governments, such as the US, EU, or UK. For example, it is feasible that a number of Hong Kong diaspora groups active in Canada may be funded by institutions such as the US National Endowment for Democracy.” Really?

Formed in 1984 by Ronald Reagan, the National Endowment for Democracy has long been recognized as a major sponsor of foreign interference and coups. As Stephen Kinzer put it in The New York Review: “The National Endowment for Democracy, which receives nearly all its funds from Congress, is a conduit through which the US government has given millions of dollars to political and other protest groups in countries from Albania to Haiti. Some may argue that it makes sense for the US to seek to undermine unfriendly governments and to replace them with new ones aligned with American interests. It is less honest to pretend that this is not the mission of the National Endowment for Democracy.”

Not all Hong Kong expatriates in Canada agree with the Concern Group’s views about Hong Kong or about the C-70 legislation. In an interview, prominent physician and Order of Canada recipient Dr. Joseph Y.K. Wong says, “Bill C-70 sends chills down my spine, and I know many other Canadians of Chinese descent feel the same way.”

Wong, who came to Canada from Hong Kong in 1968, has practiced family medicine in Toronto for 40 years. “Fifteen years ago,” he says, “I was libelled as a spy for China. Had the authors done a bit more research, they would have known that I helped organize massive protests against Beijing’s military crackdown at Tiananmen in 1989. That shows how unreliable the ‘intelligence’ sometimes is.” One of the authors of the book that libelled Wong was Michel Juneau-Katsuya, a former CSIS agent who continues to appear as an intelligence “expert” in parliament and is widely quoted in the media.

“Foreign interference should be totally rooted out” says Wong, “but Bill C-70 encourages racial profiling and spreads fear.” Wong should know. In 1979 he led a Canada-wide anti-racist movement against a CTV program, W-5, that portrayed university students of Chinese heritage as foreigners taking places away from Canadians. He never looked back.

Wong founded the Yee Hong Centre for Geriatric Care that provides 2,000 resident seniors with culturally appropriate care while still pursuing social activism and education. He was the founding president of the Chinese Canadian National Council, Chairman of the Board of the United Way of Greater Toronto (1990-1992), received the Order of Canada (1993), won the Power of Humanity Award, Canadian Red Cross (2015). He recently led efforts to build the WongAvery Asia Pacific Peace Museum.

Racialized communities raise concerns

For many Sikhs in Canada, C-70 seems like a double-edged sword. Having seen the assassination of Bhai Hardeep Singh Nijjar in June 2023, likely at the hands of agents of the Modi government in India, they yearn for protection. Appearing before the committee studying C-70, the legal counsel for the World Sikh Organization of Canada, Balpreet Singh suggested that C-70’s “international relations clause may be used as an excuse to ignore ongoing interference by India against Sikhs in Canada and might even create tools that would persecute Canadian Sikh activists.”

Ahmad Al Qadi, representing the National Council of Canadian Muslims, appeared before the Commons’ committee to say that they had previously testified on the need to prevent intimidation of Uyghur Canadians and, in principle, supported a foreign agents transparency registry. He, like many others however, advised against rushing the legislation, especially since the legislation would empower “agencies like CSIS that numerous judges have cited for their problematic behaviour,” and who “in the past erroneously targeted Christian social conservatives, environmentalists, Sikh communities, Indigenous communities, Muslims, progressives and everyone in between.”

B’nai Brith Canada also endorsed C-70. In their submission, they state that such legislation “needs to maintain a balance between freedom of expression and demonstrably justified limitations on that freedom.” They then focus their fire on Palestine supporters at universities, inferring they may be funded through foreign interference: “The encampments and demonstrations at Canadian colleges and universities protesting against the Israeli response to the Hamas attack on Israel of October 7 have been receiving private financial support. The funding itself is public knowledge. But the source of funding is not. There should be a requirement that the source of funding for these protests be publicly disclosed.”

B’nai Brith, however, is skating on thin ice. Former MP David Graham recently wrote in his Substack, “Israel, on the other hand, has a strong organisation through CIJA, CJPAC, and B’nai Brith. They effectively wield disproportionate influence on the Hill through internship placements and, frankly, the sheer competence of those they recruit.” Noting how the US and the Ukraine also engage in foreign interference, he asks, “If an ally, especially a close ally interferes in our domestic politics, is it not still interference?”

Bill C-70 will only fuel CSIS’s selective racial profiling, targeting those considered affiliated with Canada’s adversaries. Communities themselves will be divided. Understanding and overcoming those divisions to the degree possible will be challenging, for social movements and also for the Hogue Commission when it resumes hearings this fall.

John Price

John Price is emeritus professor of history at the University of Victoria and author of Orienting Canada: Race, Empire and the Transpacific (UBC Press).

Midori Ogasawara

Midori Ogasawara is a specialist in surveillance studies and teaches sociology at the University of Victoria. She was an investigative journalist with Japan’s Asahi Shimbun for ten years.