The Messy Divorce Proceedings Between Ottawa and Beijing

One legislation can change your life. Tomorrow when you get up, your life will be different. Nothing belongs to you anymore."

"This could affect thousands of Canadians with benign links to China because of their familial, commercial, educational, or civil society relationships in the mainland [China]."

"It seems very likely to me that these individuals will be seen in an unfavourable light. In the current context of extreme suspicion about all things Chinese, the risk of stigmatization is real."

"Your name goes on a list, whether  you are guilty or whether you are in fact a foreign agent. Once your name goes on the list, you will have a mark on your head and you will be stigmatized and that can affect your career and your life prospects."

Canadian Senator Victor Oh

"This is straight out of the CCP's [Chinese Communist Party] playbook, using racism as a deflection from the proper issue at hand."

"It's downright offensive."

Cheuk Kwan, Toronto Association for Democracy in China

"[The anti-registry push is similar to the disinformation campaign that targeted me in the 2021 election]."

"They are using the fear of newer immigrants."

"It's fertile ground for misinformation and they're exploiting the opportunity."

Former Conservative MP Kenny Chiu

Marco Mendicini, Minister of Public Safety: "Today, we launched consultations on the creation of a Canadian Foreign Influence Transparency Registry. We invite Canadians to share their views on this important tool to protect our institutions." Twitter

 

That Beijing has been infiltrating Canada at every conceivable level for years is well known. Agents loyal to the People's Republic of China have inserted themselves in academia, science, business and politics; their purpose to gain influence for China. During the mainland takeover of Hong Kong and the persecution of democracy activists those same activists cojoining forces with the Chinese missions in Canada and enlisting the support of Chinese students on study visas championed Beijing.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, Chinese Canadians of Hong Kong background deplored Beijing's dashing of Hong Kong's freedom to lean into democracy, imposing on the city Beijing's heavy hand of communist-style justice. The Confucius Institute chapters that were opened in many universities to foster friendship with China, to feature its heritage and promote its language was recognized as a propaganda tool and lost favour in Canada. 

Above all, the harassment of Chinese-Canadians by Chinese agents working out of Canada, some in the confines of shadowy Chinese police stations that threatened those who rebelled against Beijing's line finally received attention by investigative reporters who revealed the role that Beijing played in the last federal elections, spreading false information and attempting to influence the outcome of elections, which in fact resulted in two anti-Beijing Members of Parliament losing their seats, and led to a proposal for a foreign agent registry.

Canada has an ugly past with respect to its white European heritage that wanted to keep its citizens of European derivation and white. In 1923, the Chinese Immigration Act barred Chinese from migrating to Canada and installed a head tax of $500, an unheard-of-sum. At the same time Jewish Canadians faced discrimination as did Indigenous Canadians. Today, Canada welcomes Chinese immigrants that represent one of two top sources of new Canadians. But this Liberal government denied any knowledge of Beijing's interference despite being informed years ago by its own intelligence services.

Now, in the face of real and proven interference on many levels from industrial espionage to cybersecurity, and proven political interference, controversy has arisen over the pending legislation for a foreign agent registry. Senator Yuen Pau Woo of British Columbia conflated the installation of a registry with the former immigration act, that a registry could become "a modern form of Chinese exclusion". Both he and Senator Victor Oh often speak in the senate in support of Beijing.

Cheuk Kwan and lawyer Dora Nipp argue a registry would be welcomed by Chinese-Canadians since it would "prevent an entire community from being singularly labelled as a threat" as well as its function acting as a reminder to other nations to refrain from intimidating diaspora members. Activist Bill Chiu of Vancouver dismissed any link between legislation for a foreign agent registry and the former Chinese head tax: "If they are so gung-ho about modern forms of Chines exclusion, shouldn't they be jumping up and down when the PRC's draconian policies exclude equal participation of countless [people] in China?"

The bill, if passed would require anyone acting for a foreign government or related entity to register if planning to communicate with a member of Parliament or a senior official on government business. To prevent "malign" influence as Public Safety Canada calls it, where someone acts for a foreign power without disclosing their connection. Senator Woo opposed a Senate motion calling China's treatment of its Uyghur minority genocide; he advised government to release Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou and co-authored a report that Chinese-Canadians were largely impervious to foreign interference, while recommending closer ties with China.

Debate on a bill that would identify foreign agents lobbying those in public office was opened in the Senate. Photo by iStock /GETTY IMAGES

Senator Pau Woo

Yuen Pau Woo

@yuenpauwoo

100 years ago, as part of the #ChineseExclusionAct, Canada forced all Chinese people in the country to register or face deportation. How can we prevent this registry from becoming a modern form of Chinese exclusion? S-237 & the former C-282 are not the answer. Time to speak out

Righteous Rage Overcoming Fear

"The coronavirus epidemic has revealed the rotten core of Chinese governance. The level of popular fury is volcanic, and a people thus enraged may, in the end, also cast aside their fear."
"I cannot remain silent."
"Faced with this virus, the Leader has flailed about. Although everyone looks to The One for the nod of approval, The One himself is clueless."
"Regardless of how good they are at controlling the Internet, they can't keep all 1.4 billion mouths in China shut." 
"I can now all too easily predict that I will be subjected to new punishments; indeed, this may well even be the last piece I write."
Xu Zhangrun, law professor, Beijing

People attend a vigil for Chinese doctor and whistleblower Li Wenliang, in Hong Kong, on 7 February. Photograph: Kin Cheung/AP

The Communist Party of China bridles with indignation that anyone should blame The Peoples Republic for the global threat to human health and longevity that is striding through one country after another, wreaking havoc, destroying public trust in their governments, laying waste to the world economy, striking down the elderly and health-compromised and instilling the terror of fearful uncertainty everywhere. This mysterious zoonotic coronavirus is most certainly a Chinese curse on the world. Indeed we live in 'interesting times'.

And thanks to an arcane, mystical Chinese alimentary and pharmacopeia heritage and custom a viral plague has been released upon humanity, identified as a global pandemic. In its great wisdom, Beijing first responded to initial reports of the mysterious pneumonia that appeared so suddenly, with denial and refusal to take serious action to stifle the emerging threat. Chinese scholars themselves appear to have predicted that it was "highly likely" there would arise coronavirus outbreaks in an article in the journal Viruses a year earlier. 

Other Chinese scientists identified the virus and sequenced its DNA once the outbreak occurred, and then posted that sequence on a virology website on January 10, mere weeks after the virus erupted to make it accessible to scientists around the world. Their rapid sequencing and worldwide release enabled researchers all over the globe to use that data to begin looking for and testing all possible potential vaccines.

The while, the CPC was busy organizing its coverup, denying that anything was amiss, threatening doctors and scientists with punishment for spreading harmful false rumours injurious to China, when they began divulging the facts on the ground to the outside world. Chinese police were ordered to crack down on eight doctors accused of alerting others within the medical community of the rising risks related to this new virus. The doctors were denounced as rumor-mongers on national media.

Disinfecting an 'open market' in China

The Chinese public was horrified and then disgusted and then infuriated when they learned that Li Wenliang, a doctor who contacted his colleagues to alert and advise them of the presence of a new viral threat, and been singled out and threatened by police, forced to recant and apologize, later contracted the novel coronavirus himself, and ultimately died of it; had his warning been heeded, countless lives might have been saved.

Now Professor Xu has called on the Chinese public to demand free speech and free elections: "Rage against injustice; let your lives burn with a flame of decency; break through stultifying darkness and welcome the dawn". These sentiments will not be thought of kindly by the Chinese regime led by President Xi Jinping -- of the man denouncing their inaction and incompetence who is now incommunicado.

The government propaganda is transparent and most Chinese understand that the coronavirus was horribly mishandled, yet another example of ineptitude on the part of the regime where Xi's government mishandled a swine fever outbreak beginning in 2018 as well, which has killed one-quarter of the world's pigs. Before that, there was SARS, yet another viral agent that leapt from animals to humans by way of infected bats and civet cats, high on the culinary banquet list.

Chinese doctors and scientists can rival the world's best. Normal life expectancy in China now stands at 82, higher than the United States. For many years, China's technocrats, doctors and scientists led a push to open a new university every week, for years. In the same token, the Communist Party of China has taken great steps in another direction, stifling social media and journalism while the cult of 'Xi' dominated.

Doctors have worked themselves unstintingly in China, improvising when medical supplies became limited and to the present over 3,300 medical workers were infected with coronavirus (which they likely would never themselves have hesitated to call Wuhanvirus) and of that number at least eight have died. Professor Xu's condemnatory essay is vibrating around China, through the surreptitious distribution of copies.

Tsinghua University Xu Zhangrun  Photo: Sohu

"The political system has collapsed under the tyranny, and a governance system [made up] of bureaucrats, which has taken [the party] more than 30 years to build has floundered", he wrote scathingly. He had written an article in 2018 criticizing Communist Party leaders for agreeing to lift the two-year term limit for presidents to allow Xi Jinping to remain in office beyond his 2023 second term. His punishment then was to be suspended from teaching at Tsinghua University. With his latest broadside targeting President Xi and the CPC, his friends feared he would be arrested and never heard from again.

The Impotent Ignorance of U.S. Legislators

"The Canadian medicine supply is not sufficient to support both Canadian and U.S. consumers. The supply simply does not, and will not, exist within Canada to meet such demands."
"Hospital and community pharmacies in Canada are resourced to serve the Canadian public. they are not equipped to support the needs of a country ten times its size without creating important access or quality issues."
Warning communication to Canada's Minister of Health

Quinn Nystrom holds insulin she purchased in Canada after travelling over the border for more affordable medication. (Lorenda Reddekopp/CBC)

It is grossly inconceivable that people with diabetes, requiring the hormone insulin to manage their chronic disease, ensure quality of life and life itself, are faced in the United States -- where pharmaceutical companies who manufacture human-type insulin for broad consumption nationwide value the free enterprise system over adequate profits with the assurance that their product prolongs lives -- with steeply unaffordable costs for vials of insulin. There are times, and none more urgent than this one, when government intervention should be required to correct such a dire situation.

It belies belief that a free enterprise system can be so bereft of human values beyond profit that it can without conscience raise the cost of an elemental, vital drug from $30 to $300, placing it beyond the reach of people desperate to continue a difficult-enough therapeutic mode sustaining and prolonging life. That drug manufacturers can and do raise prices to such impossible levels is breath-takingly incongruous given that drugs manufacturing has a purpose and that purpose is now interrupted by greed.

Federal and state legislators in the United States, in recognition of the plight of people with diabetes without health insurance either through employment or independent means, whose incomes are modest and strained beyond acceptability by sky-rocketing costs of medication, have turned not to enacting needed legislation to curtail manufacturing greed, or to supplement the costs of such vital drugs through public subscription, but to allowing Americans to purchase their drugs abroad where they are available at a tenth of the cost.

Laws permitting residents of various states to import drugs from Canada represents no kind of a workable solution to the crisis inflicted upon American diabetics. It is beyond ludicrous that someone like Senator Bernie Sanders plans to highlight the issue by accompanying Americans with diabetes to Canada on an insulin-buying trip. That people with diabetes in the United States must organize trips to Canada to enable them to buy a drug that sustains their lives is beyond incredible.

The very country known for its manufacturing of drugs and their wide distribution -- and the greed of those involved in manufacturing -- sees a situation now where diabetics ration their medication, fearful of not having enough to maintain a balance of wellness. In so doing they risk hastening the onset of complications that ensue from diabetes such as neuropathy, blindness, kidney failure, heart conditions. The issue represents a country-wide medical emergency.

As for Canada; recent years have seen Canadian pharmaceutical manufacturers reporting thousands of shortages of their own, often linked to manufacturing issues but to increased demand as well. Over 27 different bills have been introduced in the U.S. Congress and state legislation over the past year -- according to data from the National Academy for State Health Policy -- which allow Americans to buy their drugs from Canadian sources.

This evades the source of the problem and it exports the problem to a neighbour's vulnerable population, threatening them with a potential precarious position in drug availability. What kind of solution does that signify?  Canada ensures the regulation of drug prices through the federal Patented Medicine Prices Review Board, with its mandate to ensure that the cost of medications is "not excessive".

"We have got to do better in our country."
"People are where we need to be on it, regular folks. It’s our political leaders lack the courage to do the right thing."
John Kennedy, who travelled to Canada from Ohio

Lija Greenseid prepares to draw insulin at her home in St. Paul, Minn. Greenseid, whose daughter has Type 1 diabetes, is organizing a group trip to Canada to buy insulin at one-tenth the U.S. cost.  Photo: Jenn Ackeerman, The Washington Post

Technological Advancement, Superior Lifestyles, Environmental Disaster

"We have trace levels of pharmaceuticals and pharmaceutical metabolites in our drinking water -- that would not be covered under CEPA."
"I'm finding in surface waters chemicals that are in my TV. We have such a huge waste stream of electronic products that require handling because of their hazardous substances."
"The casing of your TV has flame retardants that migrate from your TV. You find it as house dust, you find it in air and surface waters ... You're typing at your computer [and] your hands are going to pick u a whole lot of flame retardants and plasticizers. Our clothes pick up chemicals. We wash them, and down the drain [it all goes]."
"[As for your cellphone], It emits a very small quantity. The problem is there are so many cellphones, so many electronics, so many floor polishes, so many cosmetics. Individually, tiny. Aggregate in a home, actually not so tiny. Put it together in a city, a whole lot more."
"[In the Great Lakes, the] up and coming contaminants arise from products and materials that we use as opposed to direct effluent discharges [from factories]. We have long shifted from the belching smokestack or the pipe spewing effluent ... but a lot of the provisions [of the law] are better suited to dealing with manufacturing and also with resource extraction [like mining]."
"For example we have so many car tires. The most abundant microplastics in the environment are very small fragments from tires. And as well we see antioxidants from tire debris in surface waters and the Great Lakes."
"I think those are incredibly difficult to regulate. One way is just to talk about the sheer amount of resources that we are using and that this has unsustainable implications. But it just doesn't receive any traction."
Miriam Diamond, pollution scientist, University of Toronto

Air circulating in the home contains over 900 chemicals, including mould.

The House of Commons (Canadian Parliament) standing committee on environment and sustainable development recently set out to review Canada's federal law, the Canadian Environmental Protection Act (CEPA). This presented a large group of Canadian scientists involved in environmental sciences with a opportunity to put their heads together and draft a letter whose purpose was to present 87 considered recommendations that would in aggregate update, modernize and strengthen the CEPA.

Canada, like all countries in the developed world with strong economies that have embraced modern technologies in everyday life, faces the reluctantly-recognized reality that we have been catapulted into a world of technological convenience, and waste products resulting from those technologies. And although some of the environmental degradation occasioned by our wild embrace of the brave and the new have been tackled, the far greater consequences of our lavish use of materials, some of which have a deleterious effect on the environment, remain untouched.

Where once we envisioned pollution represented by a giant smokestack belching particulate matter into the atmosphere, or a factory heedlessly (and illegally) spilling waste into rivers, environmental degradation has become far more nuanced and infinitely more difficult to address. In Canada alone, with its 35-million population each and every member of society represents individual sources of toxic influence on the environment, a simple reality that few would ever think of, much less wish to be concerned about.

Our furniture off gassing, televisions or bathroom chemicals, cellphones -- all produce minute amounts of harmful substances that wash down drains and into lakes and rivers as we wash our hands, shower, use a dishwasher and do the laundry. And though scientists are grimly aware of this ongoing situation they cannot even hazard a guess as to the final outcome. That, in and of itself is extremely worrying to the informed scientific mind.

What Canadian researchers are convinced of, however, is that the current federal law though meeting the needs of its time when it was enacted in the 1990s, barely begins to address them at this juncture. Small amounts of toxic silver bleeds off motherboards, tantalum, cobalt, rare earth elements and other metals "for which toxicity is just becoming understood" are all involved, points out Dr. Diamond. A type of flame retardants commonly used in a variety of products represent another source of toxicity.

According to Dr. Diamond, environmental law and funding for research are based most frequently on known human health dangers, moving "away from true environmental protection and toward 'It's all about me', and human health". More intensive research is required on "the public good of clean air, clean water and clean soil", she emphasizes. Much, in the final analysis, depends on it.

Modern pollution — at least the toxic chemical kind — is smaller, more personal, from 35 million Canadians who are all individual sources of toxic bits that add up in the environment.  shironosov / Getty Images/