This piece first appeared in The Epoch Times Canada on April 17, 2025.
Normally, when countries seek each other’s assistance on criminal matters, they first seek to establish a bilateral agreement on information exchange. Then, once this is achieved, they identify agencies of like-minded mandates to collaborate with each other. This is how mature nations conduct business among themselves.
Say, for example, that person A is wanted for a serious crime in China but travels/escapes to Canada. If the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Canada have an extradition treaty in place, the former can ask the latter (through the RCMP, for example) to arrest the suspect and hand him or her over for detention and trial (not that Chinese trials are free and fair but that is a completely different matter).
What China cannot and must not be allowed to do is to issue a “bounty” on the head of the person they want arrested and encourage people in Canada to take the law into their own hands, seize the individual in question, and frog-march him or her to the nearest Chinese diplomatic premise, thereby collecting the money. Nor should it encourage “proxies” to do its dirty work.
And yet that is exactly what happened when Liberal candidate Paul Chiang recommended that anyone could hand over Conservative candidate Joe Tay, who also happens to be a human-rights advocate, to the Chinese Consulate in Toronto and claim a bounty put on him by Hong Kong authorities. Not only is this questionable and possibly illegal, but it smells a lot like continuing foreign (i.e., PRC) interference in our electoral process. After all, if a candidate is sent back to China he can’t easily run for office, can he?
Despite initial party foot-dragging on whether this kind of act should be OK in Canada, Mr. Chiang eventually dropped out of the race and was replaced by former Toronto police deputy chief Peter Yuen. But for those who think that PRC fingers in the electoral pie were finally removed, think again: Mr. Yuen has also been associated with pro-PRC leanings.
The bigger question in all of this is why in heaven’s name are candidates for party status not vetted? Why do none of the parties put in place detailed procedures to ensure that their nominees at a minimum are not acting at the behest of a foreign power? How difficult can this be?
In truth, not hard at all.
We already have an organization, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), which has decades of experience in security vetting. This is normally associated with refugee and citizenship cases but could easily be expanded to include election candidates. After all, CSIS already investigates tens of thousands of those seeking status in Canada every year—the security screening branch is by far the busiest operational section in the agency—and adding a few hundred individuals every couple of years would not tax it onerously.
Of course, all parties would have to agree to this step, and we all know that consensus in politics is a rare occurrence these days. If one party were to sign up, however, and others decline, Canadians would know which one truly cares about national security and is serious about foreign interference (another topic broached on few occasions in election campaigns).
China should not get away with planting its people in our democracy, with or without party acquiescence. The ways to prevent this to the maximal extent are already in place, work relatively well, and need to be adhered to. That no one in Canada seems to want to protect our systems speaks volumes and tells our friends that we are the weak underbelly of the alliance.
This is not the Wild West. We don’t need leading officials urging our citizens to take the law into their own hands and become bounty hunters. Leave that function to cheap Netflix series, thank you.
Perspectives
In a world of multiple voices and opinions it can be very hard to know where to turn. One choice is to look to those who actually worked in counter-terrorism in the national security world. In these short blogs, 30-year Canadian intelligence veteran Phil Gurski weighs in on these issues in an effort to provide insight into what they mean and what we need to do about them.
About Phil Gurski
Phil worked as a senior strategic analyst at CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) from 2001-2015, specializing in violent Islamist-inspired homegrown terrorism and radicalisation. From 1983 to 2001 he was employed as a senior multilingual analyst at Communications Security Establishment (CSE – Canada’s signals intelligence agency), specialising in the Middle East. He also served as senior special advisor in the National Security Directorate at Public Safety Canada from 2013, focusing on community outreach and training on radicalisation to violence, until his retirement from the civil service in May 2015, and as consultant for the Ontario Provincial Police’s Anti-Terrorism Section (PATS) from May to October 2015.
He was the Director of Security and Intelligence at the SecDev Group from June 2018 to July 2019 and the Director of the National Security Programme at the University of Ottawa’s Professional Development Institute from 2020-2022. He has also taught on national security issues at George Brown College, the University of Ottawa and Georgian College. Mr. Gurski has presented on violent Islamist-inspired and other forms of terrorism and radicalisation across Canada and around the world and is actively sought by Canadian and international media on national security and intelligence issues. He has written hundreds of op-eds on these matters for several Canadian media since 2016.
He is the author of The Threat from Within: Recognizing Al Qaeda-inspired Radicalization and Terrorism in the West (Rowman and Littlefield 2015) Western Foreign Fighters: The Threat to Homeland and International Security (Rowman and Littlefield 2017), The Lesser Jihads: Taking the Islamist fight to the world (Rowman and Littlefield 2017), An end to the ‘War on Terrorism (Rowman and Littlefield 2018), When Religion Kills: How Extremist Justify Violence Through Faith (Lynne Rienner 2019), The Peaceable Kingdom? A history of terrorism in Canada from Confederation to the present (self-published: 2021, republished by Double Dagger in 2022), and the forthcoming The Fenians: Brotherhood of fools or Canada’s first terrorist threat? (Double Dagger: 2025). He regularly blogs and podcasts (Canadian Intelligence Eh!), and posts on Bluesky (@borealissaves.bsky.social) on terrorism and intelligence matters.
