Think you understand ‘foreign influence’? Here’s a guide to the scandal shaking Canadian politics

There is a roiling conversation about clandestine foreign influence happening right now. Amid the recriminations and rhetoric, intelligence experts say words are getting thrown around with a lack of understanding of nuance and the patchy" legal gaps in Canada.

Last week, Toronto-area MP Han Dong quit the Liberal caucus to focus on defending himself against media reports that he said attacked his reputation" and questioned his loyalty to Canada.

Dong made the announcement after Global News reported allegations that the MP secretly advised a Chinese diplomat in 2021 that Beijing should delay the release of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, jailed in China.

The report touched off a fresh wave of outrage amid ongoing debates over the extent to which Canadian elected officials are complicit in China's efforts to influence Canadian politics and society.

Foreign influence issues have ignited a political firestorm for the Liberal government, with opposition demands for a public inquiry. The Star has been unable to verify Global's report, and Dong did not respond to questions from the Star. He has denied the report.

But even if true, would Dong's conversation with China's consul general in Toronto amount to foreign influence?

Not according to former senior CSIS intelligence analysts.

The CSIS Act defines foreign influenced activities" as within or relating to Canada that are detrimental to the interests of Canada and are clandestine or deceptive or involve a threat to any person." These actions could be carried out by state or non-state actors.

So if an MP tells a foreign government what policies to pursue, that's not interference in Canadian politics. It's almost the opposite," said Jessica Davis, president of Insight Threat Intelligence and former senior intelligence analyst with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.

Politicians speak to other politicians and diplomats all the time," she said. The problem arises when a foreign government is trying to hide its influence on a Canadian official."

Terms such as agent" and foreign influence" are misapplied by the Canadian public in a wide variety of instances, former intelligence analysts tell the Star.

Canadians view our own national security through the prism of the United States," said Stephanie Carvin, associate professor at Carleton University's Norman Paterson School of International Affairs and a former senior strategic analyst with CSIS.

There's a generally low level of understanding about national security issues even in senior levels of government, because CSIS is not the CIA. They are not briefing the prime minister every day or rushing into his office with new intelligence. There is a relatively weak culture of communicating intelligence up the chain and there's no regular system of briefing politicians on the subnational level - premiers, mayors, etc."

A CSIS spokesperson told the Star that the service routinely engages with a variety of stakeholders, including elected officials at all levels of government," but did not provide more details on the frequency and protocols of such briefings.

Meanwhile in the private sector such as think tanks, in contrast to Washington, D.C., Ottawa does not have a robust foreign policy and national security community where talent and expertise can easily move between the public, private and non-governmental," according to Darren Touch, a fellow at the Wilson Centre studying U.S., Canada and China relations.

For those who are willing to risk it, there are several bureaucratic hurdles that must be endured if they want to apply their government experience to public outreach and education."

Canada also either has different definitions or lacks legal definitions of common terms used in America, said Akshay Singh, research associate with the University of Ottawa's Centre for International Policy Studie.

Since 1938, the U.S. Foreign Agent Registration Act has required certain people engaged in certain activities related to foreign states to publicly disclose their engagements. If they don't, they are referred to as illegal agents."

Public observers in Canada are trying to find terms to describe those engaging in behaviours they find problematic. However, this requires caution and care. One issue is that we don't really have a system by which to designate someone as an agent" of a foreign government in Canada," said Singh, who has a decade of practical experience in national security.

This doesn't mean that foreign interference threat actors can't or don't operate here, rather, it means it can be difficult to classify what kinds of behaviours are appropriate and inappropriate from a legal enforcement perspective," he said.

Canada not only lacks a foreign agent registry, it also doesn't have any concrete laws on foreign influence.

This is a gap that some experts have identified in our laws, Davis said. Instead, we have a patchwork of different laws relating to elections, security of information, lobbying, etc.," Davis said.

So how should Canadians think of words like influence," agent" or proxy" and what would a foreign agent registry look like in Canada?

Here's what former intelligence analysts and other Canadian experts on foreign influence want you to know and consider about these key words.

Agent - There is no legal definition of an agent in Canada, in relation to matters of foreign influence. In public documents, CSIS uses the term threat actor" as people who work with foreign states to elicit, cultivate and coerce or threaten targets in Canada.

According to CSIS, effective threat actors seek to build long-lasting, deep, and even romantic relationships with targeted persons. These relationships enable the manipulation of targets when required, for example, through requests for inappropriate and special favours.' "

The most aggressive actors attempting to influence Canadian lawmakers and voters are China, Russia and Iran, which try to coerce or pressure people within expat communities, or leverage sympathizers in Canada, to exert influence on elections, nomination contests or public debate, CSIS director David Vigneault told a parliamentary committee earlier this month.

It is important to avoid describing those who simply hold views that are in support of foreign states as foreign agents, said Alice Tan, an independent researcher who contributed to a 2021 Alliance Canada Hong Kong report on foreign influence in Canada.

There's nothing incriminating about holding those views. But if they are acting on behalf of a foreign government to promote a government's interests, that's what could be cause for investigation.

I see people tweeting about how they saw a person at a gathering with a Chinese official. Yes, that may be the case, but it does not prove that they're acting as an actor of the Chinese government. It just proves they were in the same room."

CSIS - CSIS is Canada's national security intelligence service, employing about 3,350 employees. Its role is to investigate activities suspected of constituting threats to the security of Canada and to report these to the government. While CSIS officers can take measures to reduce threats, they cannot make arrests. The service is governed by the CSIS Act, which mostly restricts agents to collecting intelligence on foreign states' activities within Canada.

Canada has no intelligence service equivalent in mandate to the Secret Intelligence Service in Britain, also known as MI6, or the Central Intelligence Agency in the U.S., both of which specialize in international operations. That said, CSIS does operate abroad in a limited capacity, having acknowledged foreign stations in Washington, London and Paris.

Two former CSIS analysts with direct knowledge of the matter told the Star that within Canada, clandestine foreign influence from China has become a major focus of the service in recent years, compared to more than a decade ago, when domestic and foreign terrorism were primary concerns. The sources requested anonymity to avoid legal repercussions.

Foreign Agent Registry - Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino said on March 10 that the Liberal government is beginning public consultations on creating a foreign influence transparency registry to help prevent other countries from meddling in Canada's affairs.

There is ongoing debate about the scope of such an initiative, and who or what entities would be required to register, and the legal repercussions of failing to do so.

The Public Safety Ministry's public consultation document contains a working definition of a foreign principal" to mean an entity that is owned or directed, in law or in practice, by a foreign government. This could inter alia include a foreign power, foreign economic entity, foreign political organization, or an individual or group with links to a foreign government."

International Trade Minister Mary Ng, who is of Chinese descent, said it is important to create the registry in such a way that does not stoke anti-Asian racism.

Foreign Influence - The definition of foreign influence in the CSIS Act contains multiple requirements, said Carvin, which makes the definition different from colloquial usages.

There's a specific requirement laid out in the CSIS Act that foreign influence constitutes a national security threat. It also has to come from overseas and happen within or relating to Canada. It also has to be detrimental to the interests of Canada, and the fourth is that it has to be clandestine or deceptive or involve a threat to any person."

Issues that may anger Canadians may not meet the threshold of foreign influence, such as when Americans publicly funded the freedom convoy' in Ottawa. From a national security perspective, that wasn't foreign influence because it was overt," said Carvin, author of Stand on Guard: Reassessing Threats to Canada's National Security."

Meanwhile, the RCMP operates with a slightly different definition of foreign influence, emphasizing that the activity has to break a law in Canada.

Foreign actor interference is illegal activity which targets Canadian interests, or interferes in Canadian society and threatens Canada's national security. It includes attempts to threaten, harass, influence, intimidate, corrupt or discredit individuals, organizations and governments to further the interests of a foreign country," the national police service said in a briefing.

Proxy or Nonstate Actor - These are also terms with no legal definitions in Canada, but which appear in intelligence documents, along with terms such as intermediary."

In the Chinese political context, Beijing uses nonstate actors to serve as extensions of the state to penetrate into and mobilize societies," said Lynette Ong, professor of political science at the University of Toronto and author of Outsourcing Repression: Everyday State Power in Contemporary China."

Essentially they become state proxies in pursuing activities, such as mobilizing people, that serve the state's objectives. The nonstate actors in my research are either hired and paid by (the Chinese government) to do its bidding or mobilized by the socialist ideology."

Ong said more research is needed on whether China's same strategies could apply overseas in places like Canada.

Propaganda - As a tool of foreign influence, CSIS told the Star in a statement that it has observed social media being leveraged to spread disinformation or run foreign influenced campaigns designed to confuse or divide public opinion, or interfere in healthy public debate."

Some foreign states attempt to manipulate social media to amplify societal differences, sow discord, and undermine confidence in fundamental government institutions or electoral processes," the spokesperson said. They may use a co-ordinated approach to amplify a single narrative while also promoting inflammatory content. Foreign states may also use cyber-enabled tracking or surveillance of dissidents, those who challenge their rhetoric, or do not support their interests in Canada. Such behaviour can lead to threats or blackmail if the individual fails to co-operate."

Foreign actors' influence in online discourse can also be passive, such as by using coercion to silence speech in Canada. For example, a Chinese student in Quebec told the Star that he only had two followers on Twitter, but he still didn't escape Beijing's tactics, which he alleged included tracking his IP address and threatening his father living in China. The intimidation effectively coerced the student into deleting posts that were critical of the Chinese government.

TikTok - Earlier this month, Canada announced a TikTok ban on all government devices, with a government spokesperson saying the decision was taken as a precaution" for cybersecurity concerns.

While content on the app itself, which displays short videos, isn't a primary platform for misinformation about Canada-China relations, Brett Caraway, an associate professor at the University of Toronto's Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology, told the Star a TikTok ban was almost inevitable given the app's egregious" stance on data harvesting, even compared to the likes of Facebook and Twitter.

Although TikTok's parent company ByteDance, headquartered in Beijing, has denied its connection to the Chinese government in the past, a recent report by cybersecurity firm Internet 2.0 found evidence that Chinese authorities could access users' device data whenever they wanted.

United Front Work Department - The Chinese Communist Party's shadowy United Front Work Department sounds like the stuff of spy novels, but it has been an official department of the Chinese Communist Party since 1979, when Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping tasked it to collect information from sources around the world and advance global support for the party. An earlier iteration of the United Front Work Department was first founded by the CCP in 1948, but had gone dormant.

Modern-day United Front activities have roots in imperial China, when emperors started to see the overseas Chinese diaspora as potential assets, and also made moves to co-opt influential foreigners, according to a book by New Zealand academic Anne Marie-Brady.

The CCP says that United Front work is democratic, to seek consultation from people and organizations around the world, but its own documents show that the United Front agency works closely with the propaganda department as well as the ministry of state security, which is China's intelligence agency.

United Front officials are responsible for managing relationships with key individuals and non-Communist entities both inside and outside mainland China. The UFWD collaborates closely with propaganda officials and the Ministry of State Security police intelligence agency, according to United Front researchers.

A report for the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission by policy analyst Alexander Bowe in 2018 raises concerns about Chinese agents approaching students to infiltrate Chinese dissident groups on university campuses in the U.S. and Australia.

The paper points to one organization directly under the United Front, called the China Council for the Promotion of Peaceful Reunification, as having 33 chapters in the U.S. and at least" 200 chapters in 90 countries. Canada has chapters of the organization in Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa.

The United Front has also reportedly courted Canadian politicians. In 2017, the Globe and Mail reported on a number of Canadian senators and MPs who accepted sponsored travel to China and said two of them, Sen. Victor Oh and then-MP Geng Tan, met with arms of the UFWD while there.

WeChat - Kenny Chiu, a Conservative who lost his seat of Steveston-Richmond East in the 2021 federal election, said he was targeted by pre-election misinformation on Chinese-language social media, primarily WeChat, and that there had been a lack of action from Ottawa on foreign interests operating in Canadian politics.

While he said he felt vindicated by recent reports of China's influence efforts, Chiu said his overwhelming emotion is one of being gravely concerned" about Canada's national security situation and the ability of predatorial regimes" such as China, Russia and Iran to influence votes here.

The posts on WeChat in 2021 erroneously stated that Chiu's private bill C-282 advocating for a foreign influence registry would require all individuals and groups with ties to China be treated as spokespersons for the Chinese government."

WeChat has been of particular concern because of the ubiquity of the Chinese app among immigrants from China in Canada, and the fact that it highly censors its content according to China's strict rules governing social media companies, no matter where in the world a user accesses the app.

Launched in 2011 by Chinese company Tencent Holdings, WeChat has over a billion monthly active users worldwide and is an essential platform for a plethora of media outlets, communities and businesses.

Canada does not currently have laws requiring social media companies to remove online abuse or disinformation, but the government is engaging with experts on a new regulatory framework for online safety.

In the past month, according to a review by the Star, Chinese-language media sites and social media in Canada have been largely silent on foreign influence issues. There hasn't been the kind of uniform message of negativity about a foreign influence registry that had previously targeted Chiu as well as former Conservative leader Erin O' Toole and appeared in Chinese-language news articles and in large private chat groups on WeChat and WhatsApp, which is owned by U.S. tech conglomerate Meta.

If (previous) misinformation campaigns had any ties to Chinese consulates, the fact we're seeing little of it now could reflect a strategy to lie low rather than attract scrutiny when mainstream media is paying close attention," said Kurt, pseudonym for the Canadian independent researcher and publisher of the newsletter, Found in Translation. Kurt requested anonymity out of safety concerns for their work translating political content in Chinese-Canadian media into English.

Witting Affiliate or Unwitting Target - A previous Global News report in February named Dong as an alleged witting affiliate" of a Chinese government effort to help him secure the Liberal nomination in Don Valley North, so he could run for the party in the 2019 federal election. The report is among a series of stories from Global News and the Globe and Mail, which cite intelligence and national security reports that allege China attempted to influence multiple candidates during the last two federal elections.

But Dong told reporters that he has no information that Beijing has helped or has been involved with any of his campaigns since he entered politics nine years ago.

To my knowledge, I was not offered, I was not told, I was not informed, nor would I accept any help from a foreign country," Dong said. He also said CSIS has never contacted him about alleged foreign interference, and he's never been told of any investigation by that service, the RCMP or Elections Canada.

The issue highlights the nuances of whether a target of influence knows about it or not, said Tan.

Foreign states target people in the political space, in the social space and in academia. But if you're a target, it doesn't mean you know about it or that you're susceptible. It means you are vulnerable. A person may change their behaviours and think they did so out of their own volition, without being aware that they were manipulated.

There are many layers, and a muddiness of water to these conversations."

With files from Alex Ballingall, Kevin Jiang and The Canadian Press

Joanna Chiu is a B.C.-based staff reporter for the Star. She covers global and national affairs. Follow her on Twitter: @joannachiu