China’s Vancouver consulate interfered in 2022 municipal election, according to CSIS

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China’s diplomatic mission in Vancouver has actively interfered in the city’s politics, using proxies in diaspora community organizations and grooming politicians to run in last fall’s municipal election, according to Canada’s spy agency.

A Jan. 10, 2022, Canadian Security Intelligence Service report viewed by The Globe and Mail outlines how China’s then-consul-general, Tong Xiaoling, discussed mentoring – or as the report quoted her, “grooming” – Chinese-Canadian municipal politicians for higher office to advance Beijing’s interests.

Ms. Tong sought to elect pro-Beijing politicians to city council in the October, 2022, municipal election in which incumbent mayor Kennedy Stewart lost to Ken Sim by margin of nearly 37,000 votes.

During his term as mayor, Mr. Stewart drew criticism from the Chinese government for suspending meetings with its diplomats after it put sanctions on Canadian MP Michael Chong, a friend of his and critic of Beijing, and strengthening ties with Taiwan, a self-ruled province that Beijing wants to annex.

Mr. Stewart said he was briefed in late May, 2022, by CSIS’s regional director and one of the agency’s China specialists about foreign interference in municipal politics. They asked a lot of questions about the attacks levelled at him by Ms. Tong and some Chinese-language media, partly owned by China’s government, he said.

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Mr. Sim, a businessman and the first Chinese-Canadian mayor of Vancouver, said during the campaign that Mr. Stewart was paying too much attention to foreign issues. “We don’t have to worry about what’s been happening in other countries. We should be leaving that to the Prime Minister,” Mr. Sim was quoted as saying on Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong-based TV station majority-owned by the Chinese state.

Some Chinese-language media denounced Mr. Stewart as a “Cold War mayor” and accused him of “spreading conspiracy theories to divide the Chinese community.”

People who are ethnically Chinese make up a fifth of the Metro Vancouver population, but views on immigration, China’s role in the world and how Ottawa should relate to Beijing are widely divergent across a community that spans a range of generations and places of origin.

A former NDP MP who became mayor in 2018, Mr. Stewart told The Globe that he believes he was a target of Chinese government interference in the municipal election.

Mr. Stewart said he had tense relations with Ms. Tong because of his pro-democracy position, opposition to the Chinese government’s human-rights violations and support for Taiwan’s independence. He would like to see Ottawa expand its inquiry into Beijing’s interference in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections to municipal and provincial politics as well.

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The CSIS documents explain how in mid-November, 2021, Ms. Tong talked about orchestrating the Chinese diaspora to help elect a new mayor and a favoured city councillor.

“With regards to the 2022 City of Vancouver mayoral election, CG Tong stated that they need to do all they could to increase the ethnic voting percentage. They needed to get all eligible voters to come out and elect a specific Chinese-Canadian candidate,” according to the document.

“CG Tong emphasized this work was necessary, as the candidate will rely on those votes,” the document said. “In parallel, CG Tong indicated they needed someone within the Vancouver City Council.”

The document was marked secret and shared with senior officials at Global Affairs, Public Safety, Communications Security Establishment, National Defence, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada and the Privy Council Office, which reports directly to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

CSIS said Ms. Tong had her eye on one individual who was not named in the document but who she saw as a candidate for council and, perhaps later, provincial or federal politics.

Ms. Tong passed information on this individual to someone who she hoped “could become acquainted with them” and assess if they were worth “grooming,” the document said. The aim was to discover if the individual was a “good sapling to cultivate.”

“CG Tong saw great promise,” in this individual, saying she hoped they “could join a political party that had a long-term strategy regarding their policy towards the PRC,” CSIS reported, referring to the People’s Republic of China.

Mr. Sim was elected alongside Lenny Zhou, who came to Canada from Beijing as a graduate student. Mr. Zhou has said he ran for council in part out of concern over what he called a rise in racism. In January, he made headlines by speaking in Mandarin in the Vancouver council chamber.

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Louis Huang, a former Shanghai pediatrician who moved to Vancouver in 2002 and an outspoken critic of China, recalls Mr. Zhou coming to a meeting of the Alliance of the Guard of Canadian Values roughly half a decade ago. He was at the time “absolutely in support of the Chinese government,” Mr. Huang said.

Mr. Huang believes no other country has been “so comprehensively” influenced by China.

Mr. Zhou said he has no recollection of attending that meeting. After last year’s election, he tweeted in support of oppressed groups in China, including Uyghurs, Tibetans and those harmed by the country’s zero-COVID policy.

“I am a Canadian citizen. Canada is my country, it has been my home for almost 20 years. This is the country where I have built my life and I’m raising my family. I am a strong believer in free speech and democracy,” he said.

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Mr. Sim declined an interview request, and spokesman Taylor Verrall said the mayor could not comment on any interactions with the national-security apparatus. Mr. Sim has not met with the consulate since becoming mayor, the spokesman added.

CSIS said Ms. Tong’s involvement in the electoral process was “consistent with efforts to cultivate relationships with municipal-level politicians and help them ascend to higher levels of office over a period of many years.”

“The activity is also consistent with PRC efforts to have more ethnic Chinese individuals enter politics in Western countries, as they are seen to be easier to influence and access, particularly by leveraging community proxies,” CSIS added.

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Chinese diplomats can influence networks of Chinese associations in Canada, said Ronald Leung, who helped the federal Conservative Party with community outreach while Stephen Harper was prime minister. He is now a commentator and interviewer in the Vancouver area and it was clear, he said, that local Chinese associations supported ABC Vancouver, the party to which both Mr. Sim and Mr. Zhou belong, in 2022.

“They wanted to see a Chinese face as the mayor of Vancouver,” he said. But, he added, that is not necessarily an indication of foreign interference.

None of the city councillors during Mr. Stewart’s time as mayor had Chinese roots.

It’s common, Mr. Leung said, for Chinese seniors to be organized in support of certain candidates. Some of them live in Canada but owe their financial well-being to Beijing. “There are so many retired mainland Chinese in Vancouver, and they are getting their pension from the Chinese government,” he said.

“When they are rallied to do something for their motherland, how can you refuse to do it?”

Ms. Tong, the former consul-general who left Canada in late July, 2022, had accused Mr. Stewart of holding anti-China attitudes. In November, 2021, the Chinese consulate in Vancouver released a statement warning the City of Vancouver against forging a special relationship with the Taiwanese city of Kaohsiung, an objection in line with continuing efforts by Beijing to diplomatically isolate and intimidate the self-governing island.

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In August, 2022, the consulate criticized Mr. Stewart for backing U.S. Speaker Nancy’s Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan – a visit that sparked Chinese military exercises around the self-ruled island – calling his comments “ridiculous and unacceptable” and warned the mayor: “Those who play with fire will definitely get burned.”

As the election approached, Mr. Stewart said he noticed his invitations to Chinese-Canadian community events petered out – and certainly none where Ms. Tong was a participant.

“I have gone to many rallies and events but I noticed on the ground there was a bit of a local chill and in fact I was warned by some other councillors who are no longer sitting that I was really playing a dangerous game,” he said. “They would definitely invite her and not me.”

About three weeks before the vote, Mr. Stewart said donations to the campaign also dried up.

“It is pretty common for the development community to have a little breakfast or lunch and have 25 people come and they’d buy their tickets for $1,200. Then it just stopped and part of my suspicion is that much of the financing for development in the city comes from China,” he said.

“It is Chinese investors who are financing different projects, especially luxury buildings downtown. And all of a sudden the folks that I had worked with for four years … the money wasn’t coming in.”

Ms. Tong’s political activities were blatant interference and should not have been tolerated by the federal government, which should have expelled her from Canada, Mr. Stewart said. “I mean if it was in the U.S., you would get kicked out of the country for that.”

Mr. Stewart would not go so far as to say he lost the election because of Beijing interference efforts. His own vote total remained virtually unchanged between his loss in 2022 and his election four years earlier, which he narrowly won. Mr. Sim, however, added nearly 37,000 votes in his blowout victory last year.

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Former Vancouver city councillor Kerry Jang has been critical of CSIS for raising concern about political interference in Canada without accompanying action, saying it can lead to unwarranted suspicion of people based solely on ethnicity. What the document describes about Ms. Tong “is really bad if it’s true,” he said. But “if you’ve got the evidence, then arrest somebody. Expel somebody. Do something about it.”

Mr. Jang endorsed Mr. Stewart for mayor in 2018, but dismissed the idea that foreign interference contributed to his loss last year. “I think Kennedy lost because he was a lousy mayor. It was that simple,” Mr. Jang said.

In a Nov. 30, 2021, CSIS report, seen by The Globe, Ms. Tong discussed the recent defeat of a Conservative MP in the September, 2021, federal election whom she called a “vocal detractor of the Chinese government.” She said this loss “proved their strategy and tactics were good and contributed to achieving their goals while still adhering to the local political customs.”

A national-security source in The Globe story based on that report said the MP was former Conservative member of Parliament Kenny Chiu. The Globe is not identifying the source who risks prosecution under the Security of Information Act.

In that same report, CSIS quoted Ms. Tong as saying “they would be pioneers” if they were able to elect a mayor of Chinese descent. “In the past, they had expended great efforts, they had not been successful,” she said. CSIS said it was unclear whether Ms. Tong’s use of the word “they” was alluding to the consulate and/or the Chinese-Canadian community.

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The Prime Minister asked two closed-door panels to investigate China’s election interference after The Globe reported that Beijing employed a sophisticated strategy to disrupt Canada’s democracy in the 2021 federal election campaign.

Secret and top-secret CSIS documents outlined how Chinese diplomats and their proxies backed the re-election of Mr. Trudeau’s Liberals – but only to another minority government – and worked to defeat Conservative politicians considered to be unfriendly to Beijing. CSIS reports also said China interfered in the 2019 federal campaign.

The National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians, which reports to Mr. Trudeau, will investigate election interference in the 2019 and 2021 elections. The National Security and Intelligence Review Agency, which oversees national-security agencies and the RCMP, will examine how authorities handled investigations into Beijing interference operations.

The two panel reports will be reviewed by former governor-general David Johnston, who was named special rapporteur Wednesday by the Prime Minister. Mr. Johnston will make recommendations, including if there is a need for a public inquiry. Mr. Trudeau has so far said that a public inquiry is unwarranted, but all three main opposition leaders say it is.

“I would think the rapporteur should think of broadening the scope,” Mr. Stewart said. “It is going to be hard not to move to some sort of inquiry. … So they should definitely look at the country as a whole.”