Kinsella: Worth knowing which candidates received cash from China

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There. After all, you seem to know how to do it.

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Arrest people for violating our national security. On Monday afternoon, we received word that the RCMP had indicted a Quebec man on espionage charges.

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Yuesheng Wang, 35, from the Montreal area, is in court today to face a number of charges, including obtaining trade secrets, unauthorized computer use, fraud, and treason by public officials. Wang, who worked for the provincial power company’s energy storage unit, was allegedly transmitting sensitive classified information to another country.

China.

You know China. Coincidentally, the same country, in 2019, he is said to have provided hundreds of thousands of dollars to 11 Liberal and Conservative election candidates and campaign staff.

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Global News was the first to report the shocking facts of the case — and so far Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his office have refused to say anything meaningful about the matter. Only Conservative Party leader Pierre Polivre has spoken out about the scandal, and last week called for an inquiry into parliament into the who, what, where and why.

And “who” is still the main question. I don’t know who took the money from the Chinese. We don’t know where the crime took place, but we can guess what and why to unduly influence Canada’s foreign policy.

Who received the money completely illegally? And why doesn’t Trudeau reassure Canadians that Canada’s national security is not in jeopardy? What, if anything, did CSIS tell him?

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Our intelligence agencies may not have told him anything. This will definitely be another scandal.

CSIS does not normally brief the prime minister directly. Prime Ministers may be handed confidential memorandums. But those memos are few.

Most of the time, national leaders answer the phone to discuss national issues. Their spy bureaucracy, as in the case of Wang, is devoted to industrial espionage. The James Bond case takes place in the movies, not in reality.

In Canada, as in most other Western countries, the espionage industry is just that. It’s vast, expensive, and self-perpetuating.

If you’re allowed into the Sanctum Sanatorium, CSIS headquarters in Ottawa, you’ll find most of your file cabinets filled with newspaper clippings and printouts from the Internet. that’s it. No big secret he’s not very juicy.

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Government secrecy, by and large, no longer exists. Thanks to the internet, thanks to social media, thanks to transparency laws, almost everything will eventually become clear.

As I used to say to my political staff when I was Chief of Staff in the days of Jean Chrétien, truth is like water. all will be known.

So it’s all the more baffling that Trudeau didn’t say anything about China’s interference in the 2019 election campaign. Eventually the truth will come out.

One of the 11 candidates, or someone who most likely knows them, has one too many drinks and starts talking. Or use it as a bargaining chip in future legal disputes. And your name will be known.

In addition to ethics and morals and national security, there is another compelling reason why Trudeau must speak the truth. Every member of parliament who ran for office in 2019 is under suspicion by maintaining his silence – by obstructing. Also all candidates who failed to run for Glitz or Tory in 2019. Those people deserve to have their names cleared.

And we Canadians deserve to know the truth. In the Hydro-Québec espionage case, the RCMP was transparent this week.

It’s time for CSIS and Trudeau to do the same.

— Kinsella was Jean Chrétien’s special assistant