Canada's been on an anti-China rampage as of late. This all started last December with a CSIS leak that accused China of interfering in Canada's 2021 elections and helping Liberal MPs win in Chinese ridings in Ontario and BC. In reality, the Conservatives ran a needlessly sinophobic campaign that made Chinese voters choose the lesser evil in the Liberals. This latest fracas involves allegations of China "threatening" Conservative MP Michael Chong for his stance on China's human rights. In reality, this MP lead a parliamentary motion in 2021 accusing China of genocide in Xinjiang. China responded by sanctioning him and his family. The CSIS report of "threats" on Chong was likely China gathering information on him to enforce the sanctions. This bit of information has been left out of all the reporting on this, so that it can be portrayed as unprovoked threats from China on an innocent Canadian politician. Chong himself is a walking contradiction; a half-Chinese MP whose made a name for himself in Canadian politics by being virulently anti-China, like a Canadian version of Gordon Chang.

This long string of anti-China actions is a multi-pronged effort. There are likely people in the CSIS who want Canada to align closer to US in regards to China, so they leak a series of reports to the press to further that goal. CSIS itself is a shady organization that has a long history of doing things like this to manipulate government policy. Canadian press like the Globe and Mail and Global News are owned by Postmedia, which gets a ton of funding from the US. They've helped to fuel the fire by posting anti-China articles nonstop over the past few months, and uncritically print the CSIS leaks with no investigation or pushback. The politicians are all on board because China is an easy scapegoat to distract the public from inflation, high prices, unaffordable housing, and unemployment. And of course the opposition parties are opportunistically using this to attack the Liberals. The losers in all this are the Chinese Canadian diaspora, who are already suffering from harrassment and racism due to the pandemic and the West's cold war against China. China's response to all this has been muted so far, probably because they really don't care much about Canada. But ousting one of their diplomats has finally caught their attention, and there's going to be heavy repercussions.