Beijing a Bigger Threat to Canada’s Freedom Than Many Realize: China Scholar
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China is a more serious threat to Canada’s freedom and prosperity than many patriotic Canadians realize, says Charles Burton, China scholar and senior fellow of the Sinopsis think tank.
“I believe strongly that the significance of how Canada engages with China’s integrated business, military, Communist Party autocracy is more critical to whether or not we can reclaim Canada than most patriotic Canadians realize,” Burton said during a Sept. 21 panel as part of the 2025 Reclaiming Conference organized by We Unify in Calgary.
Jan Jekielek, senior editor at The Epoch Times, hosted the panel at the event in person and was joined virtually by Burton and Cleo Paskal, a non-resident senior fellow for the Indo-Pacific at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Jekielek said the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has convinced those in the West that it is an authoritarian regime and that there is still “some semblance of civil society” in the country, while it is actually a totalitarian regime that has a “history of crushing grassroots movements.”
He noted the Falun Gong spiritual group as an example of a group targeted by the CCP for persecution. The meditation and spiritual practice was introduced to the public in China in 1992 and had grown to 70 million to 100 million people practising in that country by 1999, but it was was then targeted by the CCP. He also said the CCP has engaged in forced organ harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners as part of its campaign of persecution.
Additionally, Jekielek referred to a research paper published in the American Journal of Transplantation that he said documents at least 70 instances of violations of the dead donor rule in China.
“They’re telling other totalitarians around the world, if you get sick we’ll kill somebody to order for you and give you a new organ,” Paskal said.
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‘Lucrative Opportunities’
Burton said he has tried to raise awareness about China’s influence on Canada for nearly 15 years, by writing commentaries in the press, but he says elite capture has enabled the CCP “to dampen down any meaningful government response to the illegal activities of the Chinese state in Canada.”“For example, we have something like 176 Chinese diplomats accredited to Canada, compared to 43 for Japan, and 30 some for India,” Burton said. “Why do they have so many people in our country? And it’s not reciprocal. We don’t have anything like those numbers in China.”
It’s estimated that 70 percent of Chinese diplomats are engaged in spying in Canada, who enable the CCP to “harass and intimidate persons of Chinese origin in Canada,” he added.
Burton also said there are Canadian politicians and senior civil servants who take advantage of “very lucrative opportunities” offered by China when they retire, such as working in law firms or other businesses that do business with China. If they are deemed to be “unfriendly” to China’s interests in Canada, however, they lose those opportunities.
The federal government has said it will enact the registry later this year. Burton said movement on restricting CCP action should be faster.
Jekielek said the CCP specializes in elite capture and noted that there are many cases of politicians cultivating long-term relationships with the Chinese regime as well as political campaigns that receive Chinese money.
The foreign influence law is not a panacea or a “be all and end all” solution, as there are many other pieces of legislation “absolutely necessary” to dealing with the China threat, he said.
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How to End Tyranny
Burton says Canadians should reject the CCP’s claim that all Chinese people in Canada support the CCP and that it is being racist toward Chinese people to criticize the regime’s human rights abuses or its actions to enable dictators throughout the world.“That idea has to be debunked,” Burton said. “Most Canadians of Chinese origin do not support the Chinese dictatorship, but how do we get that message through?”
Jekielek said the CCP is “very good at information warfare and propaganda,” leading people to believe the CCP is equivalent to the Chinese people.
Solomon Islands Premier
Paskal commented on how in 2023, then-premier of the Malaita Province in Solomon Islands Daniel Suidani, said he didn’t want the CCP operating in his province because “he had seen how CCP-linked businesses had operated elsewhere.”She said that since then, Chinese operatives and proxies within the country have “systematically tried to destroy” Suidani’s career and life.
“That was an effective veto by Beijing over a democratically elected official in a different country,” Paskal said, adding that there is now a court case against Suidani involving lawfare charges that could have him imprisoned for more than a year.
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