Canada’s adversaries will be watching, inquiry head says
Hearings look into foreign interference
• Threats of violence, isolation, coercion and even hacking of personal electronic devices. Those are just some of the tools used by foreign governments including China, Russia, India and Iran to hush dissent in Canadian ethnic diasporas — say six community members who testified at the foreign interference inquiry on Wednesday.
It was first day of a second set of hearings for the Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference (PIFI) presided over by commissioner Mariejosée Hogue.
The inquiry will host two weeks of hearings into alleged interference by China, Russia, India and other foreign actors on the 2019 and 2021 federal elections, as well as the flow of information and intelligence among federal officials and politicians.
The first witnesses were members of the Uyghur, Iranian, Russian, Sikh and Chinese diasporas in Canada. They detailed how governments of their respective countries of origin try to repress dissenting speech and activities among critics abroad.
Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project representative Mehmet Tohti said China’s repression of its Uyghur minority leads to “total isolation” for many foreign critics, who find it is unsafe to travel back to their homeland and visit their families lest they face arrest. He said he had been threatened multiple times while in Canada.
He also told a story of how he received a call from Chinese police in 2023, right before MPS voted to resettle 10,000 Uyghurs fleeing persecution in China, telling him that his mother and two of his sisters were dead.
“I confirmed that my mother was dead at the age of 76, and still I don’t know when or even if she has a grave,” he said. “My two sisters, I also don’t know when ... they were killed.”
“Transnational repression is a very big part of foreign interference,” he added, noting that he can’t even travel to many central Asian countries because of China’s influence in the region.
Hamed Esmailion, a representative of the Association of Families of Flight PS752 that was shot down by two Iranian missiles in January 2020, said he has personally been threatened by Iranian regime officials in Canada.
He said he was disconcerted by the number of former top Iranian regime officials he says have been welcomed into Canada by being granted tourist visas or even residency status.
He pointed to the former notorious Tehran police chief Morteza Talaei, who was spotted in 2021 working out in a Toronto-area gym, and Seyed Salman Samani, Iran’s former deputy interior minister who was recently ordered to be deported because of his boss’s involvement in ordering police to brutally repress protests against Iran’s “morality police” in 2019.
Grace Dai Wollensak of the Falun Dafa Association of Canada said the Chinese Communist Party has a growing network of “covert agents” against which Canada must act urgently. Her group represents Falun Gong minorities, which are persecuted in China.
The agents are creating an “invisible but persuasive hand, controlling Canadian communities to serve the CCP’S interests and eroding Canadian values,” she said.
The inquiry also heard from Russian Canadian Democratic Alliance director Yuriy Novodvorskiy, Sikh Coalition representative Jaskaran Sandhu and Toronto Association for Democracy in China co-chair Winnie Ng.
Sandhu said the Sikh community has faced transnational repression from the Indian government for four decades.
“Indian consulates act as a hub for espionage and foreign interference and transnational repression targeting the Sikh community,” he told the inquiry. “They have, stationed in Canada, intelligence officers whose sole purpose is to monitor and target the Sikh community.”
Over the next three weeks, the commission will hear from nearly 50 witnesses over 13 days including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, a coterie of federal ministers, and the heads of the RCMP, CSIS, CSE and numerous government departments, as well as officials and current and former MPS from the Conservative, NDP and Liberal parties.
Commissioner Hogue said at the onset of the hearing that although the inquiry will strive to make as much information from the inquiry public as possible, some will have to remain secret because Canada’s adversaries will be watching closely.
“Any information publicly disclosed as part of this investigation will become known not only to Canadians, but also to states and organizations with interests opposed to those of Canada. It is a reality that the commission must take into account,” inquiry Commissioner Marie-josée Hogue said in an opening statement.
Hogue said that two of the inquiry’s biggest challenges are extremely tight timelines and balancing transparency with the need to protect sensitive information. The inquiry began in January and is expected to finish in mid-april. Previous public inquiries into issues of national concern have sometimes taken years.
“No one can reasonably challenge the fact that the public, and journalists who work to inform the public, have a vested interest in knowing whether Canada’s democratic processes have been targeted by foreign actors and whether their actions had an impact on election integrity,” Hogue said.
“On the other hand, ... a public inquiry that would reveal highly sensitive information could, depending on the circumstances, do more harm than good,” she added.
Hogue cited information relating to sources of intelligence, means of collecting it or the targets of intelligence as examples of information that needs to stay secret.