While Canada and Australia have received similar intelligence that China is interfering in all levels of government, a new study says Canberra took actions to push back while Canadian political leaders “did not act” and allowed Chinese interference to flourish.
“In Ottawa, intelligence agencies reportedly found in 2017 that the CCP was interfering at ‘all levels of government’. In contrast with Australia, however, Canada’s political leaders did not act, and the problem of CCP interference continued to grow,” says a report compiled by China analysts John Garnaut, Matthew Johnson, Prudence Luttrell, and an anonymised researcher.
The study, titled “TikTok, ByteDance, and their ties to the Chinese Communist Party,” was submitted to the Australian parliament’s Select Committee on Foreign Interference Through Social Media, which was created in November 2022 by the Australian Senate to inquire into and report on the risk of foreign interference towards the country’s democracy through social media….