Beijing Cheers Liberal MP's Attack on Canadian China Expert — As State Media's Detailed Attack Dossier Raises Questions

OTTAWA — Chinese state-linked media celebrated Liberal floor-crosser Michael Ma’s combative parliamentary performance as a propaganda victory Friday, publishing a studied attack on University of Ottawa China expert Margaret McCuaig-Johnston — a scholar well known to Beijing, which sanctioned her in December 2024.

Luke de Pulford, coordinator of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China — a group that has itself been targeted by Chinese Communist Party interference operations — flagged the development immediately. “State media now praising MP Michael Ma’s attack on Margaret McCuaig-Johnston,” de Pulford wrote, citing the Observer Network’s own framing of the exchange: “Michael Ma launched a rapid-fire interrogation that sent tension through the room. The witness’s stumbling response sparked uproar.”

That framing is itself significant.

The uproar across most Canadian online reaction was caused by Ma’s unfair treatment of a well-known expert — not by any failure of testimony on her part. The technique he employed — demanding a witness confirm personal firsthand observation of an atrocity before her evidence could be taken seriously — is not a standard of proof recognized in any parliamentary inquiry or human rights investigative framework. Human Rights Watch, the United Nations, the United States government, and multiple allied democracies have each independently documented the forced labor system in Xinjiang through researcher testimony, satellite imagery, leaked internal documents, and survivor accounts.

The Observer Network’s account of the March 26 industry committee hearing did more than celebrate Ma’s performance. Hours after the event, it arrived laden with biographical detail about McCuaig-Johnston’s career in China relations — the kind of granular institutional knowledge that raises uncomfortable questions.

The piece ran under the headline “Canadian scholars hyped ‘forced labor’ and asked a Canadian congressman: Have you ever been to China? Have you really seen it?”

It dismissed her as someone who had “repeatedly acted as an anti-China pawn under the guise of a so-called ‘expert,’” accused her of abandoning legitimate scholarship to “make a big fuss about Xinjiang and Tibet,” and branded her “a notorious hardliner on China in Canada with a long list of bad deeds.” Forced labor accusations, the outlet declared, were “an absurd lie fabricated by certain Western forces based on ideological bias” lacking any empirical foundation.

Notably, the piece also charted a progression in McCuaig-Johnston’s relations with China — one she has acknowledged herself in interviews with The Bureau. During her career in senior Canadian government roles, she believed that trade and engagement with China would benefit both nations and lead to liberalization in Beijing. But after hardline Xi Jinping consolidated power, McCuaig-Johnston said she concluded that China had become hostile to Canada’s interests, in areas including intellectual property theft and transnational repression.

The Chinese state-linked report has its own version of that progression. “Her early research focused on practical areas such as Sino-Canadian scientific and technological cooperation, but she later turned to smearing and attacking China’s so-called ‘human rights issues,’” it charged.

The piece also reported that after the hearing McCuaig-Johnston handed Ma a human rights report, and that Ma replied he did not believe in reports — only in what he could see with his own eyes — and suggested they travel to China together. Ma, meanwhile, walked back his remarks, claiming his questions referred narrowly to Shenzhen rather than Xinjiang, the actual subject of her testimony.

A Canadian journalist fluent in Mandarin, who monitored Chinese-language coverage overnight and could not be named for safety reasons, said the reaction was unambiguous. “CCP media is praising his performance,” the journalist said. “Chinese social media has lots of videos praising him. He became a hero in China.”