Beijing's "Two-State" Strategy Targets Indigenous Land Claims and Resources to Undermine Canada's National Sovereignty, and Mark Carney's PRC Pivot Makes It More Dangerous
Op-Ed: As land title recognition accelerates across British Columbia and a powerful pro-Beijing lobby openly courts First Nations investors, Canada's sovereignty vulnerability hides in plain sight.
VANCOUVER — At a moment when Canada is reassessing its economic sovereignty and Prime Minister Mark Carney is charting what he describes as a deeper strategic partnership with China, a long-running but poorly understood vulnerability is quietly advancing — one that cuts across the most sensitive fault lines in Canadian public life: Indigenous land rights, natural resource development, and Beijing’s patient, methodical campaign to secure the commodities it needs without ever having to negotiate with Ottawa.
The strategy, as intelligence documents obtained exclusively by The Bureau reveal, is not new. It is simply becoming more consequential.
Canada’s National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians, in a Top Secret 2019 report obtained by The Bureau, found that Beijing was already targeting First Nations leaders through intelligence operations disguised as tourism. The goal, a People’s Republic of China Embassy official acknowledged in intercept reports reviewed by Canada’s intelligence watchdog, was never cultural exchange.
The tourism invitation extended to a national-level group of Aboriginal leaders, the report says, was merely “beipian” — Mandarin for “to be fooled.” The true purpose was to pursue Aboriginal-controlled natural resources. Chinese intelligence, the report notes, conducted research on each delegate before they arrived, seeking to identify their “potential usefulness.”
That is the covert face of Chinese resource strategy in Canada’s north.
But it has an overt companion, pursued through British Columbia Indigenous business councils, Canada’s most powerful pro-Beijing trade lobby, and quickly evolving legal frameworks.
China’s overt power play — which seeks to leverage not only direct access to resources on lands claimed by Indigenous groups, but to rhetorically counter Canada’s arguments against Beijing’s human rights abuses by citing Canada’s own historical abuses against First Nations, and to do so, in some cases, at the behest of Canadian First Nations leaders themselves — is no less significant than any activities uncovered by Canadian intelligence.
It is conducted in plain sight, in Canadian courts and political offices and public forums, and it is moving quickly.
For years, Indigenous organizations in British Columbia have openly articulated a desire for direct, state-level relationships with Chinese mining and resource interests — explicitly bypassing Ottawa. The First Nations Energy and Mining Council launched its “First Nations and China: Transforming Relationships” strategy in 2011, establishing trade desks in Vancouver and China and dispatching a ten-day trade mission to Beijing that same year. The Council was explicit: if the Canadian state was not adequately representing First Nations interests, First Nations would represent those interests themselves, including to Beijing.
In his study “Disrupting Canadian Sovereignty? The ‘First Nations & China’ Strategy Revisited,” York University professor Jean Michel Montsion examines “the ways BC First Nations are engaging with Chinese investors and opposing the Canadian state, notably through the First Nations & China strategy” — describing the Council’s role as “reproducing a third space of sovereignty to resist the hegemonologue of state sovereignty in contemporary Canada–China relations.”
It is, in Montsion’s framing, not merely an economic initiative but a structural challenge to Canadian diplomatic authority over its own territory.
The national security implications of that posture have not been lost on experts who have studied Beijing’s methods closely. In a prior interview with The Bureau on Canadian Security Intelligence Service findings regarding the covert targeting of Indigenous leaders, Charles Burton, a former Canadian diplomat, said “the idea of making friends with Aboriginal people for Chinese strategic purposes, would be part and parcel of their overall agenda to get access to the Canadian north and the natural resources that are there.”
The rhetorical dimension of Beijing’s strategy is, in some respects, the most audacious. As far back as 2012, the Yinka Dene Alliance — a coalition of six British Columbia First Nations — sent an open letter to then-Chinese President Hu Jintao, asking him to raise Canada’s human rights record regarding Indigenous peoples with Prime Minister Stephen Harper during an official visit.
The letter handed Beijing precisely the instrument it prizes most: a Canadian voice making Canada’s case against Canada, at the highest levels of international diplomacy.
It was, in miniature, a preview of the broader dynamic that Chinese influence strategists have since worked to cultivate and expand — one that would find full expression nearly a decade later on the floor of the Canadian Senate.
In June 2021, British Columbia Senator Yuen Pau Woo rose to oppose a motion that would have recognized Beijing’s treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang as genocide. Invoking Canada’s residential school system, Woo told the Senate that Canada “did all of those things, and we did them throughout our short history as a country, most appallingly to Indigenous peoples.”
The motion was defeated.
China’s foreign ministry promptly praised the senators who voted it down as “people of vision” who had seen through “the despicable schemes of a few anti-China forces.”
The narrative of shared historical grievance has found willing amplifiers in Canada.
The Canada China Business Council's 2022 Dentons report — which encourages direct China-to-Indigenous resource dealings — explicitly invokes it, asserting that Chinese and Indigenous Canadians share "a history of marginalization and cultural similarities," and that there is evidence Chinese explorers first interacted with Indigenous communities on the coast of British Columbia "hundreds of years before contact with Europeans" — a contested historical claim — adding that "instead of colonization, there was mutual trade and respect." The Musqueam Nation in Vancouver does have a documented history of Chinese-Indigenous relations, rooted in the Chinese market gardeners who lived and farmed on Musqueam reserve land in the early 20th century.
Under British Columbia Premier David Eby, the pace of Indigenous land title recognition and rights expansion has accelerated dramatically.
The provincial government’s implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, combined with a series of landmark court decisions confirming Aboriginal title over specific territories, has rapidly altered the legal landscape governing resource extraction in western Canada.
More land is now subject to Indigenous control. More projects require Indigenous consent. These are, in principle, corrections to historical wrongs. But they also mean that the pathway to Canada’s most strategically valuable resources — lithium, cobalt, rare earth elements, timber, and liquefied natural gas — now runs, in many cases, directly through First Nations governments. Beijing, acutely interested in North American court procedures, has obviously noticed.
The pace of that transformation was thrown into sharp relief on February 20, 2026, when the Musqueam Indian Band and the federal government signed three landmark agreements recognizing Musqueam Aboriginal rights — including title — within a traditional territory spanning much of Metro Vancouver: Vancouver, Richmond, Burnaby, parts of Delta, North Vancouver, West Vancouver, the University of British Columbia campus, Coquitlam, New Westminster, Surrey, and the land beneath Vancouver International Airport. The agreement, which was secretly negotiated and presented as a done deal with zero public knowledge or input, covers some of the most strategically critical infrastructure in Canada, including the Port of Vancouver — the country’s largest and busiest port, and a longstanding focus of The Bureau‘s reporting on Chinese transnational organized crime and Belt and Road Initiative maritime penetration. Even Premier Eby, who attended the signing ceremony, claimed afterward that he had “no line of sight” on the agreement.
The Canada China Business Council — a trade lobby with deep roots inside the Liberal Party of Canada, whose leadership has over the years included figures with close proximity to multiple prime ministers — published a report in March 2022, co-produced with Dentons, explicitly advising Indigenous businesses on how to enter the Chinese market, attract Chinese investment capital, and build direct relationships with Chinese state-linked enterprises.
The Dentons connection carries its own weight.
Former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien joined Dentons as counsel in February 2014, where he has worked since. Chrétien’s ties to the Canada China Business Council run deeper still. Paul Desmarais Sr. founded the Canada China Business Council in 1978, and Chrétien’s daughter France is married to Desmarais’ son André — a familial bond that has long placed Chrétien at the intersection of Canada’s most powerful pro-Beijing commercial network. A member of the Desmarais family continues to chair the Canada China Business Council today. In his writing on Chinese influence operations in Canada, scholar Dennis Molinaro has described Chrétien as an “old friend” of China and linked the Council to Beijing’s broader soft power apparatus, including the United Front Work Department. The Council’s advice to First Nations leaders, read against the intelligence picture obtained by The Bureau, takes on a different character: perhaps not merely commercial guidance, but plausibly, an elite channel through which Beijing’s resource interests might be advanced, at arm’s length from Ottawa.
Mark Carney’s government has spoken of strategic partnerships and economic engagement with China as though the principal risk to be managed is the tariff environment.
That is simplistic.
The deeper risk is that Canada’s critical mineral wealth — the very resources that Carney has identified as central to Canadian economic sovereignty in a multipolar world — could be traded away through channels that Ottawa has limited control over.
Canada’s public has not yet recognized or reckoned seriously with the fact that Beijing seeks to negotiate directly with Indigenous peoples worldwide, from Australia to Taiwan, seeking to undermine democratic sovereignty.
And this strategy has gathered alarming pace in Mark Carney’s Canada.