Canadian Senator’s Anti-‘Foreign Interference Hysteria’ Group Invites Elected Officials to Fundraiser After Parliament Clash Over United Front Findings

Former Liberal MP Paul Chiang, left, speaks with current and former Canadian senators at a press conference announcing a fundraiser for the group led by sitting Canadian senator Yuen Pau Woo, right.

TORONTO — Days after a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst testified in Parliament about a sitting Canadian senator’s group’s alleged ties to the Chinese Communist Party, that group, led by Liberal-appointed Senator Yuen Pau Woo and former Conservative senator Victor Oh, reached out to elected officials in the Toronto area and invited them to a fundraising gala.

As reported by The Bureau, Peter Mattis, a former CIA counterintelligence analyst and president of The Jamestown Foundation, testified before a parliamentary committee on foreign interference and was asked by Conservative Member of Parliament Shuv Majumdar to respond to Woo’s public attacks on Jamestown’s research.

That study, authored by Jamestown Fellow Cheryl Yu, identified 575 organizations across Canada with documented links to the Party’s united front influence apparatus — the highest per capita density among the four Western democracies examined, nearly five times the rate of the United States.

After Woo denounced the research in a Senate speech and public statements as “disinformation,” “fearmongering” and “bad fiction” — and cited reports from his new anti-exclusion group in support of that criticism — Yu confirmed to The Bureau that Woo’s group meets the same standard applied to the other 575 entries.

A founding director attended multiple World Chinese Media Forums organized by China News Service, which the report documents as operating under United Front Work Department oversight.

“What should we think of an organization whose leadership attends multiple world Chinese media forums in the PRC?” Mattis asked, pointing to the connection that Cheryl Yu identified in Woo’s Advocacy Group specifically, and describing such forums as “collaborating with the propaganda system, the United Front system, to influence foreign audiences.”

“These are not friendly organizations,” Mattis testified. “They explicitly exist to do harm.”

Yesterday, that same advocacy group, led by Woo and Oh, invited municipal politicians to a May 1 fundraiser at a Scarborough banquet hall. The gala’s stated theme is “One Canada for All.”

The Bureau obtained the invitation sent to a Canadian municipal councillor.

The letter, dated April 22, 2026, is signed by Woo. It describes the organization as “a national, not for profit, non-partisan organization that defends the rights and freedoms of Canadians against false or exaggerated narratives driven by foreign interference hysteria, national security overreach, and fear of the ‘other’.”

The invitation says the fundraising dinner will “bring together civic leaders from various communities, including municipal, provincial and federal politicians; representatives of anti-racism, human rights and civil liberties organizations; and members of the public.”

Chinese-language reports show that on April 7, Woo and Oh appeared at a Markham press conference to launch the fundraiser, alongside former Member of Parliament Paul Chiang.

Chiang, the former Liberal MP from Markham, was later forced to step down after telling Chinese-language media in Toronto that Conservative candidate Joe Tay could be turned over to the Chinese consulate.

Canada’s election interference monitors later informed Canadian media that Tay had been targeted by a multi-pronged interference campaign directed by Chinese media and intelligence entities. Tay later testified in Parliament that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police warned him of credible threats to his safety, that it became unsafe for him to canvass door to door during the campaign, that he was followed and his residence surveilled, and that intimidation and disinformation targeting Chinese Canadian voters were aimed at suppressing support for his candidacy.

Mattis, in his own testimony before the subcommittee, placed the present scale of United Front penetration in Canada in a generational context. He invoked Project Sidewinder, the controversial Canadian intelligence study from the 1990s that warned of Chinese state and organized crime penetration of Canadian institutions.

“What you could see from the report done by Cheryl Yu earlier this year,” Mattis said, “is that this is what happens when there is no pushback, when there are no investigations, and there are no discussions about what takes place.”

As reported previously by The Bureau, Senator Woo has evidently used his Senate platform since February to challenge precisely those discussions.

On February 27, Woo posted on X, tagging the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and parliamentary oversight bodies: “Foreign Interference Alert: US Think Tank spreads disinformation, amplified by witting or unwitting Canadian agents.” In a subsequent Vancouver Sun opinion piece, he argued the Jamestown methodology treated “celebrating Chinese culture, promoting Canada-China trade, and generally representing Chinese Canadian communities as conclusive evidence of co-optation by the Chinese government.”

Mattis rejected that characterization before Parliament. The report, he said, was not blaming Canadians for failing to understand Beijing’s apparatus.

It was asking them — and asking Canada’s institutions — to look at the specific Party structures it documented: the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office, the United Front Work Department and its supporting units, among them the Chinese Overseas Exchange Association and the Chinese Overseas Friendship Association.

“If people are Canadian citizens or American citizens or anything else who take official advisory or delegate positions with these United Front organizations — again, a set of organizations that seek to do us harm — that seems to me a reasonable question that we could ask of our fellow citizens in a democratic state,” Mattis said.

In response to detailed questions from The Bureau on Cheryl Yu’s research and the evidentiary standard from Jamestown that found Woo’s new group’s ties to China News Service established it as among the 575 United Front Work Department-linked groups, Woo told The Bureau, “Your query has too many flawed premises, illogical inferences, and unsubstantiated conclusions for me to respond to.”

Mattis closed his parliamentary testimony with a warning about what comes next. Defending democratic integrity, he said, would require equipping news organizations to investigate, building China expertise inside government, companies and universities, and ensuring that Canada’s coming foreign influence registration system carries real consequences. “Because unless there are consequences,” he said, “Beijing is running no risks whatsoever by continuing their operations.”