Former CIA Analyst Rebukes Senator Woo's Attempt to Discredit the Study That Has Now Captured Woo's Own Group as Its 576th United Front-Linked Organization in Canada

OTTAWA — A former Central Intelligence Agency analyst whose Washington think tank documented a swarm of Chinese Communist Party-linked community organizations across Western democracies — and identified Canada as the most heavily penetrated per capita — told Parliament that a sitting Canadian senator’s effort to discredit the research amounted to “a kind of laziness,” after that senator’s own newly founded advocacy group was identified by the same researchers as the 576th United Front-linked organization in Canada.

Peter Mattis, head of The Jamestown Foundation, appeared at a parliamentary hearing on transnational repression and was asked by Conservative MP Shuv Majumdar to respond to Senator Yuen Pau Woo, who has publicly attacked the foundation’s recent study as “disinformation,” “fearmongering” and “bad fiction.”

The Bureau first reported on the study, authored by Cheryl Yu, a Fellow in China Studies at Jamestown. The work, which has also been raised in the United Kingdom Parliament, identified 575 organizations across Canada with documented links to the Chinese Communist Party’s united front influence apparatus, finding the country had the highest per capita density of such groups among the four Western democracies studied — nearly five times the rate of the United States.

After Woo’s attacks, The Bureau contacted Yu directly, who confirmed that Woo’s Advocacy Group — co-founded in September 2025 with former Conservative Senator Victor Oh and presented as a defense of Chinese Canadians against “false or exaggerated claims” of foreign interference — meets the same evidentiary criteria applied across the study, becoming the 576th organization so identified. A founding director attended multiple World Chinese Media Forums organized by China News Service, which the Jamestown report documents as operating under the direct oversight of the United Front Work Department.

Asked by Majumdar to answer Woo, Mattis cited Woo’s group’s connections to the Chinese Communist Party, and Canada’s longstanding lack of counteractions against Beijing’s united front interference, which he said involves connections to crime groups in Canada.

“I think it’s a kind of laziness not to look at the methodology and to not to look at the party,” he said. The report, he told the committee, was “not blaming Canadians for not understanding.” It asked them, instead, to look at 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 — and their provincial counterparts.

“What should we think of an organization whose leadership attends multiple world Chinese media forums in the PRC?” he 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 about how to understand China, to tell China’s story well.”

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

Without naming Woo, Mattis went further, to the broader class of public figures who hold formal roles in united front bodies.

“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,” he said. “And if we want to protect the integrity, we have to be able to have a conversation that deals with facts and deals with those sources. And our report left a clear methodology for examining and following up on those questions.”

Asked what unique risks the swarm pattern in Canada posed for North American security and what reforms he would recommend, Mattis traced the present situation to a generation of Canadian inaction.

“This kind of expansion in terms of it being open and being accessible is a product of a lack of direct pushback,” he said. He invoked Project Sidewinder, the controversial 1990s Canadian intelligence study that warned of Chinese state and organized crime penetration of Canadian institutions.

“If you go back to the controversial report, Project Sidewinder in the 1990s, this was sort of a speculative effort. It was a sense that something could happen,” Mattis said. “And what you could see from a report from the report done by Cheryl Yu earlier this year 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.”

He pointed to Canadian reporting on the convergence of the Chinese Communist Party and organized crime in Richmond, Vancouver and Toronto. Defending democratic integrity now, he said, will require equipping news organizations to investigate, building China expertise inside companies, universities, politics and government, and ensuring that Canada’s coming foreign influence registration system carries real consequences.

“Because unless there are consequences, Beijing is running no risks whatsoever by continuing their operations,” Mattis said.

Mattis’s testimony lands against a public record in which Woo, since February, has used his Senate platform and his Advocacy Group’s website to attack the same researchers. On February 27, citing the group, Woo posted on X: “Foreign Interference Alert: US Think Tank spreads disinformation, amplified by witting or unwitting Canadian agents.” He tagged the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians and other oversight bodies. The Jamestown report, he wrote in a follow-up, “should be filed … under ‘bad fiction’.”

In a Vancouver Sun opinion article, Woo argued that the 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.”

After Mattis’s testimony, Woo posted again on X: “Thank you for drawing attention to my critique of the @JamestownTweets report, which offers no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of 575 Chinese Canadian organizations. It is all insinuation & ideology — and foreign interference to boot.”