Former Vancouver Mayor Says a British Columbia Cabinet Minister Is Under Active Investigation Over China Links, and That Carney Government Is Not Acting on Foreign Interference
Kennedy Stewart says federal lawyers confirmed the allegation, that questions in the legislature went nowhere, and that the intelligence service and the federal police understand the threat.
VANCOUVER – Kennedy Stewart, the former mayor of Vancouver, says a sitting member of British Columbia’s cabinet is the subject of an active investigation over alleged links to the Chinese government, and that Canada’s federal and provincial leadership, including Premier David Eby, know that foreign interference has reached into the country’s institutions and are not acting on it — a failure Stewart says extends to what he describes as a sustained attack on his own 2022 mayoralty campaign, mounted from inside a foreign consulate and from a radio transmitter placed beyond the reach of Canadian regulators.
“I’m sure there’s going to be interference in this election too,” Stewart said, of upcoming British Columbia municipal elections, “because nothing’s been done.”
Stewart made a series of explosive statements in a long-form interview with Aaron Pete on the podcast Nuanced, going further than he has previously in describing how he came by the allegation of a cabinet minister under active investigation — an allegation he simultaneously refused to completely detail, declining to name the minister on the grounds that the threat of litigation is silencing him and others who he says know the case.
Asked by Pete what he knew firsthand and how the information reached him, Stewart described a team of federal lawyers who traveled to Vancouver and interviewed him for roughly four hours, and said the exchange ran in both directions.
“I had some early information that this cabinet member had some links to China, but it was confirmed in these conversations with these federal lawyers,” Stewart said. He said that when the meeting ended he contacted the Canadian Security Intelligence Service himself. “I called CSIS and I told him about this. They never got back to me.”
He said he understands the file remains open, and that what he knows has been kept from the public by others in a position to do something about it, including Premier David Eby.
“I don’t think it’s good if you have cabinet members that are not loyal to your country,” he said. “I don’t think that’s a good thing.”
No charges have been laid, no minister has been identified, and no allegation against any member of the British Columbia cabinet has been tested or proven. Stewart described his own knowledge of the alleged investigation as limited.
Stewart’s indictment is not confined to British Columbia. He said the intelligence service and the federal police understand what is happening with China’s interference.
“I think this is quite widespread. I have some friends, some academic friends who study this stuff, and this is so widespread in countries all around the world. And it’s happening here in Canada right now,” Stewart said. “I think CSIS, RCMP are aware of it, but the government just doesn’t really take it that seriously. So that’s not good for us. So we need to take that more seriously.”
The federal government is led by Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberals. Stewart said he does not expect them to act, which is why he looks to a Conservative member of Parliament to force the question into the open.
He said the Hogue Commission of public inquiry into China’s federal election interference has not closed the gap either. “It’s a big problem that I don’t think the recent commission has really dealt with,” he said. “I don’t think it’s resolved itself, and I’m sure there’s going to be interference in this election too because nothing’s been done.”
Pete, who is chief of Chawathil First Nation in the Fraser Valley, hosts long-form interviews with political and public figures on Nuanced.
Pete told Stewart he had put the allegation directly to Eby when the premier appeared on the program. “He says neither CSIS nor the RCMP have raised concerns with him about his cabinet or his caucus,” Pete said. “How do you interact with that claim? Do you think that that’s true? What’s going on here?”
Stewart’s answer was that Eby is a lawyer, and should be read like one.
“I would listen very carefully to what lawyers say to you,” Stewart said, “because they’re going to phrase it in a way that’s not confirm or deny without saying anything.” He continued: “when you say, ‘I have not been briefed by CSIS or the RCMP about this,’ full stop, it doesn’t mean [Eby] doesn’t know.”
Separately, Eby has previously and categorically denied to The Bureau any suggestion that he met with or invited support from the Chinese consulate during his 2022 party leadership campaign.
The denial came in response to questions about a Canadian Security Intelligence Service assessment dated October 31, 2022, which described a trusted contact of a Chinese consulate arranging what officials called a sensitive meeting between consular officials and a provincially elected official identified only as CA3 — a candidate directed to arrive in a separate vehicle and enter through a side entrance, at a location where no outsider could observe the meeting.
One consular official, the document records, described the arrangements as slightly deceptive. The assessment says the consulate subsequently signaled its preference for CA3, and that within weeks the same trusted contacts organized a campaign rally for the candidate. Only two provincial parties were selecting leaders in the period the document describes, the British Columbia New Democrats and the Alberta United Conservatives. Both denied any awareness of such a meeting.
“There is absolutely no truth to the assertion that Premier Eby had any meetings with or invited support from the Chinese Consulate, or any of their representatives, during his time as a candidate for the leadership of the BC NDP,” his spokesperson Jimmy Smith said at the time. “The publishing of such an assertion is defamatory.”
CA3 has never been identified.
Stewart also said that questions about the cabinet member were raised in the British Columbia legislature and went nowhere. “You really depend on your intelligence services and RCMP justice minister to really deal with this stuff.”
Asked why he would make so serious an allegation without naming the minister, Stewart pointed to his own history in the courts. He was sued for defamation as mayor, he said, over remarks calling out racism in Vancouver politics. He prevailed at every level, but the process consumed about three years and would have cost him roughly $400,000 personally had it gone the other way.
“I think I’m kind of, in a way, whistleblowing, but I don’t need to get sued,” he said. “And I think that’s why other people haven’t come out either, is there have been threats of legal action if this goes any further.”
Pete pressed him on the consequence.
The fear held by Canadians and British Columbians, Pete said, is that “nobody’s coming forward. This isn’t being addressed. Nothing’s being done.” He asked whether Stewart and others who hold the information might come forward together, as a group rather than as exposed individuals. “For the sake of our democracy, that’s what we’re talking about,” Pete said. “And I just wonder how have you grappled with that? Is there pathways to do this in a safer way?”
“There’s total pathway for an elected member of parliament because you can’t be sued,” Stewart said. “If you stand up in your seat and say something and you bring it up in the House of Commons, you can’t be sued. You’re immune from that. And so for the MPs and MLAs that are protected with parliamentary privilege, they should be the ones saying this. I mean, it is known by multiple people that have these parliamentary protections and all the resources, and they’re staying quiet. And they know about interference and all kinds of aspects of things.”
What Stewart lays out across the interview is not a single allegation but an accumulation, and much of it concerns the campaign he lost.
He said officers of CSIS arrived at his office unannounced in the spring of 2022, and that the meeting was unlike anything in his experience of public office. “It was a weird meeting. I had no idea it was coming, and it was two officials,” he said. One, he later determined, was a China specialist. They walked him and his chief of staff through material on how interference operates in elections, questioned them closely about what was happening around the campaign, and then reviewed cases he had not known about.
He said his impression was that the officers came to him expecting he would speak publicly about it, and that they had grown frustrated with their own chain of command. “I think the reason they came and met with me is they know I have a big mouth and I would go out and talk about it,” Stewart said. “What I remember being told is that they were telling people and they said no one upstairs was listening. So they had fed a lot of this information up and then nobody was really paying attention.”
The briefing left him without a course of action. “CSIS leaves the office and I look at my chief of staff and is like, ‘What do we do?’ It’s like nothing. So we just conducted the election like we would.”
Stewart said the Chinese consulate in Vancouver issued material during the campaign intended to signal to pro-Beijing residents that he was the candidate not to support. “So they were actively interfering all the way through the election,” he said.
He said he learned of a further mechanism only afterward, from the federal lawyers. A radio station, he said, had been established in Washington State, outside the jurisdiction of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, and used against him. “They were basically broadcasting anti-me propaganda through the whole election.”
Stewart said that after the 2022 vote, the Globe and Mail’s Robert Fife and editor-in-chief David Walmsley came to see him in Vancouver, and that his understanding was that they were working from intercept material originating with the Chinese consulate.
“They had been fed wiretaps from the consulate here in Vancouver in which I was included and there was collusion to get rid of me,” he said, adding that in his understanding the effort was mounted mainly because of his support for Taiwan.
He said he never saw the documents himself. “I didn’t see the transcripts, but I was looking at the reporter’s notebook and they had quotes that they had seen the transcripts,” he said. “They had written quotes down from the transcripts, and that’s what they were asking me about.”
Stewart attributed the leak to desperation inside the service. “Somebody within CSIS leaked transcripts to the Globe and Mail,” he said. “That’s how I think desperate CSIS is at the moment, is that it was explained to me, nobody’s really listening upstairs.”
The Bureau holds intelligence documents covering the same ground, some of them the same records the Globe reported from. A Canadian Security Intelligence Service report dated January 2022 states that Vancouver’s then consul general, Tong Xiaoling, said that all eligible voters needed to be brought out to elect a specific Chinese Canadian candidate in that year’s Vancouver mayoral race, and that all possible effort was needed to raise the ethnic voting percentage. The same report describes Tong’s conduct as consistent with cultivating relationships with municipal politicians and helping them rise to higher office over many years. Its summary conclusion — a passage the Globe did not publish — records the service’s judgment that Tong showed a continued interest in involving herself in Canadian electoral processes to Beijing’s benefit.
A separate and broader intelligence assessment dated October 31, 2022, and reviewed by The Bureau, describes a Chinese consulate clandestinely supporting a mayoral candidate in a British Columbia city by mobilizing the leadership of three co-opted Chinese Canadian community groups to supply material and financial backing — and records that the same consulate had used the same three groups to support the same candidate in the municipal election four years earlier. The assessment states that consular officials work through trusted interlocutors to channel money and assistance to preferred candidates with the intent of creating a bond of obligation, and that support is withdrawn if a candidate later acts against the foreign state’s interests. It states that interference actors and activities can span various levels of government.
There is no suggestion in either document that any candidate knowingly accepted such support. Intelligence does not carry the weight of evidence, and none of the cases has been proven in an election interference investigation.
Ken Sim, who defeated Stewart in 2022, responded furiously to the Globe’s March 2023 reporting on the January 2022 record, saying the insinuation would not have been made “if I was a Caucasian.” Eby has said the Vancouver election was won fair and square.
Stewart told The Bureau in 2023 that the service warned him in late May 2022 that China would likely interfere in that fall’s municipal vote, and that neither the city nor Elections British Columbia had meaningful tools to establish where campaign money originated. He won the 2018 mayoralty by 957 votes and lost in 2022 by more than 36,000. “Now two elections in a row, you have this kind of very strange behaviour that defies political science,” he said at the time.
British Columbia, unlike Alberta, Ontario and New Brunswick, maintains no provincial intelligence office to advise elected officials on foreign interference.
Stewart said the cost of speaking has been steady and personal. “Every time I do, I get totally killed for it,” he said. “They call me racist. It’s a government that’s interfering, not a people.”
He expects it to happen again. Municipal contests, he said, have almost no oversight, low turnout and thin media coverage, which makes them “the perfect place to crank up a funded social media campaign.” If the money comes from outside Canada, “there’s no way of stopping it really.”
The Bureau reported last week, from a source with direct knowledge, that senior regional officers of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service delivered a closed-door briefing in July to Richmond’s mayor and council on threats facing municipal candidates ahead of the October vote, including vulnerabilities within the Chinese Canadian voting diaspora. Asked whether the briefing occurred, the service declined to confirm it but confirmed its authority to hold such meetings, saying recent amendments to its governing statute have widened its ability to share threat information beyond the federal government. Turnout in Richmond’s 2022 municipal election was 24.5 percent.
British Columbia’s general local elections are scheduled for October 17.