Op-Ed On Website Flagged In Foreign Interference Inquiry Speculates Carney Will Appoint Floor-Crosser Ma As China Ambassador

At left, former Liberal MP Paul Chiang — who stepped down as the Liberal candidate in Markham-Unionville after reports he had suggested Conservative rival Joe Tay could be handed to the Chinese consulate — stands beside Scarborough—Agincourt Liberal MP Jean Yip. Also pictured are former Conservative MP Michael Ma, who now holds the Liberal seat for Markham-Unionville, and former Conservative Senator Victor Oh. The group poses at the Embassy of the People's Republic of China in Canada's 2026 Chinese New Year Reception in Ottawa, in a photo published by info.51.ca.

TORONTO — A Chinese-language website named in federal documents at Canada’s Foreign Interference Commission — in connection with a disinformation campaign that targeted Conservative MP Kenny Chiu in the days before the 2021 federal election — has published an anonymous op-ed circulating speculation that Prime Minister Mark Carney is preparing to appoint floor-crossing MP Michael Ma as Canada’s next ambassador to China.

The piece appears on info.51.ca, a Chinese-language community platform largely aimed at readers in Markham and Scarborough. Federal documents tabled before Justice Marie-Josée Hogue’s Foreign Interference Commission identify a WeChat account called “CouponKing51ca” — with the relationship between that account and the broader 51.ca news site and its 602,000-subscriber WeChat account explicitly flagged — as one node in an amplification chain that attacked Conservative leader Erin O’Toole while spreading false narratives about MP Kenny Chiu’s foreign agents registry bill before the September 20, 2021 vote.

Those federal documents tied the disinformation campaign’s origins to Toronto-area media accounts connected to Beijing’s United Front Work Department.

The unsigned op-ed, dated February 25, 2026, argues that appointing Ma — the MP for Markham-Unionville who crossed from the Conservative Party to Mark Carney’s Liberals in December 2025 — would constitute an institutionalized reward for his floor crossing, a “dirty behind-the-scenes political deal” that would trigger a by-election in his riding and signal the imminent launch of a general election campaign.

In making its argument, the article invokes as precedent the case of John McCallum, the longtime Liberal MP who represented the neighbouring riding of Markham-Thornhill before resigning his seat in January 2017 when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appointed him Canada’s ambassador to China.

That appointment vacated a safe Liberal seat in a majority Chinese-Canadian riding — and Trudeau moved swiftly to fill it, parachuting his own director of appointments from the Prime Minister’s Office, Mary Ng, into the resulting April 3, 2017 by-election. Ng — a Hong Kong-born Trudeau insider — won with just over 51 per cent of the vote.

She went on to serve as Canada’s Minister of Small Business and Export Promotion, and later Minister of International Trade, for seven years, before not seeking re-election in 2025. The McCallum appointment, in other words, did not merely fill a diplomatic post — it simultaneously engineered a parliamentary succession, inserting a senior PMO operative into a safe seat in one of the country’s most strategically significant diaspora communities.

What the 51.ca article does not mention is how the McCallum ambassadorship ended. McCallum was fired by Trudeau in January 2019 after appearing before Chinese-language media in Markham — the same community the 51.ca piece is now addressing — to publicly argue that Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou had strong legal grounds to resist extradition to the United States, a position that aligned with Beijing’s own at a moment of acute Canada-China tension.

The piece purports to weigh arguments for and against the speculated Ma appointment, cautioning that it would reinforce perceptions of political transactionalism, and send ambiguous signals to Beijing.

But in a section cataloguing Ma’s potential advantages and disadvantages as a diplomat, the piece simultaneously acknowledges that his Chinese-Canadian heritage could improve “symbolic aspects of cultural communication” — then undercuts the point by explaining that Beijing “places greater emphasis on decision-making power and institutional signals than on ethnic symbols.”

The piece could be read as a trial balloon, floated to gauge community reaction. What is clear is that it inserts a volatile political narrative into precisely the audience most sensitive to it: Chinese-Canadian voters in Markham-Unionville, where Ma already faces significant backlash for his December floor crossing.

The Bureau has previously reported that Ma is listed as former director of the Chinese Canadian Conservative Association — a group the Jamestown Foundation’s landmark February 2026 study, Mapping Overseas United Front Work in Democratic States, explicitly names as part of Beijing’s cross-partisan influence architecture in Canada.