REPOST: The Prescient Warning Behind Ottawa’s China Influence File—and Carney’s Beijing Electric Vehicle Gamble
A Canadian immigration control official who warned of influence from Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s Beijing–Montreal business networks, predicted the types of outcomes unfolding under Carney.
Editor’s Note
This abridged 2023 Bureau investigation is being reposted in the aftermath of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s trade mission to Beijing. It offers a plausible lens on how Ottawa can arrive at policy choices that may ultimately damage the interests of most Canadians—and erode Canada’s standing as a Western middle power.
Critics, including senior voices in the U.S. government, have warned that Canada’s decision to open its market to Chinese electric vehicles could distort North American markets and raise national-security concerns. Those warnings have come from across the American spectrum—bipartisan committees, Democratic circles, and the Trump administration—often with different explanations but a shared bottom line: Ottawa is moving closer to Beijing’s orbit at a perilous moment. In that context, senior U.S. trade officials responsible for negotiations with Canada have described Carney’s moves as “problematic,” and warned Canada may “regret” the decision.
We are reposting this story for context, and because the historical record can clarify the present. Whether presciently or simply by following the logic of Ottawa’s hierarchy of incentives, Brian McAdam’s whistleblower account pointed three decades ago to a pro-Beijing trade lobby and a Chrétien-era Liberal power nexus as a troubling force shaping Canada’s national security and foreign policy—an alarm that has resurfaced again in the days surrounding Carney’s mission.
More recently, Michael Kovrig—an expert on China’s authoritarian system who was detained by Beijing as leverage in the Meng Wanzhou standoff—flagged the reappearance of that same network ahead of Carney’s trip. Kovrig urged Canadians to watch closely for the business interests linked to Jean Chrétien and Montreal’s Power Corporation, and to ask who stands to benefit from deals struck in Beijing and in the policy shifts that follow.
Power is not simply a passive observer in the Canada–China file. It is a powerful establishment actor with long-running China-facing commercial exposure in finance and investment channels. As yet there is no sign of direct investments in Chinese electric-vehicle manufacturers. However, Power Sustainable Capital Inc., a subsidiary, maintained a China equities presence through its Shanghai investment unit before later shutting that unit in 2024 amid China’s slowdown and rising geopolitical risk.
Separately—and newly relevant in light of Carney’s China-facing industrial policy—the Power group’s China exposure runs through China Asset Management Company (ChinaAMC), one of China’s leading fund managers.
Power is an indirect major backer of ChinaAMC through its controlling stake in IGM Financial, which holds 27.8% of ChinaAMC. ChinaAMC’s largest shareholder is CITIC Securities. ChinaAMC operates prominent onshore products explicitly tied to the electric-vehicle supply chain—including an ETF tracking the CSI New Energy Vehicle Index that ChinaAMC describes as spanning the full new-energy vehicle chain, with heavy representation from electrical equipment, batteries and related technology, and upstream materials. In other words, even without a disclosed Power-owned EV manufacturer, the China-facing financial architecture around Power’s orbit can still intersect with the sectors now at the centre of Ottawa’s China trade gamble.
Those linkages also echo older warnings about elite Canada–China engagement networks that circulated in Brian McAdam’s whistleblower files, and later in the leaked Sidewinder intelligence report, which noted longstanding business ties between Power’s leadership and the CITIC system. For example, CITIC Pacific’s own disclosures show that André Desmarais joined CITIC Pacific’s board in December 1997 while serving as President and Co-Chief Executive Officer of Power Corporation.
This is the same familial relationship flagged by Michael Kovrig last week, who wrote on X: “Chrétien served on the board of Power Corp., which has historic links to the Liberal party, and his daughter is married to André Desmarais, deputy chair of the financial services company.”
The story below documents an early internal warning from inside Canada’s Hong Kong post. It alleges that sophisticated corruption networks tied to Hong Kong’s elite—and related People’s Republic of China–linked influence networks—were not only penetrating Canada’s immigration and investment channels, but also embedding within powerful political and business interests in Ottawa, most notably the pro-Beijing network associated with Prime Minister Jean Chrétien.
A similar warning about where power truly sits in Ottawa has been raised in blunt terms by Brian Lee Crowley, head of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. In a speech, Crowley recounted a reported directive conveyed to the late Asia-Pacific minister David Kilgour: that Canada’s China policy was not set at the foreign ministry or in the Prime Minister’s Office, but “at the headquarters of Power Corporation in Montreal.”
That continuity is now colliding with Canada’s most sensitive strategic relationship. In a statement posted this week, the U.S. House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party warned:
“Canada’s decision to open its market to Chinese electric vehicles risks giving Beijing a foothold in the North American auto market, threatening thousands of jobs and undermining a century of integrated automotive leadership.
China’s state-subsidized overcapacity has already distorted Europe’s auto industry, and North America will be next if this precedent stands. At a critical moment for USMCA renewal negotiations, Canada should reconsider and work with the United States and Mexico to strengthen, not weaken, North American industry.”
Reuters, in the linked report, describes U.S. officials raising sharp objections to Ottawa’s move. It casts the decision as strategically risky for North American auto integration and for USMCA renewal talks.
If Carney’s approach entrenches Beijing’s leverage while fracturing North American industrial unity, the damage would not be abstract. It could credibly degrade Canada’s leverage as a Western middle power. It could also weaken Canada’s standing as a trusted ally at the precise moment that continental security and economic architecture is being renegotiated.
OTTAWA – Marie McAdam, a petite and energetic woman, grips her coffee mug with two fists and turns away.
“Sorry, this memory always makes me cry,” she says. “We came back to Ottawa, and Brian was so excited leaving for work. And then he came back that afternoon. But he was just slumped over, almost dragging his brief case behind him.”
We are sitting at the kitchen table in Marie’s townhouse, talking about her husband, one of Canada’s most consequential whistleblowers.
Brian McAdam, a diplomat and immigration control officer, died in December 2022, almost 30 years after he was recalled from Canada’s Hong Kong High Commission. From 1991 to 1993 in Hong Kong, McAdam uncovered a gaping hole in Canada’s national security.
He found the consulate’s computerized immigration-vetting system was compromised.
Canadian passports were up for sale, while immigration investment scams and corruption enabled Hong Kong Triad leaders and Chinese intelligence fronts to flood into Canada, investing in real estate and critical infrastructure, infiltrating politics, and doing business with Canadian officials.
Gathering sensitive intelligence from his colleagues in the United States and Britain, as well as the Royal Hong Kong Police, McAdam reported back to Ottawa on these growing threats. He took his job as Canada’s first line of defence against foreign interference seriously.
Ultimately, McAdam questioned the relationships between some Canadian diplomats and a circle of powerful businessmen with suspected Chinese Communist Party and Triad connections, including financier Li Ka Shing, casino magnates Cheng Yu-Tung and Stanley Ho, and Hong Kong movie mogul Charles Heung.
In 1993, McAdam believed he was being called back to Ottawa for a promotion. Instead he was effectively dismissed from Canada’s foreign service.
“He faced ostracism, harassment, and intimidation, for doing his job well,” Marie says. “It was a breaking point. It stole the core of his self-worth.”
In the aftermath, McAdam suffered severe depression.
In 2005, McAdam testified on the impacts to a panel including Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre, in a Parliamentary session regarding Canada’s lack of whistleblower protections.
“Most whistle-blowers will end up with a depression,” McAdam said. “It is almost like having someone assault you.”
At the same time, Marie says, McAdam fought back to reclaim a productive life.
Against the odds, working outside government in the mid-90s, McAdam helped a small group of RCMP and CSIS officers prepare Project Sidewinder, a ground-breaking report on Chinese interference in Canada, stemming from McAdam’s Hong Kong files. The report called for further investigation into China’s penetration of Canadian politics and business via organized crime. But its findings were buried, McAdam and his colleagues believed, leading to the leak of a Sidewinder draft. The report and its authors were discredited in Ottawa.
But like a set of Matryoshka nesting dolls, the files that McAdam originated continue to unfold, as new whistleblowers come forward with revelations on China’s vast election interference operations in 2019 and 2021.
So now, as Ottawa implements an inquiry into foreign interference, McAdam’s story is more relevant than ever. His legacy also matters for Canada’s contemporary China-file whistleblowers, advocates say.
“Brian paid a huge cost to do his job with integrity,” said Pamela Forward, president of Whistleblowing Canada. “His story is a screaming example of why protecting national security whistleblowers — and all whistleblowers — is an urgent priority, and why a Public Inquiry into election interference is needed.”
Whistleblower’s Brief
Brian McAdam’s efforts to document China’s infiltration of Canada started in 1991, when he discovered what seemed to be technical glitches on the confidential computer system at the Canadian High Commission.
“The way he described it, was he could see lines of script getting erased from the computer screen,” Marie McAdam recalls.
McAdam concluded hackers were accessing Canada’s warning files for Chinese Triad leaders and erasing criminal records, enabling violent gangsters to immigrate or visit Canada without detection.
McAdam summarized the volumes of intelligence he generated from Hong Kong, and Ottawa’s inaction, in his retrospective brief:
“Between 1991-3, I exposed corruption at the Canadian Consulate in Hong Kong and Ottawa, and the infiltration of Chinese organized crime members and spies into Canada,” the brief explains, “revealing China’s extensive espionage activities in Canada, which have now been confirmed by Canada’s intelligence service.
I wrote over 100 intelligence reports — [but] scores were destroyed before they could be circulated.”
Back in 1992 and early 1993, McAdam had little idea how his explosive reports were received in Ottawa.
“He would just say, we’ll have to see how this plays out,” Marie McAdam says.
But McAdam’s doubts were alleviated, his Whistleblower Brief says, when he was informed that Citizenship and Immigration Canada planned to implement a new organized crime unit, responding to his work flagging Triad members.
McAdam’s brief says he was specifically informed that “then Immigration Deputy Minister, Peter Harder,” had decided to “establish an Organized Crime Directorate.”
Harder was later appointed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2016 to be the Liberal government’s leader in Senate, and is associated with a group including Senator Yuen Pau Woo, another notably pro-Beijing voice in Canada’s unelected upper house.
McAdam’s brief continues to say, that back in 1993: “the Foreign Service, Director General of Personnel told me five months before my departure from Hong Kong that both the Associate Deputy Minister and the Deputy Minister of Immigration [Peter Harder] wanted me to head [the Organized Crime Directorate] when I returned to Ottawa.”
Just prior to leaving Hong Kong, the brief adds, McAdam received a Telex from Ottawa that said his “Triad reports of last year created awareness of a serious problem.”
But upon his return to headquarters in Ottawa, “Personnel stunned me by saying ‘there wasn’t any job at all for me,’” McAdam’s brief continues.
“When I explained I was told I would start the proposed Organized Crime Directorate, the response was that ‘no one needed my knowledge about Triads,’” the document says. “Expecting to start an organized crime section, an assignment promised by then Deputy Director Peter Harder, now Senate leader, I was forced to resign in 1993.”
The Bureau attempted to question Harder and the Ministry of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, regarding McAdam’s claims that he was pushed out of service with promises of a fake job.
“We do not have any information on the alleged job offer,” ministry spokeswoman Erin Kerbel wrote.
Peter Harder has not yet responded to The Bureau’s requests for an interview on McAdam’s allegations.
McAdam’s Whistleblower Brief also implies that Harder’s rise in Ottawa coincided with the favour of Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chretien, who had familial business ties with some of the subjects of McAdam’s Hong Kong files.
“After deceiving me, former assistant deputy minister Peter Harder’s career flourished, especially during the Jean Chretien era as PM,” the brief alleges. “Harder later became Canada’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs [from] 2003-2007.”
McAdam also suggested that Harder’s links to the powerful Desmarais family of Montreal, including taking a board seat with their Power Financial Corporation, seem to be meaningful.
“Appointed to the Desmarais’ Canada China Business Council in 2008, he became the President of that organization,” McAdam’s brief says. “He became a vocal promoter of deeper ties with the Communist Chinese regime.”
McAdam’s Whistleblower’s Brief also points at Daniel Jean, former deputy minister of foreign affairs and director of immigration control in Hong Kong from 1992 to 1995. McAdam alleged that Jean buried his reports on Triads.
“Trudeau appointed Daniel Jean as his national security advisor,” McAdam’s brief says. “[Jean] had been head of the Immigration Investor Program while I was in Hong Kong. Returning to Ottawa he became head of immigration and destroyed scores of my intelligence reports.”
The Bureau could not independently verify McAdam’s claim, but asked Jean to respond, and also provide answers on a key official flagged in McAdam’s Hong Kong intelligence files.
In the case, Laurence Leung, a senior Hong Kong official corrupted by Triads according to McAdam’s files, was reportedly allowed to immigrate to Canada in the 1990s, under special conditions.
McAdam’s concerns were ultimately proven in 2019, when declassified Hong Kong government files confirmed Leung’s links to Triad leaders, money laundering and heroin trafficking.
Daniel Jean said due to Canada’s security of information laws it would be inappropriate to comment publicly on McAdam’s allegations. Jean’s response to The Bureau suggests McAdam had a mistaken understanding of roles and responsibilities within immigration control, and that Jean never mishandled any intelligence files.
Coverup Mode
McAdam’s Whistleblower’s Brief also takes aim at the RCMP and CSIS and Ottawa’s Security Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC) — for failing to follow up on McAdam’s complaints of Chinese infiltration and corruption in Ottawa. The RCMP corruption probes in Hong Kong and Ottawa that were initiated by McAdam’s files “were futile” his brief says, while SIRC’s review of the leaked Sidewinder report was nothing more than a coverup.
Published in 2000, SIRC’s review found that no one politically interfered with Project Sidewinder.
And regarding Sidewinder’s controversial findings: “the Committee found no evidence of any substantial and immediate threat of the sort envisaged in the first Sidewinder draft, no evidence that a threat was being ignored through negligence or design.”
But 23 years later, as RCMP and CSIS investigate national security files involving Chinese intelligence and organized crime permeation into Canadian electoral politics at all levels — and while CSIS probes senior elected officials and senators — it is McAdam’s conclusions on SIRC, that seem more sound.
“SIRC immediately went into coverup mode and never tried to deal with issues,” McAdam’s brief says. “Their self-made mandate seems to be to destroy any probes and information that could be embarrassing to the government.”
SIRC did not respond to a request for comment in this story.
Canadian official allegedly captured on wiretap with Triad leader
In February 2005, Robert Read, the RCMP officer assigned in 1991 to investigate McAdam’s complaint in the Hong Kong consulate, confirmed two important points.
First, a systemic compromise occurred in Canada’s High Commission.
“The RCMP discovered that the computer in Hong Kong was entirely vulnerable,” and “anyone and everyone who had access to the system could issue visas in Hong Kong,” Read testified in a Parliamentary hearing on whistleblower legislation.
Second, Read said, the RCMP’s broader investigations into McAdam’s Hong Kong files were blocked in Ottawa, in “a cover-up, which I believed at that time was perpetrated by Immigration and Foreign Affairs.”
Read was disciplined by the RCMP for leaking sensitive information, but he was vindicated by an RCMP review panel in Ottawa, which found there were concerns of visa fraud in Canada’s Hong Kong consulate, but the RCMP was restricted.
The RCMP was “basically restricted to what the Department of Foreign Affairs was willing to allow it to investigate,” that review found.
In the February 2005 Parliamentary hearings, MPs appeared to endorse McAdam’s concern that senior Canadian officials blocked investigations into Chinese interference.
“One of your findings or reports to the RCMP included a list of names of Canadian government co-conspirators with China and the Triads, including people at the government’s highest levels,” Quebec Conservative Guy Lauzon told McAdam.
Liberal MP Diane Marleau followed up, asking: “Mr. McAdam, did they take steps to correct the problem after you pointed out what the problem was?”
“Absolutely not,” McAdam said. “They just covered everything up, constantly.”
In the hearing, McAdam called for an Independent Commission Against Corruption, to investigate Canadian politicians and bureaucrats, a task the RCMP and CSIS cannot fulfill due to political interference. He called for an office independent of Ottawa’s bureaucracy, “to which complainants’ information from within the bureaucracy can be provided,” and restitution for whistleblowers who suffer reprisals.
Poilievre told McAdam he would support such reforms.
“There is a tremendous human cost that all of you have suffered, and there are these armies of government lawyers who have endless hours of billing time and who come after you, and you are nearly defenceless,” Poilievre said. “I believe you need to be made whole in what you’re doing to protect Canadian taxpayers and, in your case, Mr. McAdam, Canadian security.”
Poilievre added there should be consequences for retaliation within the bureaucracy, otherwise “there will be no deterrent whatsoever for senior political leadership or senior bureaucratic leadership in continuing to attack whistle-blowers. Is that not correct?”
“I agree with you completely on that,” McAdam said, citing an allegation that one of the “major gangsters” he reported on was later granted numerous visas to enter Canada.
“The file on this man was quite thick. If you read any of the material in this file, you realized this was a pretty serious individual,” McAdam said. “He was involved in heroin, drug trafficking, money laundering, people smuggling, arms deals for China, and contract murder.”
McAdam testified that a police source in Hong Kong had informed him a wiretap captured the Triad leader discussing concerns about McAdam’s reports with “someone in the office of the Minister of Immigration,” and that the Canadian official reassured the gangster, saying words to the effect of: “Don’t worry about it. We’ll take care of McAdam.”
“I still don’t know who that was,” McAdam told Poilievre. “The retaliation against me has been just phenomenal, just unbelievable.”