For four decades, successive Canadian governments, both provincial and federal have engaged with the People’s Republic of China under the illusion that mutual trade and diplomacy would foster stability and peace, all while drawing China into the liberal democratic order. For Canada, this engagement was also driven by a desire to benefit from China’s cheap labour, lax environmental standards, and generous subsidies, delivering an influx of low-cost consumer goods to Canadian households.
Beijing sold us the dream of access to its burgeoning middle class, a fantasy we financed through the offshoring of our own manufacturing base. The result was a hollowing out of Ontario and Quebec’s industrial sectors. And when the COVID-19 crisis originating from a P4 bio-laboratory in Wuhan swept across the globe, we were starkly reminded of our dangerous overreliance on a fragile and unbalanced global supply chain.
What Canada has reaped from this misguided engagement is a fragmented reality of elite capture, compromised provincial economies, and strategic sectors vulnerable to coercion by a regime that disregards every international norm, from human rights to environmental protections, from state-backed subsidies to forced labour in Xinjiang. We see the consequences in our agriculture, energy, and tech sectors, which are now entangled with a regime that plays by no rules but its own. This is not globalization, its entrapment, and provinces like Saskatchewan and PEI are now facing the fallout.
In our book, Canada Under Siege, we outline evidence that Prince Edward Island has become a forward operating base for Chinese Communist Party (CCP) hybrid warfare, an unsettling but entirely avoidable consequence of our provincial and national naiveté.
But PEI is not alone.
Across Canada, particularly in resource-rich provinces like Saskatchewan, the CCP has exploited Canadian openness, leveraging Belt and Road-aligned business interests, clandestine influence operations, and strategic agricultural dependencies. When Canada supported the arrest of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou in 2018, Beijing retaliated not only with hostage diplomacy, but with targeted canola tariffs, crippling Saskatchewan’s billion-dollar agricultural exports overnight. As that crisis ebbed another arose when Canada increased EV tariffs to 100%, in concert with the US administration’s demand, the PRC retaliated again against Canadian canola products with a 75% tariff on canola and its bi products once again crippling Canadian farmers.
This is not diplomacy. This is hybrid warfare, and it is now finally cutting both ways.
Elite Capture in the Heartland
In the early 2000s, China courted provincial governments and elite business circles under the guise of benign investment. Their offers, often fronted by opaque state-owned enterprises, were sweetened with promises of trade deals, infrastructure investment, and cultural exchanges. But as we’ve now learned through financial tracing and interviews, these arrangements were often anchored in political leverage and intelligence operations.
From Vancouver real estate (Vancouver Model) to Charlottetown monasteries, the same CCP playbook is used: co-opt local influencers, embed economic dependency, and create legal ambiguity so deep that accountability becomes impossible.
Even the canola crisis of 2019 wasn’t merely a trade dispute. It was a demonstration. A warning shot that China can, and will, use Canada’s provinces as leverage points to achieve federal policy concessions.
The Environmental Irony
We must also confront the hypocrisy: while China undercuts global markets with slave labour, carbon-intensive production, and disregard for environmental norms, it simultaneously uses Canada’s commitment to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) standards as a tool to weaken our competitive edge.
China’s dominance in critical minerals, solar panel manufacturing, and pharmaceuticals is built not on innovation, but exploitation — of people, laws, and the environment. And yet, Canadian policymakers too often remain silent or complicit.
PEI: The Lobster in the Trap
Prince Edward Island’s recent entanglement with Bliss and Wisdom, a religious group with well-documented links to China’s United Front Work Department, exemplifies this threat. Through intricate land deals, spiritual authority, and cross-border cash flows, the group amassed enormous real estate holdings, linked not to religion but to international business activities allegedly well beyond what’s legally allowed. Meanwhile the group pays no taxes due to their generous religious status.
This is not religious freedom. This is foreign interference masquerading as faith.
In February of this year under public pressure, the Minister of Land, Steve Myers called for an investigation into the purchase of lands by the group. This will be handled by IRAC, The Islands Regulatory and Appeals Commission which is a great first step, but as former Solicitor General and PEI Liberal MP Wayne Easter has stated, “it is time for a public inquiry.” Time for a National Counter-Strategy.
We are not powerless. But our response must be as sophisticated as the threat.
A Moment of Reckoning
This isn’t just about PEI or Canola from Saskatchewan. It’s about the sovereignty of Canada.
We have tolerated, even welcomed, the slow encroachment of authoritarian influence into our most cherished institutions, our schools, our farmland, our churches. We’ve done so in the name of trade, tolerance, and globalization. The Trojan Dragon isn’t at the gates. It’s already within.
We cannot afford another decade of willful blindness or reactive politics. The CCP has turned our own systems — laws, trade frameworks, and open civil society, into tools of manipulation. Whether it’s foreign-influenced monasteries in PEI or retaliatory tariffs on Saskatchewan’s canola, the evidence is overwhelming: Canada is already on the battlefield of hybrid warfare. What we now require is not just vigilance, but resolve, a whole-of-nation strategy that treats foreign interference not as a foreign issue, but as the defining domestic threat of our time. National security begins in the provinces with a robust national legal and policy framework in support of our mutual interests.
Dean Baxendale is the President and Publisher of Optimum Publishing International.
Garry Clement is the coauthor of Canada Under Seige, How PEI Became a Forward Operating Base for the Chinese Communist Party and is a contributor to the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
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