How Beijing Bought Off the Trudeaus: ‘Obviously, My Family Has Historical Ties with China’. By Frances Martel.
Leftist Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has followed in his father Pierre’s footsteps both in assuming the high office and using it to further the interests of the Chinese Communist Party, Peter Schweizer writes in his bestseller Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win. …
Oil deals:
In 2012,” Schweizer reports, “he [Justin Trudeau] outlined his support for a controversial energy deal involving the Chinese National Offshore Oil Corporation, which was seeking to acquire the Canadian energy company Nexen. There were concerns about the significant implications to national security and possible damage to ‘Canadian interests and values.’”
Trudeau justified his support for the deal in part because, according to Schweizer, “obviously, my family has historical ties with China.”
Covid supplies:
Trudeau also faced a barrage of criticism for depending on China for pivotal infectious disease supplies at the height of the first wave of the Chinese coronavirus pandemic. Trudeau’s government chose Chinese companies over Canadian ones to purchase masks, gloves, and other personal protective equipment. Outraging much of the population, Canada had to scramble to replenish its supplies of this equipment — buying it from China — because Trudeau gave away much of it in free “foreign aid” to China.
Bribery?
Trudeau’s ties to China have, on occasion, stretched the limits of Canadian law. In 2016, for example, the Globe and Mail revealed that Trudeau had attended a fundraiser in which he had a private conversation with Chinese businessman Zhang Bin, who then promptly donated one million Canadian dollars to the Pierre Trudeau Foundation. Zhang was, in addition to a businessman, a Chinese regime advisor, making him essentially a lobbyist for a foreign power.
Outside of the strictly political, Justin Trudeau also appeared to receive financial and ideological support from Beijing. As Schweizer details, a Chinese state-owned publisher released a Chinese version of the younger Trudeau’s memoirs, The Legend Continues, in 2016.
“Curiously, some of Trudeau’s national security aides were not even aware that the rights to his memoir had been sold to Beijing, not finding out until 2021, after being contacted by the media,” Schweizer notes. “Trudeau’s aides would later explain that all profits from the book were going to the Red Cross. But the Globe and Mail newspaper could not confirm that claim with either the publisher or the Red Cross.”
Trudeau’s brother and foreign policy adviser Alexandre entered the family business of publishing books in China in 2016, the year after Justin became prime minister. Barbarian Lost: Travels in the New China was largely sold as an update to Two Innocents in Red China. At the time of its release, Schweizer documents, Alexandre used the book to compare the West unfavorably to the rule of the repressive Communist Party, asserting, “I now look at our own freedoms with a little more circumspection and consider some of the irresponsible nature of some of the freedoms we enjoy.”
So all these incredibly good deals in China just happen to arise for the Trudeaus, that result in money being transferred to the Trudeau family. I’ll bet the Trudeaus feel goooood about China.
The Chinese have been bribing barbarians to their will for thousands of years.
Pick your side carefully, Justin Trudeau:
hat-tip Stephen Neil
