Sam Cooper;

Beijing is targeting Canada’s First Nations leaders with intelligence operations based on tourism that are aimed at securing Aboriginal-controlled natural resources, a Top Secret report from Ottawa’s intelligence-review watchdog NSICOP says.

Additionally, Beijing funded a British Columbia provincial candidate and its Consul General in Vancouver took actions to cover up the candidate’s “possible Chinese Communist Party membership,” NSICOP’s June 2019 draft report alleges.

The Bureau exclusively obtained NSICOP’s unredacted, 2019 report on foreign interference, which details China’s pervasive operations to bribe, coerce and co-opt Canadian leaders at all levels of government.[…]

“Many of the same tactics used to target elected officials at the federal level are replicated with provincial, municipal, and indigenous officials,” the June 2019 NSICOP report obtained by The Bureau says.

Canada’s Aboriginal leaders — and the tension between federal and First Nations jurisdictions over natural resources in northern Canada — are an unexplored aspect of the Chinese interference story.

But the 2019 NSICOP report demonstrates crucial national security issues at stake.

It suggests Beijing is seeking clandestine relationships with First Nations leaders under false pretences in order to control Canada’s strategic resources in areas of increasing geopolitical importance.

“In late 2011, China invited a national-level group of Aboriginal leaders to travel to China. A CSIS assessment noted that the invitation was advertised as an opportunity to develop tourism for First Nations,” NSICOP’s report says.

“According to a Minister Counsellor at the PRC Embassy, the tourism opportunity was merely “beipian” (Mandarin for ‘to be fooled’) and that the true intention of the invitation was to pursue Aboriginal-controlled natural resources.”