Representatives of Canada's Chinese, Russian, Iranian and India diasporas came to testify on Wednesday, March 27, about how their home countries monitor, harass and sometimes even hunt them down on Canadian soil. The representatives evoked their families and communities, disrupted by the attempts of foreign regimes to control them. Canada's Foreign Interference Commission was at the heart of the investigation on foreign influence.

This independent commission, which is looking into allegations of foreign state interference during the 2019 and 2021 federal elections and the government's ability to detect and counter them, was created on September 7, 2023, by Liberal (LPC, center left) Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

But revelations made in fall 2022, notably by the daily The Globe and Mail, alleging that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service suspected Beijing of having wanted to favor a short victory for the outgoing Liberal Party, deemed less damaging to its interests than the arrival in power of a Conservative (CPC, right wing) government, triggered a veritable political storm.

Joint pressure from the Conservative Party, angered by the authorities' lack of transparency over the level of information available to them at the time, and from public opinion worried about the vulnerability of its democracy, eventually got the better of Ottawa's reluctance.

"The topic of Chinese state interference is not a novelty for us. For decades, Uighur Canadians have been subjected to all forms of intimidation and harassment by the Chinese Communist Party," said Mehmet Tohti, a member of an association for the defense of Uyghurs' rights, to the Commission, chaired by Quebec judge Marie-Josée Hogue and assisted by 20 lawyers specializing in national security issues.

Having arrived in Canada in 1988, the former Chinese national belonging to the Uyghurs minority, an ethnic group native to Xinjiang, listed the multiple restrictions of freedom to which he is subjected, despite his Canadian citizenship: the impossibility of traveling to certain countries (such as Turkey) that have extradition agreements with China, for fear of possible arrest, the repeated taking of personal data from his computer and telephone, the more or less discreet "shadowing" of his movements on Canadian territory, and the ban on all family members communicating with him or visiting him. His mother died in a concentration camp, but he doesn't know when or where.

Grace Dai Wollensk, a member of the Falun Gong religious movement, whose members are persecuted in China, detailed the systematic surveillance of social media and the manipulation of information, in media sometimes established in Canada but subservient to the Chinese regime, to divide the Chinese-Canadian community.

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