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August 20, 2026. Six months after Mark Carney’s historic trip to China, the first for a Canadian prime minister in nearly a decade, CBC announced it will reopen its Beijing bureau. Pending final approvals, a Canadian journalist will be permanently working in mainland China for the first time in years. The bureau shuttered in 2022, after Beijing would not renew its correspondent’s visa. But that was when the Canadian government viewed the country as one of our greatest security threats. Today, the Canadian government says China is our 'strategic partner.'
More Canadian journalists on the ground to cover a world superpower is welcome news. But will they be safe from documented spying, arrest, and harassment? What will they actually be allowed to report on? More importantly, what did Canada trade away to get them there? Following Carney’s meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, China and Canada touted a joint agreement resetting relations and deepening ties after years of strain. A brief section on media went grossly under-reported. 'The two [China and Canada] sides consented to provide mutual support and convenience for media to work in each other’s countries, and provide greater convenience for two-way travel,' read the document. When The Hub asked Global Affairs Canada what this would mean in practice, we were told it was a 'pragmatic recalibration to make progress on Canadian priorities in a way that is grounded in managing and raising outstanding concerns.' The department would not answer questions around what those concerns actually were or what protections would be put in place.
With this agreement, the Canadian government opened the door even further to the world’s most powerful authoritarian state propaganda and surveillance machine. It’s a machine that our intelligence agencies have documented repeatedly engaging in intimidation, manipulation, and spying on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party within our borders. And its victims have often been Canadian journalists, Chinese Canadians, and the Canadian electorate at large. China’s worldwide propaganda campaign is well documented. What once took the form of domestic censorship has now morphed into an aggressive international $10 billion a year influence campaign. 'China is trying to reshape the global information environment with massive infusions of money—funding paid-for advertorials, sponsored journalistic coverage and heavily massaged positive messages from boosters…to exploit the vulnerabilities of the free press to its advantage,' a five-month Guardian investigation concluded in 2018.
In more recent years, that propaganda campaign has reached Canadian shores. A 2024 National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP) report named China as the 'most capable, when it came to using media to covertly influence Canadian opinion.' Intelligence sources alleged the state had been 'interfering with Canadian media content via direct engagement with Canadian media executives and journalists.' This included paying to publish articles with no attribution, making fake social media accounts to spread disinformation, and pressuring journalists to withdraw stories. In one instance, CSIS reported China contacting a journalist within half an hour of publishing a negative story about a Chinese company. 'As a result, the journalist deleted the article so as not to offend the Consulate,' read the report.
In another, an employee of Xinhua news service accused the state-run outlet of 'working as agents of the Chinese government' while in Canada. Allegations included instructing the Canadian journalist to spy on the Dalai Lama, as well as to collect the names and addresses of people who protested the Chinese president during a state visit in Ottawa. They’ve since been banned from Parliament military briefings but deny wrongdoing. But the Chinese diaspora is bearing the brunt. As CSIS has detailed, per journalist Sam Cooper’s reporting, there has been a complete 'takeover' of Chinese-language media by the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Victor Ho, former editor-in-chief of the Vancouver edition of Sing Tao Daily, testified to the Hogue Commission that 'The majority of local Chinese media has been influenced, if not outright controlled, by the CCP for years.' Evidence from NSICOP shows Chinese officials are 'paying Chinese-language journalists to locate and track individuals.'
Then there’s the silencing of critics. In 2016, the B.C.-based Global Chinese Press fired veteran columnist Gao Bingchen after he criticized China’s foreign minister. A year later, editor-in-chief Lei Jin was fired, allegedly for publishing an obituary for a Chinese dissident and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. 'Mainland China’s influence on Chinese media is growing,' said Gao. The Chinese embassy did not answer our questions about whether China was behind these practices or whether they would end. Canadian journalists covering Carney’s Beijing trip got a first-hand view of the media surveillance foreign journalists face inside the Middle Kingdom. 'We’re using burner phones for the first time when we cover this. Because China spies on journalists and businessmen.
China intercepts communications,' David Akin, chief political correspondent at Global News, told Minister of Industry Melanie Joly. 'Is China really the right kind of partner for Canadian industry?' For decades now, foreign journalists in China have been repeatedly spied on, censored, and intimidated. 'Barely 10 minutes into the interview, local government officials showed up,' described Owen Guo, long-time Chinese journalist who has worked for Western outlets like the New York Times, BBC, and the Globe and Mail. 'Their presence was a warning to the family, who knew that continuing the interview would risk punishment. Intimidated, the family politely asked us to leave.' He would later describe another interview being cut short when a 'group of unidentified men' bundled his source into a van and drove off. In 2017, a Globe and Mail journalist was detained with his equipment confiscated by China’s secret police for reporting on Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
Two years later, Chinese police in Guangdong detained another Canadian journalist for seven hours. This year, for the third year running, the Committee to Protect Journalists named China the world's worst jailer of journalists. Global Affairs Canada told The Hub that 'Canada has advocated for them [media] to be able to resume their work in the country.' But when we asked the Chinese embassy if their government would not threaten, spy on, or intimidate Canadian journalists on their soil under the new agreement, our questions went unanswered.
When Prime Minister Carney embarked on Canada’s new alliance with China, he told Canadians there would be 'guardrails' put in place to ensure they remained protected. While his ministers have struggled to define what these guardrails are, Carney says it means collaboration between our two countries would exclude AI, critical minerals, and defence. It is concerning he did not add media to his list of no-go zones. The government appears to view Canada’s free press as expendable, going as far as to include it as a bargaining chip in negotiations. In three months, Carney will attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in the Chinese city of Shenzhen—likely hoping for another sit-down with President Xi. China’s ambassador to Canada is urging us to move as quickly as possible to fulfill our collaboration promises, spelled out in the agreement inked in Beijing. But history shows Canada should do the opposite. Now is the time to seriously reconsider what we are giving up before we finalize a media deal with the most sophisticated propaganda and surveillance machine on the planet.
Author: Harrison Lowman
