McCarthyism is back. The term refers to the US 1950s extreme demonization of a community accompanied by witchhunts against individuals. The “red scare” process has been widely revived today in several western communities, but victims in Canada are fighting back. Aidan Jonah reports.
CHINESE CANADIANS HAVE BEEN put through the ringer by Canada’s government and their collaborators in the wider community. Now, Chinese Canadians are to form a national organization to oppose McCarthyism and defend their democratic rights.
The organization which will be spearheaded by Canadian Senator Yuen Pau Woo. He was accused of “acting as a spokesperson for China rather than for Canada”, by a Canada-based NED-funded Uyghur separatist organization in 2021, for daring to oppose a Uyghur “genocide’” declaration motion in Canada’s Senate.
The Uyghur genocide narrative, started and spread by Washington-financed groups, has been repeatedly debunked. Rather than being destroyed, China’s ethnic minority population has been expanding faster than the main population group.
‘RESIST CHINESE EXCLUSION‘
Mr. Woo, Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project (URAP)’s sworn enemy, declared his intention in a February 2, 2025, speech:
“We must resist this emerging form of Chinese exclusion. To champion our rights and freedoms, I intend to establish an organization, tentatively called Rights and Freedoms of Chinese Canadians, because this is not a battle I can fight alone. My final appeal to all Chinese Canadians is this: we must not allow prejudice or ideology to dictate who qualifies as a ‘good’ Chinese Canadian. … We must unite rather than allow divisions to weaken our collective strength.”
In an interview with The Canada Files, long-time Chinese Canadian organizer and author William Dere said the Montréal collective of Chinese Canadians he is a part of will fully participate in and help this proposed national organization against McCarthyism get organized among various Chinese communities across Canada. The vision? To protect the democratic rights of Chinese Canadians, protect community organizations and fight back against Canadian state McCarthyism.
Dere said: “The Chinese Canadian community… needs the support of Canadian society.” Given rampant anti-China attitudes in the nation, this will be a challenging fight, but one activists are prepared to take on, he says. Dere is appreciative that at least one political party, the Green Party of Québec, has opposed McCarthyism against the Chinese Canadian community.
RISE OF ANTI-ASIAN RACISM
Chinese Canadians would not consider forming such a national organization without reason. That reason has been McCarthyism, slowly rising since 2010, when ex-CSIS Director Richard Fadden baselessly claimed there were Chinese Canadian politicians under the influence of a “foreign government” (Fadden later admitted regretting the claims). Confucius Institutes were then systematically targeted from 2013 onwards.
Meanwhile, anti-Asian racism had begun to increase in Canada ever since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic. As noted by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, between 2020 to 2021, “hate incidents reported by South Asian and Southeast Asian people increased by 318 per cent and 121 per cent respectively. The McCarthyism bubbled to the surface in 2022 and 2023, under the justification of supposed Chinese interference in Canada’s 2019 and 2021 elections.
While the Canadian Public Inquiry on Foreign Interference (PIFI) final report admitted that “foreign interference on the two general elections was inconsequential”, the damage has already been done.
‘BASELESS ACCUSATIONS’
The bluntest example: the trials and tribulations of Chinese Family Services of Greater Montreal (CFSGM) and the Sino-Quebec Centre (CSQRS), both based out of Canada’s Québec province, baselessly accused of being police centers for the Chinese government.In desperation, “board directors used their own assets as collateral to secure an extended loan” to save the CFSGM’s building, after provincial Québec funding was cut. Dere and Wawa Li, in The Canada Files, noted that “the organizations filed a lawsuit against the RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police]—a suit that remains unanswered.”
President of the Board of Chinese Family Services of Greater Montreal, Carole Cheung, was quoted in a report in The Canada Files saying:
“It is deeply regrettable that the actions of the RCMP have caused nearly two years of suffering for our community through the loss of essential services. We no longer have French classes in Chinatown or Brossard; our support for vulnerable seniors and women experiencing intimate partner violence has been diminished; our intake services for new immigrants have been curtailed; and we have lost vital assistance in employment research. We have cooperated with the RCMP investigation from the beginning, and we urge them to allocate the necessary resources to complete the investigation as soon as possible and to stop the bleeding of social services for our community.”
REMARKABLE IRONY
And with remarkable irony, meetings to help organize Chinese Canadian opposition – spearheaded by CFSGM and the Canadian Race Relations Foundation – to McCarthyism, are occurring in the very Chinese Family Services building which the community nearly lost to the Canadian state’s ongoing McCarthyite campaign.
Despite collaborators, such as URAP, Canada-Tibet Committee and other assorted anti-communists getting assistance from either the Canadian or US government, Dere says these groups are ‘elitist’ and lack on the ground support in the Chinese Canadian community.
Dere and activists who’ll be involved in the upcoming national Chinese Canadian organization hope to see a return to a time when “Canada and China had mutually beneficial relations”, “very beneficial” trade and exchanges on both the cultural and economic fronts. Will such a day come? The present writer certainly hopes so.
Aidan Jonah is the Editor-in-Chief of The Canada Files, an independent media group. Jonah wrote a report for the 48th session of the UN Human Rights Council, held in September 2021.
Illustration at the top by Fridayeveryday.