Senator Victor Oh has taken more sponsored trips to China over the past decade than any other Canadian senator or MP, parliamentary records show.
Since his appointment to the Senate in January 2013, Mr. Oh has made seven trips to China with expenses paid by various sponsors that included three provincial governments in that country.
Mr. Oh paid his first visit to China as a senator in September 2013, spending six days in northeastern Jilin Province to attend the 9th China-Northeast Asia Expo in Changchun City. The trip was sponsored by the provincial government of Jilin, according to records from the Office of the Senate Ethics Officer (SEO), as first reported by Blacklock’s Reporter. Other records of Mr. Oh’s trips thereafter are available on the SEO website.
On his second visit, Mr. Oh travelled to China’s southernmost province of Hainan in December 2014 with a Canadian delegation, with the trip billed as promoting cultural exchanges between Canada and Hainan. The Hainan government paid for accommodations, ground transportation, and meals for the first leg, Dec. 20 to 27, 2014, while Hainan Airlines sponsored ground and air transportation for the second leg, Dec. 28, 2014, to Jan. 3, 2015.
Hainan Airlines is a civilian-run, majority state-owned airline, according to data from the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).
In May 2015, Mr. Oh visited Wuhan City, Hubei Province, to attend a trade and investment expo, with the trip paid for by the Hubei provincial government.
Mr. Oh’s next four trips to China were paid for by individuals or organizations.
According to the SEO’s records, he travelled to China three times in 2016, sponsored by Ontario-based Sheridan College in July; the China International (Dalian) Seafood Culture Festival in Dalian City, Liaoning Province, in August; and Sichuan Airlines in November. Sichuan Airlines is also partly state-owned, according to ICAO data.
SEO records show that Mr. Oh made his last sponsored trip to China from Dec. 27, 2016, to Jan. 12, 2017. On that trip, the president of Kent School, a secondary school in Niagara Falls, Ont., paid for hotels, some meals, and transportation for Mr. Oh and his wife in Jiangsu Province, where Mr. Oh promoted “cooperation in education between Canada and China.” Kent School lists four sister schools in China.
The Epoch Times reached out to Mr. Oh for comment but didn’t hear back.
Ethics Code
Mr. Oh may have travelled to China more often than what the parliamentary records show. Reporting the trip to the Office of the Senate Ethics Officer is only required if it is sponsored.Mr. Oh reportedly made seven trips to China in 2016, according to an article published that year by chinaqw.com, a subsidiary media of the Chinese state mouthpiece China News Service.
The Senate’s ethics officer, Pierre Legault, previously raised concerns about Mr. Oh’s trips to China, saying he had breached the upper house’s ethics code four times by accepting an all-expenses paid trip to China in 2017, reported The Canadian Press in 2020.
Mr. Legault also said Mr. Oh withheld information and deliberately misled an investigation into the trips, such as by blurring the line between his private and public affairs throughout his visit in China.
A 2017 Globe and Mail article said that during Mr. Oh’s visits to China, he met with officials from the regime’s United Front Work Department—Beijing’s primary body involved in foreign interference, according to a study by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) cited by Public Safety Canada. The article also said Mr. Oh also met with officials from the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and the All-China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese. According to the ASPI study, both of these organizations are tools used by the United Front to control Chinese diasporas living outside China.
Parliamentary records show that Mr. Oh places second in terms of the number of paid visits to China when the timeframe is stretched back to 2007—the earliest record on the SEO website.
Mr. Oh comes after former Liberal MP Jim Karygiannis, who made eight free trips to China between 2009 and 2012. John McCallum, former Liberal MP and Canadian ambassador to China, made five trips to China between 2008 and 2015 and was particularly criticized for one trip in September 2010 that cost more than $28,000.
Apart from making trips to China, Mr. Oh is also a frequent guest of the Chinese Consulate in Toronto. He has been invited by the consulate to celebrate the founding of the communist-led People’s Republic of China every year since 2013, according to online open-source information from 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022.
Opposing Foreign Agent Registry
Some democracy activists have raised concerns about Mr. Oh’s affinity to communist regime-ruled China, particularly in light of his recent call against creation of a foreign agent registry in Canada.Mr. Oh has repeatedly argued that such a registry would be “unfair” to Chinese Canadians. He initiated a protest on Parliament Hill on June 24 that was advertised as marking the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Immigration Act, also called the Chinese Exclusion Act because it resulted in stopping Chinese immigration.
He attended a series of events in Chinese communities to promote the event along with a petition, e-4395, against the foreign registry. At a June 12 event in Montreal, Mr. Oh said the registry would become a modern version of the Chinese Exclusion Act.
Gloria Fung, president of Canada-Hong Kong Link, one of over 30 community group members of the Canadian Coalition for a Foreign Influence Registry, described Mr. Oh’s allegations against the registry as “baseless” and “fear-mongering.”
She also criticized his plans to create a foundation to raise funds to sue Canadian media outlets for their reporting on Beijing’s alleged influence activities. Mr. Oh had called them attempts to “smear Chinese,” pointing to news reports in recent months about the Chinese regime meddling in the last two federal elections and operating secret police stations on Canadian soil.
“In Canada, the charter protects the freedom of the press, of our news industry. So, Senator Victor Oh’s proposal to create a foundation, in my opinion, is to silence the voice of the media,” Ms. Fung told The Epoch Times in Chinese. “This goes against the spirit of the Canadian charter rights.”
“As Canadian citizens, we have the right to be informed, and we should fully support the journalists who dare to [report the truth] and the media organizations they represent, as they continue to [defend] the freedom of the press.”
In October 2018, Mr. Oh co-sponsored a parliamentary panel discussion on how to view China’s foreign interference in Canada. While the panel recognized this reality, it concluded that Canada should “avoid the excesses that have characterized the Chinese interference debate in the US and Australia,” adding that other countries’ foreign policy on the issue are “based on exaggeration or fear.”
The United States, Australia, and the UK each have a foreign agent registry in place requiring those acting on behalf of a foreign state or entity to register their activities.
Legislation
The federal government has recently concluded a public consultation on creating a foreign influence registry.Bill S-237, legislation sponsored by Sen. Leo Housakos that’s aimed at creating such a registry, is currently in second reading in the Senate. Former B.C. Conservative MP Kenny Chiu had introduced an earlier bill, C-282.
Neither bill targets any specific countries. Mr. Chiu told The Epoch Times in a previous interview that neither mentions “China” nor “Chinese,” since a foreign influence registry is meant to comprehensively address interference attempts by all authoritarian regimes.
Mr. Chiu, who lost his bid for re-election in 2021, previously said he was targeted by pre-election misinformation campaigns on Chinese-language social media platforms like WeChat.
On March 29, 2022, Mr. Housakos raised this issue in the Senate, saying that the disinformation against Mr. Chiu and his Bill C-282 “was clearly linked to a foreign power.”
Mr. Oh responded by telling Mr. Housakos that Mr. Chiu had been “lying to you” about having fallen victim to disinformation set up by pro-Beijing groups. Mr. Oh later issued an apology to Mr. Chiu for this allegation.
Donna He, Grace Dai, Isaac Teo, and Peter Wilson contributed to this report
