‘Old Friends’ of Beijing: Dennis Molinaro on Trudeau and the Elite Networks That Rewired Canada–China Relations

OTTAWA — In this episode of The Bureau Podcast, I chat with Canadian author, historian and former national security analyst Dennis Molinaro to unpack Under Assault: Interference and Espionage in China’s Secret War Against Canada — the book The Bureau has reviewed in three pieces, and which covers a vast array of cases revealing how Beijing has shaped Canada’s trajectory for more than half a century.

One of the central themes of the conversation is Molinaro’s insistence that you cannot understand the evolution of Canada–China relations by looking only at diplomatic files or security reports.

“We can’t just detach security from diplomacy and from relations,” he says. “So I wanted to try to tell that complete story as best I could.”

That fuller picture includes a re-assessment of Pierre Trudeau and the 1970 recognition of the People’s Republic of China. Molinaro is careful with his evidence, but blunt about the pattern it reveals. On the recognition decision, he tells me: “I would say that the recognition of China, I’m comfortable in saying that likely looks like it was a foreign interference operation by the PRC … because of Paul Lin.”

Molinaro walks listeners through the previously obscure figure of Paul Lin, an academic who moved between the West Coast, the United States, China and finally McGill University. Newly released RCMP and allied intelligence files show Lin under heavy surveillance and flagged as a likely Chinese Communist Party influence operator. In Molinaro’s words, the Mounties “flat out say that this is part of his task of being an agent of influence is to get China recognized.”

At the same time, Beijing’s internal language about Canada’s leaders was far from neutral. Drawing on the testimony of defector Chen Yonglin, Molinaro explains how Chinese internal documents categorized Pierre Trudeau, Jean Chrétien and Henry Kissinger as “old friends” of the regime. As he tells me: “Old friends… it’s this category of an individual that is very close to the PRC in supporting the CCP… the CCP views them as a close ally, in a sense… even generations later, which is quite a substantial thing, I would say.”

I push the conversation further, asking whether Molinaro’s work is forcing a broader re-evaluation of Pierre Trudeau’s ideological legacy and the way Canada’s elites still “see” China. Molinaro argues that the Hogue Commission hearings themselves became an example of how much Canada’s political class has preferred a comforting story over a harder look at Chinese Communist Party power.

The discussion then turns to the Canada–China Business Council, Power Corporation and the Desmarais network of political relationships. I note my own reporting on how Power Corp, the Desmarais family and Jean Chrétien have been intertwined with senior Chinese state–investment bodies. Molinaro adds a deeper origin story, explaining that Paul Lin helped midwife the business council itself and then became a gatekeeper to “curated” deals inside China.

For Molinaro, the problem is not legitimate business in 2025, but the origins and intent: “The problem becomes Paul Lin… his central interests were the CCP… it brings into all kinds of questions… mainly, if the government’s getting briefed on this guy… what was done about this?”

Winnipeg, Wuhan and the lab-leak debate

Midway through the episode, Molinaro and I shift to the Winnipeg Level 4 lab and the contested origins of COVID-19 — a chapter Molinaro says “was all about… Canada being this place where the PRC is just actively somehow operating … as it will.”

We walk through the now-public documents on Dr. Xiangguo Qiu, Thousand Talents applications, the transfer of Ebola and other high-consequence pathogens to Wuhan, and the proposed “bat filovirus” gain-of-function project linking Winnipeg and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Molinaro is explicit that the lab-leak hypothesis is not fringe: “I see this as probably more likely than having a virus that emerges so fast, basically overnight, that can infect humans on scale, just on a mass scale.”

‘Canada is overrun’: how Washington now sees its northern ally

In the final third of the conversation, Molinaro reveals what senior United States officials told him when he asked how they now view Canada’s China file. One line that stuck with me: “I don’t want to say joke,” one official told him, “but the saying you get a lot of times here is, look to Canada if you want to see what could happen here.”

Another was even starker: “Canada is overrun.” Molinaro interprets that as a quiet warning about intelligence sharing: “What they were trying to essentially say as nice as possible was we’re going to have to start thinking about how we share intelligence with you if you don’t clean up your PRC problem.”

The episode closes with prescriptions. Molinaro says Canada must finally pass and use a meaningful foreign-agent registry. It needs RICO-style anti-racketeering laws: “You need a structure of laws that will target the people who are running these organizations and tie them to the individual offenses like the Americans are doing.” And the country must overhaul its security culture — including how CSIS, the RCMP and political leaders share and act on intelligence.

Above all, he says, this is a leadership question: “If you don’t have good leadership, that’s going to take the lead on these things and solve them… don’t expect any changes.”

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