Justin Trudeau Worked With United Front Media Organization During His 2015 Election Campaign.

Red Maple News also agreed to collaborate on reporting with now-sanctioned Russia Today in 2018.

A post on the online news site “World Chinese Media” (世界华文媒体) details the establishment of the Canadian Association of Chinese Journalists and Editors in 2016, a registered “not-profit journalism organization” used to “communicate and carry out exchanges on behalf of Canadian-Chinese media with other ethnic media.”

The founding chair of the new association it leads is Gu Jianyun, who is also editor-in-chief and president of “Red Maple Forest News Network” (红枫林). In March of 2016, Red Maple News was cordially invited to Beijing to attend the national “Two Sessions,” and Gu Jianyun also officially became the vice chair of the “World Association of Chinese Mass Media” (世界华文大众传播媒体协会), an organization first established in 1998 with a headquarters in Toronto. The “Two Sessions” refer to a collective term used for the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) annual plenary sessions consisting of two parts: the National People’s Congress (NPC), and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), which are held every spring in the Great Hall in Beijing. The CPPCC is an advisory body to the CCP and is viewed as a meeting where diplomats, academics, propagandists, representatives, officers and others unite. It is unofficially governed on different levels by the United Front Work Department.

Jianyun is pictured in the article standing beside a young Justin Trudeau while wearing a 2015 Liberal Party volunteer lanyard around her neck, with Liberal Party campaign materials in the background plastered with their old slogan “Real Change.”

Red Maple News is also detailed as having overseas bureau branches spread out over multiple locations in China, including Beijing, Guizhou, and Chengdu. An article on Red Maple’s site describes how Jianyun was invited to Parliament Hill by Justin Trudeau in 2017 to a celebration. She explains how she was the first to report the speech he made back to “China News Service” (中国新闻社) - the second-largest state-controlled news agency in China. It was formerly run by the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office, a state department which was absorbed into the United Front Work Department of the Central Committee of the CCP in 2018.

Jianyun visited Beijing in 2017 with her team to meet with the United Front Work Department and other leaders to promote “new ideas and developments in the Belt and Road initiative.”

She has received numerous blessings and has had extensive interactions with Chinese diplomats both abroad and in Canada, including with now-expelled persona non-grata diplomat Zhao Wei. She has received nods and letters from state-run organizations such as China News Service for her work. The article divulges that “in the big family of overseas Chinese-language media, colleagues in the media are willing to call Gu Jianyun ‘President Gu’”. It was her “dream” and her “mission in life” to appear in the Great Hall of Beijing (at the Two Sessions), according to the write-up on her in Red Maple News.

Jianyun has created several other media organizations and formally struck a cooperative agreement with now-sanctioned media outlet Russia Today in 2018: “Red Maple Media Group and One Belt One Road News Agency have successively cooperated with Russian State News Agency, World Publishing House of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China, International Business Daily of the Ministry of Commerce of China, China Economic Publishing House, China Overseas Chinese Publishing House of the Chinese Federation of Overseas Chinese, etc., to establish a new type of strategic partnership,” she claims.

A separate piece written on the collaboration with Russia headlines “Canadian Red Maple Forest and Russia Today (RT) join hands to open up a new chapter of cooperation between Chinese media and international media.” Jianyun represented Red Maple News in talks and was invited to RT’s Beijing headquarters to discuss “future cooperation between the two in news reporting in China, Canada and Russia.”

According to the story, “the two sides reached an agreement to jointly rely on their own national news qualifications to carry out international news business cooperation, and established a cooperation mechanism for global manuscript exchange, editing and editing in the field of Chinese news. From February 2018, Russia International News Agency officially authorized Canada's Red Maple Media Group and the Belt and Road News Agency to normally use signed news original manuscripts and news in various related fields in Chinese categories collected and edited by reporters from Russia International News Agency Beijing branch.” An authorized Canadian distributor of RT.

Russia Today was banned by the CRTC in Canada following the Russian invasion of Ukraine and targeted for extensive sanctions by the European Union, and Justin Trudeau’s UFWD campaign volunteers are collaborating with them in Beijing. She doesn’t deny or attempt to hide colluding with them.

The Government of Canada website acknowledges on it that the UFWD is a “primary foreign interference tool” of the CCP:

“CSIS has seen multiple instances of foreign states targeting specific Canadian institutions. The scope of potential foreign interference activities can be broad, encompassing a range of techniques that are familiar to intelligence agencies. These include: human intelligence operations, and the use of state-sponsored or foreign influenced media.”

The Liberal Party of Canada pledged through a statement released by Minister of Foreign Affairs Mélanie Joly after Zhao Wei was ordered out of Canada that they “will not tolerate any form of foreign interference in our (Canada’s) internal affairs,” despite failing repeatedly to commit to an exhaustive public investigation into foreign interference activities.

Does campaigning with Liberal politicians count?