Mayor-Elect Olivia Chow Falsely Claims She Was “Unaware” Pro-Beijing Groups Rallied Behind Her Mayoral Campaign.

A National Post story read that “as Olivia Chow campaigned successfully to become Toronto’s new mayor, she received some unsolicited help from controversial sources.”

A National Post story read that “as Olivia Chow campaigned successfully to become Toronto’s new mayor, she received some unsolicited help from controversial sources.”

There is every indication that she not only was aware, but that her team welcomed assistance from community organizations long-known to be sympathetic to the Chinese Communist Party and its causes.

The mayor-elect’s staffers claimed in the article that Chow never requested help from the pro-Beijing group, but a video on WeChat tells a very different story. “We did not ask for or co-ordinate any volunteers from either organization,” a spokesperson for Chow was quoted as saying.

Posts were first released on WeChat and discovered by Found In Translation, a newsletter that reports on foreign inference activities. A video shows Chow and her team coordinating her campaign efforts with members of the contentious Canada Toronto Fuqing Business Association (CTFBA).

The CTFBA recently came under scrutiny after its address was linked to the “overseas Chinese police stations” operating in Canada earlier on in the year. Several leaders of the organization recently helped organize a large demonstration against a foreign agent registry on June 24^th on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. Felicity Guo, a deputy secretary general of the CTFBA according to its website, initially posted images of her meeting with Chow and her team on her WeChat account.

Further to that, Guo also went on to post a video showing Chow and other members of the CTFBA coordinating volunteers for her mayoral campaign. The video depicts Chow in front of a slideshow which has slides asking for assistance with various key campaign duties, including “Coordinators,” “Fundraisers,” and “Drivers”.

The headline on one of the images instructs participants to contact Olivia Chow’s Campaign Recruitment Team. The man standing at the front of the campaign slideshow appears to be the executive president of CTFBA, He Zongjiang. A caption on the video asks people to “Support Chow’s candidacy for Mayor of Toronto.”

During Chow’s campaign, the CTFBA apparently went “all out” to actively support Chow and sent scores of volunteers to assist in the campaign, a June 26^th letter from the CTFBA to Chow read according to the National Post story. The statement actually reads that the association “pledges their full support.”

It was posted on a website called Canadian Chinese News Media. Links on the site connect to Confederation of Toronto Chinese Canadian Organizations (CTCCO), which is headed by chairman Weng Guoning. Guoning is also an honorary member of the CTFBA, and met earlier this year at the 10th World Overseas Chinese Association Friendship Conference with the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and President Xi Jinping in Beijing. A CCTV (China Central Television, which is the party’s state media network run by the Central Propaganda Department) readout accompanies the post on this historic meeting between overseas Chinese association representatives and Xi Jinping.

Other images included in the Chinese Canadian News Media article show volunteers from the CTFBA posing for photos with campaign material for Olivia Chow in the background.

The CTFBA has come under fire in the past for aligning with Beijing’s brutal crackdowns on Hong Kong protestors and supporting harsher national security laws. It has also organized demonstrations in Canada prior to them coming under RCMP investigation to support the newer legislation in Hong Kong which has been used to punish and repress political dissidents.

Posts by political commentator Karen Wen Lin Woods earlier on in the year had pointed out that Chow was meeting with the CTFBA. While she couldn’t be reached to comment on the National Post story, her public comment made on Twitter can be found here. Alternate media reports additionally quoted Chow supporters as saying that meeting with and supporting groups like the CTFBA was a “necessary evil.”

The full video of Chow meeting with the CTFBA pulled from WeChat can be found here.