America’s post-1965 immigrant influx is notoriously unskilled, so that the U.S. is in effect importing poverty. But excessive skilled immigration can be a problem too—as Canada is finding out.

Canada recently ratified a foreign investor protection agreement [FIPA] with China [Harper Gov't 'Conceded to China' under Pressure: Treaty Expert, by Jeremy J. Nuttall, TheTyee.CA, September 13 2014]. The agreement underwent considerable delay and remains controversial. [FIPA Signed, but Questions Linger| Canada's investment deal with China vs. anti-monopoly laws, by Matthew Little, Epoch Times, September 17, 2014.]

A major source of the controversy: FIPA may allow China to force Canadian firms to share industrial intellectual property. The major source of the delay: the discovery Chinese infiltration of a Canadian government agency, apparently to steal…intellectual property.

It seems the Chinese have now decided that if you get caught with the goods red-handed, it’s still not too late to just ask for them instead.

Ask—or demand.

The spying came to public light this summer. According to a bland statement placed on the National Research Council’s website July 29th, Canada’s security apparatus had “detected and confirmed a cyber-intrusion” at the NRC. Canadian officials said the intrusion came from “a highly sophisticated Chinese state-sponsored actor

The American government has made similar allegations against China in the past, leading China to a pattern of official denial which the Chinese immediately employed in this Canadian episode as well. But this was the first such attribution from Canada, which cultivated considerably closer ties to China.

Canada must have had overwhelming evidence of the Chinese origin of the attack. The statement came smack in the midst of a trip to China by Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird, himself preparing for a November visit to China by Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Baird was said to have had “a full and frank exchange of views” with his Chinese counterpart, implying the cyber-spying accusation was discussed." (Canadian spy agency says Chinese hacked into NRC computers, by Terry Pedwell, Canadian Press, July 29 2014). Canada has changed considerably since VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow first described the Canadian approach to “Electing A New People” in his book The Patriot Game back in 1986. As mass immigration goes, a combination of dumb luck and British-influenced bureaucratic diligence has served Canada better than could be expected. At least there is little appetite for the importation of folk like the unpromising Guatemalan underclass; the relatively prosperous Asian middle and business classes are preferred.

There have even been some surprising political results. When The Patriot Game came out, it seemed a safe bet that Pierre Trudeau’s Liberal Party of Canada would inevitably become the natural party of new voters, the northern version of the Democrats, for whom every immigrant represents a net electoral gain. A generation ago, the Liberal Party of Canada thought so too. But it turned out that newly-arrived Hong Kong businessmen raised in the epicenter of Chinese resistance to Maoism weren’t natural socialists at all, and many proved quite willing to leave the Liberals.

Brimelow successfully predicted the rise of the Reform Party of Canada as a party of implicitly white protest, but under Stephen Harper, Reform betrayed its white base, shed its social conservatism, officially rebranded itself Conservative and emerged as a typical pseudo-right party devoted solely to global capitalism. At that point, some Chinese immigrants, considerably more antisocialist than the white Canadian average, proved ready to vote for Harper.

Meanwhile, the Chinese population in Canada has tripled, growing from 0.5 million in 1986 to 1.5 million now, almost 5% of the Canadian population. Vancouver’s population is 20% Chinese, and significant swathes of metro Toronto and metro Vancouver are almost entirely Chinese in character. [Whites to become minority in Metro Vancouver by 2031 ,By Douglas Todd, Vancouver, Sun, April 1, 2013]

The student body at Western Canada’s largest university, the University of British Columbia, is majority Asian in ethnic origin and is one-third Chinese.

Western Canada’s current resource boom, over a decade long now and counting, is keyed primarily to Chinese economic growth, as that has provided the marginal demand to counter faltering Western growth. Energy plans for the region center on megaprojects to increase the export of coal, natural gas and bitumen to Asia.

Thus ethnic Chinese have considerable power in Canada, from both within and without. We will probably never know whether China managed the attack on the NRC entirely from the Asian side of the Pacific Ocean, or whether it had sympathetic help from within the agency. But if the latter, there is no shortage of candidates.

You can use the NRC’s employee search function to look up staff members alphabetically, including searching with a single initial letter. The As alone begin with Abbadi and end, one hundred and sixty-four people later, with Azzi. From there to the twenty-one Zhangs, Zhengs and Zhuangs, and the seventeen Zhaos, Zhous, Zhus, Zous and Zuos, there are thousands of people in this rather minor branch of the Canadian bureaucracy. Most are employees but some are “volunteer visitors,” “guest workers” and the like—all the more worrisome in light of the computer hack. Some 25% of the names are of East Asian, South Asian or West Asian origin.

But perhaps China had help, not from within the NRC employee base itself, but from one of the corporate entities that constitute the other half of the NRC’s very essence —Public/Private Partnerships. There is no lack of possibilities there too: a look at the corporations the NRC is partnered with yields similarly Asianized results e.g. here.

At best, these search results suggest to me that, good intentions aside, the effect of the foreign takeover of Canada’s university student body, like an upscale version of the “Jobs Program” in Tom Wolfe’s Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, is not the creation of jobs with net economic benefit at all, but instead the placing of Asians by the hundreds of thousands into the massive Canadian government bureaucracy. At worst, the results suggest infiltration by foreign powers.

The plot thickened soon after the Chinese spying allegations, when the Chinese Foreign Ministry announced that it was investigating a Canadian couple who ran a coffee shop on the Chinese border with North Korea for the suspected theft of military and intelligence information and for threatening national security [ China probes two Canadians for alleged theft of state secrets, by Nathan Vanderklippe and Mark Mackinnon, The Globe and Mail, August 4 2014]. The official news agency Xinhua identified the couple as Kevin and Julia Dawn Garratt. Neither arm of the Chinese government troubled to say whether the couple had been detained, but Western journalistic digging in Dandong where the Garratts lived, and interviews with their sons in China and in British Columbia, establish that they were. [China’s detention of B.C. couple on suspicion of spying is ‘crazy,’ says son,By Cheryl Chan, The Province, August 6, 2014]

It turns out that the Garratts are a white Canadian couple in their fifties with strong missionary Christian impulses who have been in China for thirty years, originally travelling there to teach English. Naturally, their sons are extremely concerned about the serious potential of the accusations against their parents—China is not known for a light attitude about the death penalty, for example.

It’s impossible to avoid the conclusion that this was tit-for-tat. The Garratts were the wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time—the time immediately after the Canadian government made an espionage allegation against the Chinese.

That is how Chinese “diplomacy” works when the going gets tough. With the benefit of hindsight, the response was predictable.

But white Canadians, and all Occidentals, should consider the asymmetry of these events. Canada made an allegation that must have had overwhelming evidence behind it—else why poke the dragon? But thousands of real, flesh-and-blood Chinese, potential Fifth Columnists among them, will continue to be civil servants in the Canadian government.

No Chinese individual is likely to come to any harm as the result of all this. In fact, the net result may well be that groveling Canada apologizes and the Chinese increase their quiet invasion here.

Meanwhile, two flesh-and-blood whites sit in fear in Chinese detention, pondering their fate in a land that, despite three millennia of civilization, has never known any government other than Asian despotism, nor anything like Anglo-Saxon law and the rights of individuals.

Informed speculation is that the Canadian government’s timetable has been co-opted by the Chinese, so that Stephen Harper can be seen as obtaining release of the Garratts near to his planned visit to China in November. [Canada ratifies controversial investor deal with China,by Steven Chase, The Globe and Mail, September 12, 2014]

Just in time to improve the optics of this master-slave relationship.

Jack Highlands (email him) is a political observer who lives in the Pacific Northwest