A Conservative hopeful says his run for Parliament was haunted by stalking, intimidation and surveillance carried out by agents linked to the Chinese Communist Party, a campaign ordeal he described to MPs as nonstop foreign interference aimed at silencing him.Blacklock's Reporter says Joe Tay, a longtime media personality who ran in Don Valley North, Ont., told the House affairs committee he endured coordinated harassment throughout the race. Tay finished second in the 2021 vote by 5,276 ballots but said the tactics used against him were intended to “erase people from public life.”“Transnational repression’s real, highly sophisticated, coordinated and totally destructive aim is to silence voices, end careers and erase people from public life,” he said. Tay said his visibility in the Chinese-Canadian community made him a target after he openly supported Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement in 2019.Federal monitors previously confirmed that suspected foreign agents circulated mock wanted posters of Tay on platforms like WeChat during the campaign. .Tay said RCMP officers made an unexpected visit to warn him they intercepted a credible threat to harm him, forcing him to suspend all campaign events.He told MPs consular officials pressured venues to block him from gatherings, canvassers were photographed, and strange vehicles monitored volunteers’ homes. One supporter received a dress splattered with red paint in the mail, while seniors in Chinese-language housing complexes were warned they would “lose your visa to visit China” if they voted for Tay.Tay said the worst incident came from within Parliament itself. Liberal MP Paul Chiang, a former police officer, told Chinese-language media that Tay had a Hong Kong bounty on his head and joked that “you can claim the one million dollar bounty if you bring him to Toronto’s Chinese Consulate.” Prime Minister Mark Carney initially brushed off the remarks — “He has my confidence” — before Chiang abruptly resigned on March 31..Conservative MP Grant Jackson said he was shocked by what Tay endured. “You’ve got the People’s Republic of China putting a bounty on a Canadian citizen’s head who is running for political office,” he said, adding that the Prime Minister downplayed the danger.Tay said he feared for his life. “When Paul Chiang first announced that through the press and it was picked up by the media, my life was endangered exponentially,” he said. “When Mark Carney was protecting the candidate, that really scared me.”
