FOURNIER: Never mind America's F35, worry about China's solar panels

I am thrilled to hear so many Canadian politicians of late acknowledge their desire for greater national economic sovereignty and a reduced reliance on the United States for our export revenues.Talk is cheap of course; Western Canadians have been beating that drum now for over 10 years. Meanwhile, Carney’s talk of Canada becoming a clean-energy super-power sounds much like Trudeau’s clean-electricity regulations on steroids.I would not be surprised if there are future federal mandates for the Canada Pension Plan to invest tens of billions in Chinese clean-tech if Carney’s Liberals decide to lean heavily on his net-zero values — the Liberal voter base is heavily aligned with such a move. Now, six months into 2025, I am baffled by how the mob that trumpets for Team Canada and for fighting the Americans so readily turns a willful blind eye to the myriad examples of political interference and organized crime by close affiliates of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) operating within Canada..Further to this point is that the CCP has executed numerous Canadians over the past six months and has benefited immensely from the sale of Chinese-manufactured fentanyl precursors that have, since 2020, claimed the lives of more than 26,000 Canadians. My concern is that neither federal nor provincial governments recognize how Canadians may simply be trading an over-dependence on the Americans to buy our exports, for an over-dependence on clean-tech imports from the CCP. I strongly believe that these energy technologies are an integral part of a nefarious geopolitical agenda that will ultimately be weaponised. Basically, most of the technologies we are told will help achieve net-zero are manufactured by CCP-controlled corporations. (That would include heat pumps, inverters, wind and solar PV generators and lithium-battery storage technologies.).This is ironic. Many Canadians argue that we should break our F-35 stealth fighter contract with the U.S. arms giant Lockheed Martin, for fear that an embedded so-called 'kill switch' could render the fighter useless at the whim of the Americans. But, the same logic is not applied against Chinese clean-tech imports. Reports such as Reuters via La Voce di New York and The Economic Times are raising the alarm that the CCP has embedded secret communication and kill-switch devices in their clean-tech exports. This is not alarmist. The idea that high-tech imports manufactured in the People’s Republic of China might contain malware to allow back-doors for hackers, is nothing new in the world of IT security. For example, according to sources familiar with the matter, during the last nine months some batteries bought from Chinese suppliers have been discovered with hidden communication devices like cellular radios.Experts have warned that communication devices could evade firewalls and switch intermittent power-generation facilities’ inverters off remotely, posing a huge risk to power grids, as they could change settings, damage energy infrastructure, destabilize the grid, and cause widespread blackouts. .FOURNIER: Sudden, catastrophic power loss... if it happened in Spain, can it happen here?.On a side note, Spain, with its massive Chinese-supplied solar-PV fleet, just had a nationwide blackout on April 28 that appears to have been triggered by a large and sudden collapse of its solar-PV power generation. Coincidence?.It’s worth noting though, that the PRC’s Huawei is currently the world’s largest supplier of inverters, accounting for 29 per cent of shipments around the world in 2022. Inverters are electronic devices that convert direct current (DC) power from solar panels, or rectified DC power from wind-turbine systems, into grid-compatible alternating current (AC) power at 60 Hz — the standard frequency for North American electrical grids — while also synchronizing voltage and phase to ensure seamless integration.Ironically, while Canada and the United States have banned Huawei and other PRC technology firms from the North American 5G network for national-security reasons, these very same firms are given unrestricted access to Canadian power-generation, transmission and distribution markets. Banning Huawei from our 5G network was one of a few intelligent policies coming out of Ottawa over the past decade when it comes to the PRC. It is not a conspiracy theory to believe that the CCP has nefarious geopolitical interests driving its huge marketing push to sell its so-called clean tech into North American energy markets. While the PRC’s clean-tech sector comprised almost 50 per cent of the total GDP growth in China in 2023 and achieved an annual revenue base of US $1.6 trillion, do not make the mistake of thinking that there is not also a military objective at play. When we go back to the late 1990s, when the PRC was first granted favoured-nation status with the World Trade Organization, a special intelligence report called the Cox Report was circulating within Washington, D.C., that outlined the CCP’s 16-Character Policy. .The CCP’s 16-Character Policy was codified in 1997 and it defines the CCP’s purposeful blurring of the lines between state and commercial entities, and military and commercial interests. The sixteen characters literally mean: Combine the military and civilCombine peace and warGive priority to military products, and Let the civil support the military. This policy holds that military development is the objective of general economic modernization, and that the CCP’s main aim for the civilian economy is to support the aims of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA.) The CCP’s weaponization of Chinese corporate affairs is made possible in large part because as of 2023, there were 80 billionaires filling senior cabinet roles within the CCP, the People’s National Congress (PNC) and the State Council (senior executive branch.)The estimated net worth of these billionaire PNC delegates as of March 2023 was over $800 billion CDN. In other words, the senior executive branch of the CCP is also made up of the captains of industry within the PRC. If I were a member of the senior executive branch of the CCP, I would conceive of a way to use clean-tech exports to the West as a Trojan horse and as a means of impeding a timely, coordinated military response by the West to the planned invasion of Taiwan by the PLA. .According to an intelligence report made public by the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the PLA appears to be operating under orders to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027.I suspect that the Pearl Harbour moment for North America will be a continental-scale blackout along one or more of its north–south interconnecting grids (for example, the Western Interconnection,) and the timing of this will coincide with the activation of CCP malware embedded in the North American grid network.Let’s be intelligent and bold by banning the CCP’s energy tech from our energy network. If we do not make energy supply-chain sovereignty a national-security policy like we did with our 5G network, then I predict that we will simply be trading one economic dependence — and one geopolitical risk — for another, or much worse.

FOURNIER: Never mind America's F35, worry about China's solar panels

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