A Reflection on Foreign Interference and Institutional Betrayal

In 2011, my husband, Guy Ho, and I traveled from Hong Kong to Vancouver to get married. At the time, same-sex marriage was (and still is) illegal in our home city, and homosexuality largely remained a taboo subject. Our wedding video was later turned into a documentary that we shared across Asian film festival circuit to show that queer love, dignity, and legal equality were worth fighting for.

When we later settled in Quebec, we believed we had finally found a safe haven. Eight years after our wedding, in 2019, Guy and I prepared to lead a grassroots collective I co-founded, Action Free Hong Kong Montreal (Freehkmtl), down the pavement of the Fierté Montréal parade as Hong Kongers for the very first time. We wanted to bring together LGBTQ members and allies, bridge our identities, march under the Pride banner, express solidarity with LGBTQ equality, and show support for the democracy movement that was then at its height in our homeland.

Less than 24 hours before the event, Fierté Montréal decided to bar us from marching.

Looking back on that week, the subsequent collapse of the festival’s leadership, the emergence of the splinter movement Wild Pride, and the shifting national landscape, I realize our exclusion was never about a simple security concern. It was an early warning sign of how easily Western democratic institutions can succumb to transnational repression when they choose corporate comfort over human liberation.

The WeChat Blueprint of a National Suppression Network

When Fierté Montréal revoked our authorization, they sent us a panicked email. They claimed they had received around ten explicit threats from individuals saying they would “sabotage and stop” the parade if we participated.

We already had a good sense of where these threats were coming from. Media reports and our own digging inside the diaspora had revealed a massive, quiet mobilization. Beyond public platforms, pro-Beijing actors regularly operate through semi-closed networks—Chinese community associations, student unions, campus clubs, and WeChat groups members who directly connected to Chinese consulates in Canada.

Our investigation uncovered two distinct groups targeting us in Montreal. The first was a wave of overseas students mobilized across several WeChat channels, staying in close contact with the local Chinese consulate. The second group consisted of older immigrants. In WeChat conversations we obtained, individuals openly discussed being offered cash compensation and a free lunch by local community associations simply to show up and oppose us.

This was not a one-off local flare up. It was part of a synchronized, nationwide counter-protest campaign hitting at least three other Canadian major cities that same weekend. It showed just how easily pro-Beijing networks could flex their muscles on Canadian soil.

In Montreal, the festival’s leadership folded almost immediately. In their email to us, they explicitly cited “the presence of public figures, including prime ministers,” and defended their decision by saying they did not wish to interfere in “geopolitical conflicts”. They told us they were acting on direct safety warnings from the police. We were ready to face the risk anyway; our members went out and bought umbrellas and safety goggles to protect ourselves from potential counterprotesters. We trusted the system. “I thought we were safe because there’s a Pride team, security, police everywhere,” I remember saying. “Instead, they removed the one who was being bullied”.

The counter-protest went ahead despite the committee’s last minute action, and the festival’s target was entirely misplaced. In less than a week, the Chinese nationalist network mobilized over a hundred people along the parade route. Waving huge five-star flags of the People’s Republic of China, they disrupted the event by chanting and singing the PRC national anthem—appallingly choosing to do so during the solemn moment of silence dedicated to the remembrance of HIV/AIDS victims.

Then a CBC News investigation exposed a stark contradiction: the Montreal Police Service (SPVM) publicly and categorically denied ever issuing a security warning or advising the festival to ban us. Faced with that public denial, we were left to conclude that Montreal Pride had invoked a non-existent police alert to justify silencing our group. Guy and I were left with the sickening sense that the organizers cared far more about protecting political VIPs and staging a sanitized, corporate friendly “happy parade” than defending the very human rights they claimed to celebrate. As Guy aptly put it at the time, “We were excluded from a parade of inclusion”.

Writing Repression Into Law

What Freehkmtl endured in 2019 was not an isolated corporate blunder; it was a textbook example of foreign interference exploiting local institutions.

Since then, the landscape has grown darker. The setup of illegal “overseas police stations” across Canada, the crushing imposition of Hong Kong’s National Security Law in 2020, and the recent passage of Beijing’s sweeping Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress (民族團結進步促進法) mark a chilling escalation. These laws explicitly assert jurisdiction over organizations and individuals outside China and Hong Kong. Anyone deemed to “undermine ethnic unity,” “create division,” or “endanger national security” can be targeted.

Human rights watchdogs have warned that peaceful advocacy for Hong Kong, Taiwanese, Uyghur, or Tibetan human rights anywhere on Earth could now be treated as a criminal act under Chinese law. What we faced in 2019 was the informal rehearsal of that exact strategy. Years before Beijing wrote it into legislation, local pro-CCP networks had already managed to export authoritarian censorship into a Canadian cultural festival. By enforcing a “heckler’s veto”, they weaponized our identities against us and pressured a Canadian non-profit into acting, in effect, as a proxy enforcer of a foreign regime’s domestic agenda.

The Price of Compliance

The Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference led by Justice Marie-Josée Hogue has laid bare the structural vulnerabilities of our democracy. The commission’s findings sharply criticized the federal government’s longstanding failure to communicate threat intelligence transparently to the Canadian public. It was precisely within this information vacuum that Montreal Pride was able to use “safety” as a dishonest, unverified shield to protect its commercial interests and corporate sponsorships from political friction.

The federal government’s implementation of Bill C-70, the Countering Foreign Interference Act, is an admission of this vulnerability. Bill C-70 overhauls the Security of Information Act and the Criminal Code, introducing severe criminal penalties for individuals who commit indictable offences under the direction of, or in association with, a foreign entity to intimidate Canadian citizens. Had Bill C-70 and its companion legislation been in place in 2019, the kind of covert, anonymous threats we faced on WeChat to shut down our peaceful march could potentially have fallen within their scope. The law now formally recognizes what Freehkmtl learned the hard way: foreign interference does not only target voting booths—it also targets public squares, community hubs, and cultural parades.

Yet more than two years passed between Parliament passing the law to create a foreign influence transparency registry and the Carney government finally setting a date to bring it into force, despite repeated public warnings about ongoing interference and mounting pressure from diaspora communities. From our vantage point as an advocacy group directly targeted by foreign intimidation, this long delay—combined with a complex, red tape heavy rollout—signals a troubling lack of urgency. To us, it looks like a government more eager to reset business relations with China than to urgently protect the human rights of those most at risk.

Caving to foreign intimidation also carried a heavy international cost. Just two months after silencing us, Montreal’s delegation arrived at the InterPride annual general meeting in Athens, Greece, to vote on the host city for WorldPride 2023. Montreal entered as the overwhelming favorite, backed by millions in public funding. But international delegates had read the CBC investigation. Recognizing that an organization willing to invoke a non-existent police warning to sideline human rights activists lacked the ethical baseline to host a global summit, the international community delivered a blistering verdict. In a landslide upset, delegates rejected Montreal and awarded WorldPride 2023 to Sydney, Australia, with about 60 percent of the vote, leaving Montreal with only around 36 percent.

The structural overhauls that later purged Fierté Montréal’s board and barred diplomatic corps from the parade are a bitter validation. The system fractured exactly where we warned it would, and Ottawa has finally begun building legislative walls—through Bill C-70 and the new Foreign Influence Transparency Registry—to counter transnational repression.

A Warning from the Pavement

For Guy and me, the cost remains permanent. We were denied our right to stand with our community during a defining era of Hong Kong’s history. Since that day, we have not joined a single Pride parade anywhere in Canada. The streets that were supposed to be our refuge became a reminder of how quickly a celebration of love can turn into a stage for fear — and how easily a promise of inclusion can be withdrawn when foreign pressure knocks at the door.

As Montreal enters another festival season, my story stands as a warning to cultural boards across Canada: when you choose corporate convenience over grassroots solidarity, you do not just betray your own community—you hand the keys of your institution to a foreign authoritarian regime. If left unchecked, this kind of foreign interference will not stay on the margins; it will eventually seep into everyday life and threaten public safety.

By simply writing this article, I have probably violated all of these laws. It means that going home is no longer just a question of distance or time, but a question of whether my own government would see me as a criminal for loving my city, loving my new home country, and speaking the truth about both. Canada gave us refuge, marriage, and a chance to live openly as ourselves — yet the price of that safety is knowing that the place where we were born may now only ever see us as traitors, not as sons who still care.

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Henry Lam (JiaJiaWriter) is a Hong Kong–born, Calgary-based media professional, columnist, and novelist. His work focuses on the Hong Kong diaspora, LGBTQ+ equality, and transnational public issues. He has contributed to outlets including Stand News, The Chaser News, The Pulse HK, Ming Pao, and The News Lens. In addition to his writing, he has been actively involved in advocacy and community work for the Hong Kong diaspora, co-founding Action Free Hong Kong Montreal and the non-profit Vancouver Kaifong Association.