In 2012 a small group of Taiwanese Buddhists applied for charity status for a nunnery in Prince Edward Island. They had modest habits, according to Access To Information filings with the Canada Revenue Agency. “All the nuns are vegetarians,” they wrote on their application. They spent 16 hours a day at silent prayer and chores to “joyously engage in resource conservation,” “promote Buddha’s teachings” and “reveal the ultimate truth of life and universe” in the hamlet of Vernon Bridge, P.E.I.
Their application was approved. “Congratulations on becoming a Canadian registered charity,” auditors wrote the Great Wisdom Buddhist Institute Inc. in 2013. “We wish you every success.”
And how. The nunnery by 2023 held $85.1 million in securities, $61.7 million in assets including land and buildings, $2.3 million in “furniture and fixtures” and $1.1 million worth of vehicles. Clearly there was more to the Great Wisdom nunnery than prayers and salad.
Canada Under Siege: How PEI Became A Forward Operating Base For The Chinese Communist Party advances a theory. The first Buddhist settlements on the Island were “humble and practical,” it says. Within a decade their property holdings expanded to 18,000 acres – “Monks and nuns had become landowners,” authors write – and installed a fibre optic line at a $2.1 million cost.
Canada Under Siege is the work of publisher Dean Baxendale, former RCMP anti-money laundering director Garry Clement and Michel Juneau-Katsuya, former head of the Asia-Pacific desk at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. They pull no punches.
Prince Edward Island is called “an easy target,” “a perfect target,” the “easiest entry point” for foreign agents as the smallest legislative district in North America with a fifth the population of Delaware. “It is within reach of Halifax, home to Canada’s East Coast naval operations,” authors note. “It lies along NATO shipping routes, and important undersea communications cables are just a few miles off the coast. It is part of North America’s maritime perimeter.”
This is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. Canada Under Siege attempts to name names but concedes not all the dots are connected. “On their own, each transaction might seem legal, even innocuous,” it states. “But taken together, they form a mosaic.”
Canada Under Siege is punchy and provocative. It stirs and shakes. If authors have not fully documented a conspiracy, inquiring readers are asked to ponder: Why would Buddhist nuns need their own dedicated high-speed internet line?
Authors asked now-retired Liberal MP Wayne Easter (Malpeque, P.E.I.), former chair of the Commons finance committee. “These are people coming in, buying up farms, entire sections, using shell companies, offshore accounts,” he said.
“We don’t know what we’re up against,” Easter is quoted. “And when we do, we call it ‘investment.’ That word has become a shield. But it’s not investment when the land is empty, the buildings are vacant and the money’s untraceable. That’s laundering.”
“We need a public inquiry,” said Easter. “That’s the only way. Without subpoena power and the ability to track bank records and compel testimony this will remain in the shadows.”
By Holly Doan
Canada Under Siege: How PEI Became A Forward Operating Base For The Chinese Communist Party, by Michel Juneau-Katsuya and Garry Clement; Optimum Publishing; 252 pages; ISBN 9780-8889-03556; $29.95
