The Tory MP, the Chinese reporter and the amorous emails
A reporter who works for the Chinese government’s state-controlled media agency is distancing herself from intimate emails purportedly sent to her by a Conservative MP but circulated widely this week, saying her husband hacked into her account. Shi Rong, a Toronto correspondent for Xinhua News Agency, declined to comment further or confirm whether the emails, dated from 2010, are genuine or a hoax. A mass email sent to more than 240 media, academic, political and business contacts across Canada Thursday contained texts of messages purported to have been sent from Mississauga-Erindale MP Bob Dechert to Ms. Shi at Xinhua. Mr. Dechert is parliamentary secretary to Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird. Before the 2011 election he served as parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Justice. Xinhua is the official press service for the People’s Republic of China and Western counterintelligence agencies have likened it to an intelligence agency. One email, purportedly sent to Ms. Shi on April 17, 2010 from Mr. Dechert’s parliamentary office account, says: “You are so beautiful. I really like the picture of you by the water with your cheeks puffed. That look is so cute, I love it when you do that. Now, I miss you even more.” The email was signed “Bob Dechert, MP.” The sender account named was decheB9@parl.gc.ca and the recipient was shirong2011@gmail.com, which Ms. Shi has used as an email account. Mr. Dechert’s office did not immediately reply to a request for comment Friday and the Prime Minister’s Office said it’s looking into the matter. Reached on her instant messaging account Thursday night, Ms. Shi would not comment on the authenticity of the email messages, saying only that she was not responsible for the mass email. She initially said “someone hacked my email box!” and later elaborated on that, saying “the one who hacked my email box is my husband.” Another email, dated April 20, 2010, invites Ms. Shi to watch TV for an evening vote in Ottawa. “Dearest Rong,” the note began. “How is your day. Did your interviews at Royal Bank go well? Did you get enough information for your articles?” The sender tells Ms. Shi that they arrived in Ottawa “just after 12 pm” and “I enjoyed the drive by thinking of you.” The email encouraged her to watch televised proceedings in the Commons that day. “We will be voting at 6:30 p.m. If you have time, watch on TV or on your computer (on the CPAC website) and I will smile at you.” “I miss you. Love, Bob,” the email concludes. Canada’s top spy warned last year that Chinese spies had infiltrated Canadian politics and was influencing Canadian officials. Canadian Security Intelligence Service head Richard Fadden, suggested during a TV interview in June 2010 that two provincial cabinet ministers and a number of other government officials and employees were under the control of foreign countries as part of espionage schemes. “We’re in fact a bit worried in a couple of provinces that we have an indication there are some political figures who have developed quite an attachment to foreign countries,” he told CBC in 2010. Mr. Fadden later backtracked a bit, saying CSIS had not deemed the cases to be of sufficient concern to bring them to the attention of Ottawa’s Privy Council Office or provincial authorities. China is known to be an extremely aggressive collector of intelligence and Canadian security agencies have, in the past, cited links to Xinhua as a reason to remove bureaucrats from positions where they might have access to top secret data. For example, the government fired a senior Chinese-Canadian bureaucrat from the Privy Council Office in 2003, partly because she had once worked for Xinhua and had kept up contacts with her former colleagues there after joining the Canadian government. “The complaint denied that while an employee of Xinhua she had engaged in intelligence collection activities for the Chinese government … [but] it was reasonable for the Clerk to conclude that the complainant may have engaged in intelligence collection activities on behalf of a foreign state as an employee of Xinhua,” a once “Top Secret” report on the matter said. The report, by Paule Gauthier, then chair of the Security Intelligence Review Committee, went on to say that individual’s social visits to the “Xinhua compound in Ottawa” were problematic. “More over I heard evidence from CSIS witnesses relating to the concern that as a former employee of Xinhua the complainant may have engaged in intelligence collection activities on behalf of a foreign state,” the report says. “I find that evidence to be compelling and reliable.” Mr. Dechert is a former senior partner with the law firm Gowling Lafleur Henderson LLP, and a former president of the Empire Club of Canada. His government biography says he has lived in Mississauga for many years with his wife Ruth Clark. With a report from Colin Freeze in Toronto
