It’s nothing new. It’s not unique. And it’s not just something that happens in federal politics.

Chinese mauling of our democracy, and democratic institutions, that is. What has been reported in the media about the Chinese regime — that it deliberately and repeatedly sought to influence the 2019 and 2021 federal elections, and targeted a former cabinet minister for attacks — is well known.

Less known, however, are China’s attempts to do likewise at other levels of government, right across Canada.

In Vancouver, for instance, the Chinese consulate aggressively and regularly interfered in the city’s municipal election races. They’d do that using “proxies” — Manchurian candidates, in effect — grooming and deploying their shills in city election contests.

That revelation — which is fact, not conjecture — was found in a January 2022 report by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), which stated that the Chinese consul-general “groomed” candidates in B.C. to illicitly do Beijing’s bidding.

The report prompted the province’s premier to demand a briefing by CSIS, while Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — arguably Beijing’s best friend in the G7 — dismissed it all as “little bits and pieces of uncorroborated, unverified information.”

On that occasion, Trudeau resisted the temptation to label the CSIS report as “racist.” But Trudeau and his more obsequious MPs have used that canard on other occasions. So, too, the campaign of Olivia Chow, now seeking Toronto’s mayoralty — when asked about her relationship with Chinese front organizations.

Chow, who is usually a fair-minded person, shouldn’t ever make such an accusation. As she should know, China hasn’t just targeted federal politicians. It has sought to influence lesser levels of government, too. Even at the school board level.

That’s certainly what is alleged to happen at the level of Canada’s largest school board, the Toronto District School Board (TDSB). And reports about China’s meddling with the TDSB were followed by high-level resignations and recriminations.

As long ago as 2014, TDSB’s chair, Chris Bolton, abruptly resigned after what the Toronto Star then called “a never-ending stream of scandals” during Bolton’s tenure. “The timing of his resignation [was] questionable,” the Star reported — and China was one of those scandals.

When Bolton resigned, The Globe and Mail reported: “The news of his departure also comes just days before trustees are set to vote Wednesday on whether the TDSB should pursue its controversial partnership with the Chinese government. Mr. Bolton was the driving force behind the school board’s Confucius Institute.”

The “Institute,” which has been around for nearly two decades, has been the focus of controversy and opposition across democracies. Essentially, credible reports link the Confucius Institute to military and industrial espionage, including in Western educational institutions.

Former CSIS director Richard Fadden said that the Confucius Institute is “managed by people operating out of the embassy or consulates” and tasked with suppressing criticisms of Beijing.

After hundreds of parents signed a petition objecting to the presence of the Confucius institute in TDSB classrooms, Bolton hurriedly offered his resignation. One later report found no wrongdoing by him — but the author of the report was the TDSB itself.

Summarizing the scandals that had beset the TDSB, the Globe editorialized: “[Bolton] showed a stunning lack of judgment in striking an agreement with the Chinese government to offer Chinese language and cultural programs, subsidized and controlled by the non-democratic government in Beijing. Despite its innocuous name, the Confucius Institute functions as little more than a long arm of the Chinese state, pushing its political agenda under the guise of simple language instruction.”

And that, at the end, is the reality: China muscling into our democracy — even at the granular level of a school board. China’s regime is a multi-headed hydra, increasingly, its tentacles slinking into our institutions from coast to coast. No target is too small for Chinese manipulations, it seems.

Justin Trudeau and Olivia Chow may claim otherwise.

But they should know better.

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Artificial intelligence is a benign kind of description, isn’t it? Doesn’t sound demonic at all.

So too its acronym, AI. We hear and see “AI” all the time, these days. It’s so ubiquitous, so commonplace, it just makes people shrug, now.

For an entire generation, all of us have been carrying around little machines — iPhones, whatever — that operate on the same principle as AI. In basic terms, they benignly collect information from us when we interact with them.

Except AI takes that a step further, a big step. Artificial Intelligence takes the information it collects on us to actually mimic us. To learn, to plan, to reason, to problem-solve. To, as the Oxford Dictionary people put it, “develop computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require humans.”

If that sounds to you like “machines replacing humans,” you’re right. It is. AI is about replacing humans — computer people (coders, programmers, software engineers, data analysts), media people (in advertising, content creation, technical writing, journalism), legal people (paralegals, legal assistants to start, lawyers later), people who create (artists, writers, musicians). And, of course, people who teach, people in finance and accounting, people who deal with the public.

People: if you are on the above list, AI can do what you do, but better and faster and cheaper. And, the now-anxious AI experts say, it’s not a case of you losing your job or vocation to AI, maybe.

You will.

Not surprisingly, the usual arguments in favour of this radical change are being trotted out to justify the expansion and use of AI. Efficiency, prosperity, competitiveness, productivity — and, of course, those hoary old chestnuts, “eliminating duplication” and “freeing up your time to let you do what you love.”

Except, what if what we love is what we already do?

Well, get ready. It won’t be SkyNet, as in the Terminator movie series, which foretold a world being enslaved by AI-enabled death machines. No, it’ll arguably be qualitatively worse, because it’s arriving on tiny feet.

Is it too late? Well, AI is already metastasizing at a speed that cannot (ironically) be put into words. So say the people who used to advocate for it.

Dr. Geoffrey Hinton is one. Hinton, along with two graduate students, has been working on developing Artificial Intelligence for more than two decades. At the University of Toronto, the trio essentially created what the New York Times called “the intellectual foundation for AI systems.”

Except now Dr. Hinton — who quit his job at Google so he could speak out — is saying: stop.

AI is already being used for misinformation, and soon it will be a real risk to humans with jobs. Eventually, the New York Times’ report soberly notes, “it could be a risk to humanity.”

Said Dr. Hinton to the Times: “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things.” For starters, he says, AI will be used to flood the Internet with faked photos, videos and information: “(We will) not be able to know what is true anymore.”

And, inevitably, people will get replaced. Sure, at the outset, menial tasks — the drudge work — will be taken over by AI. But eventually, Hinton says, “it might take away more than that.”

Can anything stop it, or even slow it down? Not at the moment. Right now, Google and Microsoft, who are more wealthy and more powerful than most nations, are in a type of arms race to perfect AI first. Scientists (Elon Musk among them, interestingly) have signed open letters warning of the risks. But few are listening.

We need to. AI isn’t just coming, it’s here. And we need to get ready.

As Musk, no less, says: “With artificial intelligence, we’re summoning the demon.”

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