Not sure how many times Canadians need to be warned until they pay attention……

OTTAWA—Former U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director Mike Pompeo warned audience members at an Ottawa conference that agents of the Chinese regime have so thoroughly infiltrated Canada that they could be in attendance at the event.

“I can’t see very much out there, but I will bet you that there are Chinese Communist Party affiliated people in this room today,” Pompeo told attendees of the Canada Strong and Free Conference on May 7.

Pompeo said that many people affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are not ethnically Chinese, and that they “look like me; like they’re white Italian kids.” He also said there is not a “single university in the United States that isn’t deeply tied to Chinese money,” and some Chinese students engage in intellectual property theft.

Pompeo said he is less concerned about a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan than about what he sees as Beijing’s influence operations in cities such as Denver, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Ottawa, or Toronto.

Pompeo was the the director of the CIA from 2017 to 2018, and the U.S. secretary of state from 2018 to 2021. He said that during his time as CIA director, the agency learned that Chinese operations against the United States were being conducted out of the Chinese Consulate in Houston, Texas. After months of planning, the CIA and FBI launched an operation to close it down.

After the consulate was ordered to close, employees of the diplomatic mission began burning documents in barrels in the courtyard of the consulate, he said.

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“They were burning everything there, and within two days, we had identified hundreds of Chinese agents operating in the United States, most of which we were unaware of,” Pompeo said.

Pompeo said while he and then-FBI Director Christopher Wray were “pretty proud of ourselves for having pulled this off,” they recognized there were likely many more Chinese agents operating within the United States that had yet to be discovered.

Conservative MP Shuvaloy Majumdar asked Pompeo about Prime Minister Mark Carney’s moves to seek closer relations with China in the face of U.S. tariffs, despite saying in 2025 that China posed the greatest threat to Canadian national security.

Pompeo said this approach was “misguided” and that Beijing will “sell your nation’s values down the river in two seconds.” He urged Canada to “move past the irritation and remember who the people are that share your values.”

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Earlier in the day, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre had spoken at the event and also said the Liberal government should not turn away from the United States to pursue a “strategic partnership” with China.

“We must reject the idea of a permanent rupture with our biggest customer—which buys two thirds of our goods—in favour of a strategic partnership for a ‘new world order’ with Beijing,” he said.