Under Assault: Interference and Espionage in China's Secret War Against Canada

FINALIST FOR THE 2026 BALSILLIE PRIZE FOR PUBLIC POLICY

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2026 J.W. DAFOE BOOK PRIZE

A National Business Book Award Summer Reading List selection: The Canadian Deep Dive (Politics, Policy & Power)

A Hill Times’ Top 100 Best Book in 2025

Foreword by Cherie Wong

National security expert Dennis Molinaro reveals the shocking details of Beijing’s five-decades-long effort to influence and interfere in Canadian political life. From cultivating future political leaders at the end of the Cultural Revolution to the foreign-interference scandals that have shaken present-day Ottawa, this definitive book addresses one of the most urgent global issues of our time.

Amidst heightened tensions between Western nations and China, Canadians have found themselves astonished by hostage crises, cyberattacks, harassment of members of our government, and theft of intellectual property worth untold billions of dollars. Guided by Molinaro’s experience as a historian and China specialist, Under Assault focuses on the actions of the People’s Republic of China’s government and its governing party, the Chinese Communist Party, against Canada during the past fifty years.

From Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s earliest journeys through the “Middle Kingdom” prior to his election to Parliament in the 1960s, the communist government of the PRC has perceived Canada as a staging ground for spying on and pressuring its ultimate target, the United States. When Canada’s first tech giant, Nortel, was plundered of intellectual property by digital spies; while Canada was manipulated into advocating against the independence of Taiwan; and as Chinese Canadians were targeted in the country where they thought they’d escaped Mao’s terrors, Canada’s leaders have too often seen only what they want to see in China: an emerging market of inestimable value and fertile soil for democratic change for a long-tyrannized people. Generations of Communist leadership have gladly allowed Canada’s government to labour under these misapprehensions, even when the evidence of China’s spying, theft and harassment of Canadian citizens has been happening right before its eyes. Canada has rarely allowed itself to believe what the rest of the world has long understood.

Using Canada as an early warning Under Assault shows how influence operations quietly shape international democratic institutions, markets, and political decisions—including in the United States. Informed by numerous interviews with generations of Canadian politicians, diplomats and bureaucrats; members of diaspora communities targeted by China who have endured this harassment for too long; as well as by new revelations from recently declassified CSIS documents, Under Assault is a timely, eye-opening account of a country compromised by its own illusions in a time of rising global conflict and a burgeoning new world order.

DENNIS MOLINARO is a former national security analyst and policy advisor for the Canadian federal government. An author and an academic, he earned his PhD from the University of Toronto in 2015 and studies the history of security, counterintelligence and foreign interference. His research on wiretapping and the government's use of emergency powers in the 1970s received national media coverage. A frequent media commentator on intelligence and foreign-interference issues, he has taught courses on modern espionage, human rights law and national security at several Canadian universities, including the University of Toronto.