The problem is the threshold for "being on the take".

It is not difficult to donate money to a politician. They'll take money from all sorts of directions. Whether or not you manage to purchase some influence is another issue.

If I were CCP wanting to appear to have corrupted a particular candidate, I could donate $5k to their campaign through fairly acceptable totally legal channels then let myself get caught doing so.

I would have helped someone get elected by contributing to their campaign then get caught doing so if I wished to smear them.

If we are going to become more proof against foreign manipulation we are going to have to substantially improve our understanding of the issues being voted for in parliament.

I don't mean that we should get more compelled, I mean that we need to nurture a deeper understanding of how shit works instead of ascribing to the hot takes of influencers that excite us.

I can see some brilliance in China's play: they have recognized a kind of primal weaknesses in the human social psyche. I see that they exercise a cynical raison d'etre in their approach to governance and manipulation in respect of this realization.

The Chinese have recognized that the human psyche is prone to tribal behaviours and that our social impulse is both powerful and highly irrational.

They are working to limit individualism and keep a tight lid on their internal narrative while experimenting in destabilizing Western cultures wherever they can.

I crunched some numbers from an article on Chinese "police stations" being operated in Toronto a month or so ago. CSIS presented some estimate of how much China was spending on their efforts to destabilize us.

Lots of discussion as to which of our politicians had been corrupted. It got us thinking about what political things had happened in the past that we didn't like and could they be attributed to foreign manipulation.

I rounded up and chunked on some more cash to reach something like $20M CAD.

I was chagrined that China could spend a mere $0.60 per Canadian person to destabilize our fragile psyche. We do something insane like $70k GDP per person and we can be dicked with with a $0.60 spend.

Our GDP per person is freaking $70kCAD per freaking person and they can twizzle our psyches with 60 cents.

Ok, I'm pissed that China could dick with my country, but I have to own the fact that the vulnerability they're playing with has to be more my fault than China's.

The cash that China is spending to mess with us is a mere pittance in comparison to our productivity. They're messing with a kind of social transistor effect that is inherent to our brains and we get to take that away from China if we could somehow find some harmony with ourselves which would be good for us in the long term anyways.

We are losing the plot on how to become a better society and are instead wracked with infighting.