Current Parkdale-High Park NDP MPP Bhutila Karpoche speaks to a “Free Tibet” rally in Ottawa, on Parliament Hill in March 2008. (Photo Credit: Students for a Free Tibet Canada/Google Images)

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Written by: Aidan Jonah

Two resolutions to the NDP’s 2021 online convention showcases the influence to which the “Free Tibet” movement and Tibetan exile community hold within the party to this day. Both were passed originally by the Parkdale-High Park Electoral District Association (look on page 17 and 47), a central location to the “free Tibet” movement in Canada. Due to the malicious incompetence of those running this year’s conventions, who worked to prevent pro-Palestine resolutions from reaching the floor, these resolutions were never discussed.

In the “Whereas” section of the resolutions, three false claims are made:

WHEREAS: In 1959, the People’s Republic of China violently occupied Tibet and forced HH the Dalai Lama and thousands of Tibetans into exile
WHEREAS: The PRC have suggested they will interfere in selecting the next Dalai Lama as a way of further legitimizing their ongoing occupation of Tibet
WHEREAS: The intervening 62 years, have seen Tibetans inside Tibet subjected to violations of their fundamental human rights, including culture, language, religion, and freedom of movement

Tibet was in fact a feudal theocracy run by the Dalai Lama, where serfs were ruled by religious leaders. It was not even recognized by any other countries as an independent state until the Communists gained control of Tibet and China as a whole.

Declassified Canadian cables from 1950 described the Tibetan regime as such:

“The spiritual and temporal spheres of authority are combined in a theocracy under the Dalai Lama, who is believed by Tibetans to be a reincarnation of a Buddha and who resides in a monastery-palace in Lhasa. The administrative system is maintained chiefly through the local authority of the wide-spread monasteries, which are linked together by a common veneration for the parson of the Dalai Lama.”

Esha of Historic.ly explained that “Society was divided into three classes and nine ranks, with the Dalai Lama at the top. Children of nobles were automatically placed at the fourth-highest ranks at birth. Meanwhile, children of serfs had to be registered and as the property of their parents' feudal estate.”

The Tibetan people, as serfs, suffered extreme poverty. The Tibetan elites viewed servants as an inferior race, and Tibetans were only allowed to marry those of the same rank in the societal hierarchy.

The resolution also falsely claimed that Tibet has been under assault from China, with a variety of human rights abuses. Rather than attempting to destroy Tibetan culture, China has made extensive efforts to ensure that a majority of government officials and teachers are of Tibetan descent.

During the Qing dynasty and for hundreds of years previously, the central Chinese government has influenced the choosing of the Dalai Lama. If the current central government continues this longstanding tradition, it will not be to “legitimize the ‘occupation’ of Tibet”, but continuing a centuries long tradition.

Buddhism is in fact not under attack, as in Tibet, there are 1,787 sites for the practice of Tibetan Buddhism, along with more than 46,000 resident monks and nuns, and 358 Living Buddhas.

After taking control of Tibet, the CPC only engaged in moderate land reform, infrastructure projects such as schools, and provided financial supports to serfs, to allow their children to go to school, along with low-interest loans to improve their financial standing until 1955. That year, the government began to push through land reform, a move supported by the peasantry.

The PLA defeated an attempted counter-revolution, led by feudal monks and their paid militias in 1959, with the firm support of the Tibetan people. Tibetan serfs voted for the first time ever in 1961. By 1965, Tibet had become an autonomous region of the People’s Republic of China.

The CIA provided arms drops to Tibetan militant rebels located in Nepal until 1965.

Up until 1974, the Dalai Lama received $186 000 USD in annual funds from the CIA, who gave $1.7 million to his administration as a whole each year.

As an autonomous region of China, the Tibetan people have seen a drastic improvement in life expectancy and living conditions. After the CIA backed counter-revolution failed, more than 1 million serfs, 95 per cent of Tibet’s population were freed from serfdom. The average life expectancy of a Tibetan was 35.5 years before the PLA took control of Tibet, and rose to 70.6 years as of 2019.

Misinformation claiming otherwise does not come out of thin air. Rather, it comes through a concerted effort to demonize China for its removal of the theocratic regime which formerly ruled Tibet.

Tibetan dissidents begin to mobilize Canadians

The first concerted push among the dissident exile community began in the mid-1980s, and resulted in the founding of the Canada-Tibet Committee by Thubten Samdup in 1987.

The Dokham Chushi Gangdruk Society, Canada’s chapter of the India-based Welfare Society of Central Dokham Chushi Gangdrug, was founded in 1992. It is tightly connected to Chushi Gangdruk [CG]: an organization of pro-feudalism Tibetan guerrilla fighters, which was created after the People's Liberation Army took control of Tibet in 1951. Along with other militias funded by Tibetan elites, CG received training and weapons from the Central Intelligence Agency from 1952 to 1958. It then played an important role in the attempted CIA backed pro-feudalism uprising in 1959.

In 1994, Students for a Free Tibet would be founded in the USA. It was not until 2004, that Canada would get its very own iteration of the group, Students for a Free Tibet Canada.

Bhutila Karpoche was born in 1984, in Nepal. She attended boarding school in the definitive dissident hub of Dalai Lama supporters, India, during her youth. Karpoche came to Canada with her family by 2002 at the latest, in reaction to the Maoist rebellion sweeping the country at the time.

Karpoche would begin studying at University of British Columbia in January 2003, for a Bachelor of Science degree. Timelines are fuzzy at best for the next three years. She would become the president of UBC’s Students for a Free Tibet Canada chapter for the 2006-2007 school year. The chapter then was not registered on campus the next year.

Karpoche joined the Students for a Free Tibet Canada board in 2008, and served as the Deputy Director of SFT Canada that same year. Karpoche was also an executive member of the Tibetan Joint Action Committee (JAC) by 2008.

In 2008, Karpoche gave “an impassioned speech,” at an Ottawa based Free Tibet rally “lambasting the Chinese regime for their violent and heavy handed tactics in suppressing the dissent in Tibet, and called the government of Canada and the International Olympics Committee (IOC) to demand China to stop their brutal reprisals and to remove Tibet off of the planned Olympic torch relay route.”

A year later, Karpoche was tapped to work in the constituency office of Parkdale High Park MPP Cheri DiNovo, a prominent pro-Tibet advocate. According to a Toronto Star article on Karpoche’s 2018 election victory, she got the position as a direct result of her work for SFT Canada. The direct quote from Brendan Kennedy’s article is put below:

“DiNovo had wanted to add a Tibetan speaker to her staff to better liaise with Parkdale's large Tibetan population, so she asked organizers with Students For a Free Tibet if they knew anyone who might be interested. Karpoche arrived and quickly became indispensable, DiNovo said.”

Karpoche would work in a paid position for DiNovo in the constituency office for multiple years, before becoming DiNovo’s executive assistant near the end of her third and final term as an MPP.

But this was far from the only role taken on by Karpoche, which she was able to pursue in a volunteer capacity thanks to the salary from working for former MPP DiNovo’s office.

It is unclear when Karpoche stopped serving on the SFT Canada Board of Directors due to a dearth of publicly available information. A board member can run for a maximum of two terms, comprising four years total. Since the earliest publicly available notice of her board membership came in 2008, the latest Karpoche could’ve served on the board until was early 2012.

The international Students for a Free Tibet organization has received $330 000 from the National Endowment from Democracy since 2016 alone. Since SFT Canada works under the international SFT structure, it is almost certain to have received NED funds from at minimum 2016 until the present day. The organization has had paid summer interns since at least 2008, which would have been almost certainly impossible to maintain for a four-years old organization (as of 2008), without outside funding.

Unfortunately, since the organization has chosen to register as a corporation, no annual reports, annual financial reports or financial statements of any sorts are available. This making the official sources of income impossible to determine. This is almost certainly an intentional decision, as registered charities have much more extensive disclosure requirements.

From 2013 to 2015, Karpoche would serve on the Tibetan Canadian Cultural Centre’s board, as the PR/Media/Grants Coordinator.

From 2015 to 2017 she sat as Canadian representative on the steering committee of the International Tibet Network.

The only available ITN Annual Report, thanks to Web Archive, is one from 2014. The ITN’s total income was $226 891 USD, with 80.21 per cent of this coming from grants from three regime change NGOs, the Isdell Foundation, National Endowment for Democracy and Taiwan Foundation for Democracy. The majority of the ITN’s annual funding continues to come from these three organizations.

International Tibet Network has received $500 000 from the NED since 2016 alone, the earliest date NED grants became publicly searchable.

As reported earlier by The Canada Files, Allen Weinstein, a former acting president of the National Endowment for Democracy and one of the authors of the study that led to its creation, said in a 1991 interview that "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

Karpoche also served on the Board of Directors of the Canadian Tibetan Community of Ontario, according to the Canada Tibet Committee, but there is no publicly available information on when and how long she served for.

Karpoche then had the full force of the Parkdale-High Park political establishment come out in support of her bid to become the NDP MPP candidate for the riding. This included former NDP MP Peggy Nash, her former employer and former MPP Cheri DiNovo, along with the Tibet dissident groups located in the PHP riding. By September 2017, she was acclaimed as the NDP’s official candidate for the riding. In August 2018, she defeated all challengers in the provincial election to become the NDP MPP for Parkdale-High Park.

Karpoche has used the power and prestige which comes with being an MPP to full effect for the Tibet dissident cause.

In December 2019, she made a passionate speech praising “his holiness”/former feudal leader of Tibet, the Dalai Lama. She spoke about Tibetans “fighting for freedom and human rights”: a classic imperialist phrase often used in efforts to drive support for “humanitarian intervention”. She cited Radio Free Asia, a CIA funded propaganda organization, and the New York Times, to spread debunked smears of genocide and mass detention.

On September 24, 2020, Bhutila Karpoche’s bill to create a Tibetan Heritage Month which would occur every July, was passed in the Ontario Legislature. The NDP bragged that it received the public backing of “several Tibetan organizations including the Canadian Tibetan Association of Ontario (CTAO) [Karpoche was on Board of Directors previously], the Tibetan Women’s Association of Ontario (TWAO), Chushi Gangdruk, Students for a Free Tibet Canada and the Regional Tibetan Youth Congress of Toronto, which advocate to preserve and share Tibet’s rich culture in today’s increasingly diverse and multicultural Canadian society.”

Karpoche has served as the chair of the Ontario Parliamentary Friends of Tibet since entering office. Karpoche initiated the Ontario Parliamentary Friends of Tibet Summer Internship Program in summer 2019. This is a paid summer internship which is meant to help Tibetan youth gain familiarity with governance in Ontario, yet another paid opportunity for dissident youth to climb the political ladder. Its operations began in 2019 and have continued on into 2021.

Repeating the favour that DiNovo did for her, Karpoche has brought prominent young Tibetan-Canadian dissidents into her constituency office in paid positions.

That dissident is Dechen Tenzin, a long time Students for a Free Tibet Canada organizer. Tenzin was in SFT Canada’s paid summer internships program during Summer 2017 and now serves on SFT Canada’s Board. Tenzin served as a constituency assistant in Karpoche’s office for the entirety of 2019 and 2020. She now works as an outreach coordinator for the Manitoba NDP.

Tenzin is typical of the new age, super woke Tibetan “leftist” organizer, supporting Palestine (even attempting to disingenuously equate the Palestinian liberation struggles to those of pro-feudalism Tibet dissidents), supporting Indigenous nations in Canada while opposing colonialism at home. Yet, as is typical with these types of organizers, seemingly decent international and domestic political aims serve to mask her imperialist aims towards Tibet and the rest of China.

Another prominent young Tibet supporter has also been brought into Karpoche’s orbit in a paid position. That person is Spencer Julien, who served as SFT Canada’s Toronto Regional Coordinator in June to August 2019, and now sits on SFT Canada’s Board. They served as a consultant for Office of Bhutila Karpoche from April 2020 to December 2020, and now as a Constituency Assistant for Karpoche from January 2021 onwards. Julien is also the volunteer coordinator, a provincial council delegate, and a 2021 NDP federal convention delegate for the provincial Parkdale-High Park NDP riding association executive.

Tenzin, Julien, and the other young Tibet supporters detailed throughout the rest of this piece had their SFT Canada summer jobs and internships funded through the Canada Summer Jobs program.

Yet, Karpoche is far from the only Parkdale-High Park politician who was slyly supporting the Tibetan-Canadian dissident movement through paid positions.

Youdon Tsamotshang is a long-time SFT Canada activist, who got a Canada Summer Jobs funded SFT Canada summer internship, as the Toronto Regional Grassroots Coordinator in Summer 2016. Tsamotshang then gained a paid position in Parkdale-High Park’s Toronto city councillor Gord Perks’ constituency office, where she has served as a constituency assistant from 2017 to the present day. She has served as the Chair of SFT Canada’s Board since 2019, and is now the Vice-President of the Tibetan Children’s Project. Tsamotshang is also a women’s committee delegate for the provincial Parkdale-High Park NDP riding association executive.

Other board members went through the paid summer internships as well. Tenzin Paljor served as the Toronto Regional Coordinator in Summer 2014. Tenzin Lhawang was a summer intern in 2015, and then served as the community events coordinator in summer 2016.

Five of the eight SFT Canada board members had at least one paid summer internship with SFT Canada.

CTC & Canadian federal parliamentary internship programs

While Parkdale-High Park is the hub of the Tibetan-Canadian dissident community, this location is far from the only power centre in Canada.

A key paid opportunity for young Tibet dissidents is the Parliamentary Friends of Tibet Internship Program, which has been running since 2009. This means that for 12 years, young dissidents have been able to build connections and influence, on the Canadian taxpayer’s dime. That’s because the interns participating in parliamentary internship programs are paid from an MPs designated member’s office budget. According to the Hill Times, as of 2017, “an MP’s basic office budget is $355,400, from which all staff wages must be paid, including ‘salaries, service contracts, some operating and travel costs, and other expenses.’”

Parkdale-High Park Liberal MP Arif Virani has been the chair of PFT since 2017 and has been the lead figure in the running the internship program. Conservative MP Garnett Genuis and the NDP MP Randall Garrison serve as Vice Chairs of the PFT.

Sherap Therchin is certainly the most well known among the beneficiaries of the PFT internship program.

According to the Canadian Tibet Committee bio on him, Therchin was born and grew up in Tibetan refugee communities in Nepal.

From 2013 to 2015, he was the Deputy Chief of Tibet Fund India, with responsibility for oversight and evaluation of USAID projects supporting education and healthcare in Tibetan refugee communities. USAID is the regime change arm of the United States government.

Therchin moved to Canada in 2015 and took a year to pick up a Masters Degree at Queen’s University.

Therchin was selected to be a summer intern by the Parliamentary Friends of Tibet Internship Program for the summer of 2016, serving in Liberal MP Arif Virani’s office. He would then work as a proposal consultant for Global Affairs Canada funding, from December 2016 to January 2017.

In January 2018, Therchin was hired to be the Executive Director of the Canada-Tibet Committee. Without the paid position in Virani’s office, there is no way to know if Therchin would have ever risen to his current political prominence.

The Canada-Tibet Committee’s funding sources are impossible to determine, as it is registered as a corporation just like Students for a Free Tibet Canada, which allows both to have almost non-existent disclosure requirements. The organization’s annual reports are barebones documents which only look at the amount of money coming in and out of the organization, providing no further details than this. That choice should truly speak for itself.

Tibetan-Canadian dissidents are organizing at a rapid pace, while seeking to influence young people and NDP policy. The party recently voted in favour of a conservative motion to demand Huawei be blocked from Canada, and then voted with the conservatives again to declare a “Uyghur genocide” based on debunked think tank reports and parliamentary committee reports. They continue to gain influence in the party, and are playing an important role in driving the party to continue along its anti-China path.

Aidan Jonah is the Editor-in-Chief of The Canada Files, a socialist, anti-imperialist news site founded in 2019. He has written about Canadian imperialism, federal politics, and left-wing resistance to colonialism across the world. He is a second-year Bachelor of Journalism student at Ryerson University, who was the Head of Communications and Community Engagement for Etobicoke North NDP Candidate Naiima Farah in the 2019 Federal Election.

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