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Ching, also known as Cheng Muyang, is wanted by Chinese authorities on corruption-related charges and has waged a long legal battle to remain in Canada, it was revealed last week.

“I’m following the news reports the same way you are,” Trudeau said Monday in Aylmer, Que., where he was unveiling his election pledge to lower middle-class taxes. “And I’ve asked the party to take this very seriously and look into this and take the appropriate action.”

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But it won’t, at least not for a growing number of wage-earning Canadians. The Canadian housing market is overvalued by 35 per cent compared to Canadian incomes, and 89 per cent compared to rents. Chinese money, of the hot and cold type as well as the clean and dirty variety, is no minor factor in the calamity. In Vancouver, as much as half the dollar value of detached housing sales went to Mainland Chinese buyers last year. Most of the $3 billion poured into the purchase of west-side Vancouver properties last year originated in China, a reflection of the spike in Chinese money that has entered Canada since China’s ruthless Xi Jinping took charge three years ago.

There is also the predicament of all those voters who have mortgaged themselves to the hilt on the bet that their houses are going to continue to rise in market value. “The Conservatives want all of this to go away and not be noticed, and not just the Conservatives, either. Nobody wants to say anything that might cause the property bubble to deflate a bit, certainly not before the election,” the veteran diplomat Martin Collacott told me the other day. A former Foreign Affairs director-general for security services and a Chinese-speaking negotiator in the lead-up to Canada’s diplomatic recognition of China in 1970, Collacott says Beijing has got us all over a barrel.