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Just because it’s less Hollywood than some of the reporting has made it out to be, doesn’t make it less Orwellian Samantha Hoffman, visiting academic fellow, Mercator Institute for China Studies, Berlin

Michelle Rempel, the federal Conservative Party’s immigration critic, said questions about the potential connection between Sesame Credit and the Chinese state should have given the Canadian government pause.

“This is the wrong message to send,” Rempel said in an interview Tuesday. “At a bare minimum, those questions alone should be a pretty strong indicator to the government to not be using this.”

The move to accept Sesame reports is part of Canada’s push to court Chinese tourists in 2018, which the federal government has proclaimed the Canada-China Year of Tourism. Chinese tourism to Canada has exploded in the past decade, jumping more than 300 per cent since 2008 with nearly 700,000 Chinese tourists visiting last year alone. And the government has pledged to double the number by 2021. Accepting Alipay’s Sesame Credit reports, Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen said in a news release, “will help us achieve that goal by making the application process more convenient.”

The ministry did not directly address the criticism surrounding its decision on Tuesday. Asked whether the decision to accept the reports should be seen as an endorsement of Sesame’s methodology, the ministry said it wasn’t privy to the algorithms that generate the credit scores, adding that its agents were looking at the financial information in the report, and not the scores themselves.

“It is not related to the Chinese government’s social credit plan,” the ministry said in an email, adding it “only uses the financial data in the report needed to process visa applications.”