Trudeau fears fallout from U.S.-China spat

McCallum meets with detained Canadian Kovrig

OTTAWA • Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called China’s seizure of two Canadian citizens unacceptable and said Canada was getting caught in a trade war between two superpowers that would have consequences for the economy.

Meanwhile in China, Canada’s ambassador in Beijing, John McCallum, was granted access to former diplomat Michael Kovrig on Friday, five days after he was detained on charges he was a threat to China’s national security.

Trudeau said he expected China to also give access to entrepreneur Michael Spavor, a self-fashioned “fixer” who has spent decades working in authoritarian states and once sipped ice tea with Kim Jong Un on the North Korean leader’s private yacht.

He, too, has been held since Monday in apparent retaliation for the Canadian arrest of Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei. She was detained on Dec. 1 while switching planes in Vancouver at the request of the United States. She is facing extradition on charges that she and the company breached U.S. sanctions against Iran.

“This is one of the situations you get in when the two largest economies in the world, China and the United States, start picking a fight with each other,” the prime minister said. ”The escalating trade war between them is going to have all sorts of unintended consequences on Canada, potentially on the entire global economy. We’re very worried about that.”

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also urged China on Friday to end the “unlawful detention” of the two Canadians.

“We ask all nations of the world to treat other citizens properly and the detention of these two Canadian citizens in China ought to end,” Pompeo said in Washington, alongside Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland.

Pompeo moved to temper an earlier statement by U.S. Donald Trump this week, who mused he might intervene in the Meng case if it helped him get a trade deal with China. Pompeo said the extradition request for Meng isn’t being used as political leverage in the trade talks with China.

The arrests dominated questions Pompeo and Freeland took after a meeting that also included Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan and U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.

The two foreign ministers tried to distance politics from the extradition process that is now in the Canadian courts. Freeland said the discussions focused on upholding the rule of law, and ensuring Meng’s right to due process is respected and that the ongoing legal process remains free of politics.

“Canada, in detaining Ms. Meng, was not making a political judgment. In Canada there has been, to this point, no political interference in this issue at all. For Canada, this is a question of living up to our international treaty obligations and following the rule of law,” Freeland said. “The extradition process is a criminal-justice process. This is not a tool that should be used for politicized ends.”

During an interview with The Canadian Press, Trudeau said the only way for Canada to see its way through the turbulence is to adhere strictly to the rule of law, and the international institutions that are under threat.

“It’s not about being nice guys, or good guys. It’s about understanding that the rules that we have established as a global community have kept us in an unparalleled era of peace, stability, prosperity, lifting millions upon millions of people around the world out of poverty,” said Trudeau.

He said he’s following the rules of international diplomacy when it comes to freeing the Canadians by staying out of it personally. He said it isn’t in the detainees’ interest for him to personally raise the matter with China’s leaders because if he gets nowhere, all options are lost.

“It’s always easier to keep it from escalating too much by focusing on official-to-official, ambassador-to-ambassador, minister-to-minister, and then once you’ve worked your way through this, you get to a place where it’s leader-to-leader.”

Asked about Kovrig’s condition at her Washington press conference, Freeland declined to comment citing concerns for his privacy but said “we’ve shared with his family details of the meeting.”

Guy Saint-Jacques, a former Canadian ambassador to China who was Kovrig’s boss when he was first secretary at the embassy in Beijing, said Kovrig’s job had involved gathering information on sensitive subjects, like Taiwan and minority groups, subjects that would have attracted the scrutiny of the Chinese authorities.

“The Chinese would’ve been waiting for the right moment to spring,” he said. “The Meng case provided them the perfect opportunity.”

Kovrig, a Toronto native who was living in Hong Kong at the time of his detainment, was working as a senior adviser for the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based research organization.

Saint-Jacques said Kovrig was likely being subjected to psychological pressure, detained in a room with the lights left on 24 hours a day. He said China’s accusation that the crisis group was operating illegally in China could be a precursor to filing espionage charges.

Meanwhile Tourism Minister Melanie Joly announced Friday she won’t go to China on Monday to mark the end of the Canada-China Year of Tourism.

The decision puts the brakes on a major Sino-Canadian initiative meant to deepen ties between the countries.