National Post (National Edition)
‘We’re all hostages now’
In Canada, hostage diplomacy works. It’s exceedingly difficult to reach any other conclusion, with the evidence for that proposition piling up every day. As of May 13, 520 days have passed since Beijing abducted and imprisoned Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor. Well done, China. You’ve bested us. You win.
Or at the very least, the Trudeau government has been bested. The overwhelming majority of Canadians certainly have not been so eager to bow and to scrape and to mind their tone lest they give Chinese President Xi Jinping and his thugs any offence. But around Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet table, and in every impression Canada is giving the rest of the world, that’s exactly how things are to be done in Ottawa.
On Tuesday, the National Research Council, for reasons that were not made quite clear, entered into an agreement, the exact details of which Canadians are apparently unentitled to know, with a Chinese entity known as CanSino Biologics Inc., in a project backed by the Institute of Biotechnology in China’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences. The deal commits Canadian researchers to the development of a vaccine for COVID-19, the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2, the deadly virus that Chinese authorities, by gross negligence and disinformation, in roughly equal measure, unleashed upon the world late last year.
The National Research Council, it might be remembered, was badly hacked in 2014, or in the federal bureaucracy’s lexicon, was made “a victim of Chinese computer network exploitation activities,” and the vandalism ended up costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars to repair. But hey, bygones.
An Angus Reid poll released this week demonstrates once again that Canada is unique in the G7, perhaps even in the G20, in the breadth and depth of the yawning chasm that separates public opinion in the country on one side and, on the other, the slavishness that passes for the government’s “foreign policy” posture in respect of the pampered and corpulent ruling class in Beijing.
Only 14 per cent of Canadians have a favourable view of China. Only 12 per cent of us want closer trade ties with China. Only 14 per cent of us think it would be a good idea to allow Beijing’s “national champion” telecom giant Huawei to get in on Canada’s 5G wireless network. Three out of four poll respondents say human rights and the rule of law, and not trade and investment and that sort of thing, should be the most important element in our dealings with Xi’s regime.
As for the coronavirus catastrophe, 84 per cent of the Angus Reid poll’s respondents say Beijing has been neither transparent nor honest about the “COVID-19 situation” in China, a situation that was allowed to inflict itself on more than four million people around the world, killing at least 293,000 of them, including 5,209 Canadians, as of Wednesday morning.
But Ottawa hasn’t yet found the courage to say no to Huawei, or to join the United States, the European Union, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom in the audacious notion that, you know, maybe there should be an independent inquiry into how the hell this pandemic happened. China is offended by the proposition and opposes it. The World Health Organization, its credibility shot, is also against it. So Trudeau is keeping quiet.
Trudeau has also declined to address the horrifying results of an in-depth investigation Amnesty International carried out in a collaboration with the Canadian Coalition on Human Rights in China that details the “bullying, racist, bigoted” campaign waged by Beijing’s proxies in Canada. The investigation’s report lays out a reign of fear that employs “direct threats of violence, including sexual violence and even death,” targeting mostly Chinese-Canadians involved in pro-democracy activism.
Titled “Harassment & Intimidation of Individuals in Canada Working on China-related Human Rights Concerns,” the report sets out in meticulous detail dozens of instances in which Hong Kong democracy protesters, Tibetans, Uyghur Muslims and Falun Gong practitioners are subjected to surveillance, monitoring, phone hacking, computer hacking, website hacking and violence on campuses, at rallies and at cultural events.
“Individuals responsible for the threats often remain anonymous or invisible,” said Amnesty International’s Alex Neve, “but make it clear that they are strong backers of the Chinese government, often leaving no doubt that they are directed, supported or encouraged by the Chinese government.”
Amnesty International and the Canadian Coalition on Human Rights in China point out that three years ago, a similar report was submitted to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, but since then, conditions have seriously worsened. Canada’s timidity in the face of Beijing’s diplomatic and trade bullying — the abduction of the two Michaels, embargoes on Canadian agricultural products and so on — is not helping. It’s making matters worse. “Chinese state actors have almost certainly become emboldened by the inadequate responses of Canadian officials,” according to the report.
It’s not just Ottawa. To be honest, journalists haven’t always been exactly helpful. It’s not just the lazy habit we’re all guilty of, to some degree, of referring to Beijing’s rampaging as a “diplomatic spat” between Canada and China. And the way we tend to report the case of Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou, who was detained on a U.S. Justice Department extradition request in December 2018, as a matter of poor little Canada getting caught up in a trade war between U.S. President Donald Trump and Xi Jinping.
Report the story that way and you’ll miss the fact that Meng is one of tens of thousands of jet-setters from the Chinese Communist Party’s Princeling caste who have been allowed to make Canada a sort of robber’s roost and real-estate bolthole for their billions of shady dollars (Meng is currently enjoying life in one of her family’s two mansions in Vancouver’s fancy Shaughnessy neighbourhood.)
And Canada isn’t keeping her here against her will. We’d all be happy to get shut of her. She can leave any time she wants. She’ll just have to present herself to U.S. Customs at the Blaine border crossing, south of Vancouver, to face charges that her own lawyers say are eminently beatable.
As for the lives of fear that thousands of decent and upstanding Chinese-Canadians are being required to live in Canada, there is also, it must be admitted, a rather louche tendency among main line journalists to engage in a kind of “both-sidesism,” as if the squalid state of affairs outlined in the Canadian Coalition on Human Rights in China report is some naturally interminable squabble between members of an inscrutable ethnic minority.
It is no such thing. And there is no single ethnic bloc called the “Chinese-Canadian community.” There is rather a confounding and splendid diversity that extends among and between all those comparatively trivial ethnic, racial and gender categories that tend to take up so much bandwidth.
So perhaps the Trudeau government is getting off easy, with its persistent and largely hollow claims of being devoted to the cause of human rights, while making practically no use of itself to that cause at all, because the government’s critics are really not that much better.
It’s not a pleasant thought, but it is hard to avoid it.
We’re all hostages now.
OTTAWA HASN’T YET FOUND THE COURAGE TO SAY NO TO HUAWEI.