Where lies Liberal loyalty: Canada or China?

Reading our extensive China coverage these past days, the mind turned to the ever-relevant question posed by the late George Shultz, Ronald Reagan's secretary of state. After his death earlier this month at the grand age of 100 — he was born when Woodrow Wilson was president — nearly every obituary explained how he would greet new American ambassadors, who had to report to the boss before heading abroad. He would take his new colleague over to a globe and ask: “Which is your country?”

The new ambassador would invariably rotate the globe slowly, perhaps feeling patronized by this elementary geography test, before laying a manicured finger upon, say, South Korea or Kenya.

“No,” Shultz would reply, rotating the globe himself and pointing to the United States. “This is your country.”

Point made. Ambassadors were American representatives to other countries, not other country's representatives to the United States.

Our current federal government got that spectacularly wrong with our former man in Beijing, John McCallum, who famously said upon his appointment as Canadian ambassador to China that his policy was “more, more, more” — whatever China wanted, McCallum wanted more of it.

As between Beijing's interests and Ottawa's interests, McCallum reliably opted for the former. Or more accurately, there was never a conflict between the two, as he saw Canada's interests as facilitating whatever China wanted. After the kidnapping of the Two Michaels, McCallum rolled out his usual apologist and appeasement routine, which was a little too much. Ambassadors are at least supposed to pretend to have an interest in justice for Canadians detained abroad. Justin Trudeau had to fire him.

But the firing of McCallum two years ago was the exception. He was too indiscreet about putting China at the centre of his globe. As for the rest of the government, its conduct this past coronavirus year does invite the question: Which is your country?

Our federal health minister — in pandemic time analogous to a minister of war — took over McCallum's role as chief representative of the Chinese regime to Canada, continually defending how the Chinese communist party handled the pandemic.

Six days after the first coronavirus case arrived in Ontario in January 2020 — a passenger from Wuhan, China — president Donald Trump restricted flights from China to the U.S., barring non-citizens from arrival. That mightily upset China, so Trudeau took China's side, not imposing flight restrictions for another six weeks.

While the American administration was launching Operation Warp Speed to produce a vaccine in less than a year — despite the entire public health bureaucracy saying that it simply could not be done — the federal government's main vaccine strategy was designed to help China portray itself as the solution, not the source, of the global pandemic.

How a joint venture with CanSino, part of the vast apparatus of the Chinese armed forces, would advance Canadian interests was never clear. Sometimes there is no fig leaf large enough to shroud naked appeasement, and so the federal Liberals had to drop that foolish project.

On the matter of allowing Huawei to siphon off Canadian data by providing 5G infrastructure, the federal Liberals were too timid even to follow the lead of our chief allies. Our ambassadors in London and Canberra were likely reminded that their country was China, too. So the decision to exclude Huawei was off-loaded to Canada's own telecommunication companies.

The same is being done on the question of whether Canada should participate, 1936 style, in the Beijing Winter Olympics next February. That decision has been off-loaded to the sports federations, though it is likely that a quiet word will be had about our athletes declining invitations to tour the concentration camps where Muslim minorities are interned.

And so it goes, with Canada buying security equipment for our embassies from China. Why not? If the Canadian ambassador's instructions from Ottawa are to advance Chinese interests, why not allow the Chinese communists to monitor whether those instructions are being followed?

Appeasement of China has been a multi-generational, bipartisan affair in Canada, which reached its nadir during the post-Tiananmen rehabilitation of the Chinese communists by Jean Chrétien. But that same rot is well advanced in the current government, the disease of appeasement being planted at the very beginning.

Peter Harder was appointed head of transition for the Trudeau government after its 2015 election victory. Harder, a former deputy minister of foreign affairs and just about everything else, also served as president of the Canada China Business Council, which serves as a sort of volunteer auxiliary to the Chinese foreign ministry. It was to the CCBC that outgoing Nova Scotia Premier Stephen McNeil recently submitted what must be presumed his job application for some lucrative Chinese lobbying work, grovelling with the best of them. After all, when it comes to kidnapping foreign nationals and covering up a global pandemic, McNeil takes the McCallum line: “Let's go learn!” he enthused.

So back in 2015, as hundreds of new officials were staffing up the new government, China had its man overseeing the whole process. The pandemic policies which have followed are thus no surprise.

Back when Harder was at foreign affairs, any doubt about which country he would have pointed to on that globe?