With Trump gone, it’s time to resolve Meng Wanzhou and bring our Michaels home
It is hoped that the arguments in support of Ottawa’s deep concerns, ignored by Trump, will be positively received by the Biden administration
What are the advantages for Canada of the electoral defeat of the pathological, narcissistic U.S. President Trump, and his replacement by president-elect Biden?
There are many, prominent among them support for the release of the two Canadians, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, both seized and cruelly imprisoned by China in retaliation for Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou’s arrest by the RCMP pursuant to Trump’s extradition demand.
The Trudeau government has so far resisted intervention in the resulting extradition court process, contending that to do so would contravene Canada’s rule of law and our judicial process.
This position ignores provisions in the Extradition Act which permit the Minister of Justice at any time to withdraw the court’s authority to proceed, in which case the court is required to discharge the person in detention.
Moreover, the court case is about to enter its third year of hearings. Perhaps the prime minister, with his repeated concerns for judicial process, should reread the Canadian Senate’s 2017 211-page report, “Delaying Justice is Denying Justice.”
But to get back to the significance of Trump’s electoral defeat. The receipt of the U.S. 2018 extradition demand is said to have posed difficult problems for the Trudeau government.
In 2014, a similar U.S. demand, accepted by Canada, for the extradition of a Chinese resident resulted in the abduction by China of two married Canadian missionaries, the Garretts, the wife for six months and the husband for two years. However, if Canada were to have denied the 2018 U.S. extradition demand, there was a real concern of a broad punitive Trump trade and tariff response. In retrospect, given these conflicting possible outcomes, it is persuasively arguable that the government made the wrong choice.
In any event, the irrational, populist Trump is on the way out. Some of the evidence of his true, offensive and irrational motivation is set out below.
Will the Biden government be open to a reasonable, prompt and humane resolution — namely, the withdrawal of the extradition demand?
On Dec. 11, 2018, Trump told Reuters that he would “certainly intervene” in the Meng case “if I thought that it was necessary to help forge a trade deal with China” — a remarkable admission of the true, impermissible purpose of his extradition demand.
According to a Globe and Mail report, “U.S. officials knew on Nov. 29 that Ms. Meng would be on the Cathy Pacific Flight but waited until Nov. 30 to ask Canada to arrest her when she arrived in Vancouver on Dec. 1 ...” Sandy Garossini, in the National Observer, contends that this timing was deliberately designed to strengthen Trump’s position in trade talks occurring on that very date with China’s President Xi Jinping at a G20 meeting in Buenos Aires.
Garossini, myself and others have also pointed out that the U.S. has traditionally only charged corporate entities, and not individuals for violating its Iran sanctions, and that Meng’s company, Huawei, in accordance with normal practice, should have been charged on its own.
In addition, counsel for Meng have several evidentiary contentions still to be fully presented in the prolonged B.C. Court proceedings including the following:
The allegation that the threehour questioning of Meng by the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), prior to the RCMP intervention without granting her a lawyer, was a denial of her Charter rights.
The assertion that the alleged seizure by the CBSA of Meng’s phones and their passage to the FBI, along with private technical data, was illegal and violated the Extradition Act.
The allegation that her questioning by CBSA and subsequent arrest by the RCMP, fully communicated to the Trump team, was a plan orchestrated by the U.S. to covertly gather evidence in support of the U.S. charges against her, in violation of Meng’s rights.
It is hoped that the arguments in support of Ottawa’s deep concerns, ignored by Trump, will be positively received by the Biden administration. The Canadian objective should be to obtain the withdrawal of the phoney, Trump-inspired chaotic extradition nightmare, putting Canada in a solid, Biden-supported position, to bring the long-suffering Canadian victims home as soon as possible.