Canada backs Taiwanese presence at health talks

OTTAWA — Canada has backed an American-led effort to allow Taiwan to be granted observer status at the World Health Organization because of its early success in containing COVID-19.

The move is politically sensitive because China considers Taiwan a breakaway province and views any overture of support as meddling in its internal affairs, and because Canada is in its own dispute with China over what it calls the “arbitrary” imprisonment of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor.

Taiwan is also in the centre of the Trump administration’s dispute with China and the WHO. The U.S. has temporarily halted funding to the organization over its allegedly inadequate assessment of COVID-19’s threat when the novel coronavirus broke out in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

“We believe that Taiwan’s role as a non-state observer in the World Health Assembly meetings is in the interest of the international health community and is important to the global fight against the COVID-19 pandemic,” Foreign Affairs Minister François-Philippe Champagne wrote in an email to the Canadian Press.

“Canada encourages the WHO to engage with experts from Taiwan and to support Taiwan’s meaningful inclusion in global discussions on health.”

Canada approved a verbal demarche to two senior WHO executives during a meeting Thursday that urged them to allow Taiwan to be admitted as an observer to an upcoming meeting because its input would be “meaningful and important.”

A senior government official said the demarche was issued jointly by the Geneva-based ambassadors of Canada, Australia, France, Germany, New Zealand, Britain, Japan and the U.S. The World Health Assembly meets on May 18 in Geneva.

Canada has a “one China policy” that does not recognize Taiwan as a sovereign political entity, although Canada has a cultural and trade relationship with it. —