Hard lessons for Canada
We’re in this mess because, as Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland has explained, Canada was just following the ‘rule of law’
It’s bad, but quite predictable, that the Chinese government would lash out against Canadian citizens to express its anger about the arrest in Vancouver of a senior executive of Huawei Technologies.
That’s how Beijing rolls: you offend us, we slap you right back, and to heck with the niceties of law or due process or even simple morality. In this case, you grab one of ours and we take two of yours — even if the charges of “endangering China’s national security” are patently ridiculous in the cases of the imprisoned Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor.
Yes, it stings, but not half as much as how Canada is being treated by its alleged friend and ally in this affair, the country on whose behalf our judicial authorities arrested Meng Wanzhou.
We’re in this mess because, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland have exhaustively explained, Canada was just following the “rule of law.” In this case, it was honouring our extradition treaty with the United States, where Meng is to face charges related to violating U.S. sanctions against Iran.
China is furious because one of the top executives of its leading international technology company is being dragged into U.S. courts on charges that are intrinsically political, in that they are bound up with American foreign policy objectives. It sees all this as part and parcel of the worldwide struggle for supremacy in the next generation of communications technology, and there’s lots of evidence that it is right despite all the trappings of legal process wrapped around the extradition request.
So Canada is, dutifully and properly, carrying out its obligations to the United States and getting slapped around by China. And the U.S. government does what, exactly?
Does it send a strong message to China to cut out this judicial kidnapping of Canadian bystanders? Does it make clear that the U.S. and Canada are in this together, and China will suffer if it tries to beat up on the smaller partner?
No, it does not. It’s quite clear that, for the Trump administration, the United States and China have much bigger fish to fry — namely renegotiating their economic relationship in a way that will allow the U.S. president to claim that his country is no longer being ripped off.
This has been one of Donald Trump’s obsessions for decades, and is perhaps his central preoccupation in global affairs. Canada, for him, is a sideshow.
For China, too, the United States is the top priority. China also needs a good deal with the Americans; for all the bigpower bluster put out by the government of President Xi Jinping, the reality is that its economy is slowing and it is more vulnerable than it appears. Canada, then, can just take it, as far as the giants are concerned.
In fact, it’s even worse than that. The extradition request for Meng Wanzhou was suspect right from the start, but Trump removed any doubt about that this week when he casually linked her fate to winning a better trade deal with China.
Officials on both sides of the border immediately started backpedaling, insisting this was just a typical Trump brainfart and U.S.-Canadian “rule of law” would prevail. But how can anyone — especially the Chinese — overlook the fact that this came directly from the president of the United States? Of course it’s a political process, and now no one can pretend it isn’t.
Canada is in an impossible position, squeezed between a country that unapologetically practises naked power politics and another led by an administration willing to do much the same whenever that seems like the best way to accomplish its goals.
The best Canada can do is manage its way through with the least amount of damage. It is silly to pretend, as right-wing commentators have argued, that we’re being mousetrapped because of some failure by the Trudeau government to anticipate and head off either the Chinese reaction or Trump’s inconvenient truth-telling. Not even Trump’s own cabinet can put a leash on him.
Canada is learning a hard lesson: it’s a lonely world when the bully is beating on you, and the people you thought were your friends are nowhere to be seen.