Don’t expel Chinese ambassador, Ottawa
A Canadian diplomat is still being held hostage by Beijing, but the hostage diplomacy keeps getting worse.
China’s ambassador to Ottawa added public insult to private injury this month. Piling menace onto mendacity, Cong Peiwu suggested hundreds of thousands more of our citizens in Hong Kong could be held hostage to the crisis in our diplomatic relations.
Ottawa responded with yet another diplomatic protest. But the defiant ambassador — barking in the unbridled manner of China’s self-styled “wolf warrior” diplomatic corps — remains unmuzzled and unrepentant.
How can we win the release of the “two Michaels,” Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, who are long-standing victims of China’s retaliation over the extradition case of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou?
Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole is tired of turning the other cheek: Time to expel the impertinent Cong unless he apologizes, the opposition leader insists.
O’Toole is not wrong to lash out at Beijing’s undiplomatic diplomat, who had no right to threaten the security of Canadian citizens in the supposedly autonomous region of Hong Kong. Cong warned against criticism of China’s security crackdown “if the Canadian side really cares about the stability and prosperity in Hong Kong and really cares about the good health and safety of those 300,000 Canadian passport holders in Hong Kong.”
Good on O’Toole for pushing back, sending a message that
Canadians won’t countenance bullying. As long as we understand that it is hollow rhetoric, an empty threat that would only set us back if ever carried out.
Declaring China’s ambassador persona non grata would assuredly trigger a reciprocal expulsion of Canada’s ambassador to Beijing. There is no good time to be without ambassadors in either embassy, but this is the worst of times — with Canadians unjustly incarcerated — to surrender consular access, and access to China’s opaque power structure.
Diplomatic relations are not about friendly relations. Recognition of a regime does not confer legitimacy, and communication does not imply comity. Flailing and fulminating will not advance our interests. And make no mistake, we have important interests at stake — national and individual, consular and commercial.
We must learn from the misjudgment of an earlier Conservative government under then-PM Stephen Harper, which made a show of rupturing all relations with Iran and rescinding any recognition of the regime. Much like U.S. President Donald Trump’s ill-conceived ripping up of an anti-nuclear accord negotiated by his predecessor, Barack Obama, the Harper Conservatives in power played domestic politics at the expense of international diplomacy.
And so when 55 Canadian citizens were killed by Iranian missiles that brought down a Ukrainian airliner near Tehran’s airport, Ottawa was left in the lurch. Our government scrambled to provide consular services to grieving families, and lacked the full diplomatic levers to pressure the Iranian regime into complying with its civil aviation obligations.
That’s precisely the trap we should avoid with China today. Goading the government into going further is a dead end.
China’s ambassador was summoned for a dressing down “to make clear in no uncertain terms that Canada will always stand up for human rights and the rights of Canadians around the world,” Foreign Affairs Minister FrançoisPhilippe Champagne said this month.
Our UN ambassador, Bob Rae, added that Canada “shall never forget” Beijing’s hostage diplomacy.
To be clear, there is much to be said for saying what needs to be said — both by the government, the opposition and Canadians at large. But closing the door to diplomatic ties is a mistake we cannot afford to repeat.
That doesn’t mean Canada must limit itself to rhetoric, just that we need to be realistic — about what works, and what doesn’t, when dealing with a bully that is not going to retreat anytime soon. Over time, China may come to its senses, as it comes to understand the enormous reputational damage in a world where soft power and economic co-operation are still important.
Other democracies have also experienced China’s bully diplomacy — notably Sweden, India, Taiwan, Australia, the U.S. and the U.K. — representing an influential and growing bloc of countries that can resist Beijing’s tactics if we remain united, rather than reacting with unco-ordinated ripostes. The election of a new U.S. president may also prompt Beijing to reconsider its selfdestructive tactics and press the reset button.
The latest public opinion survey shows that 73 per cent of Canadians now hold an unfavourable view of China, and the trend line is inexorably negative. Little wonder that officials at the Ontario legislature scrambled to cancel a flag-raising scheduled for China’s National Day on Oct. 1, and that Ottawa city hall has also banned the Chinese flag, depriving Beijing of the international respectability it has long craved.
Many of the most savvy Chinese diplomats that I encountered as an Asia-based foreign correspondent (and also here in Toronto) understood only too well the limits of raw power and rhetorical bluster. China’s leadership needs to keep hearing that message, which is why we need to keep the messengers in place — on both sides of the diplomatic divide — while forging an alliance with like-minded countries that can act as a force-multiplier.
Shooting China’s undiplomatic messenger won’t ensure our message is sent — let alone received — and would only compound the misery of hostage diplomacy.