With friends like these:
China is putting the boots to Canada—with a little bit of help from some old-guard Liberals
Jean Chrétien and some old-guard Liberals are pushing a problematic plan to resolve the Meng Wanzhou issue
Ever since Beijing erupted in a rage following last December’s detention of Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou on a U.S. warrant in Vancouver, Justin Trudeau’s government has been strangely incoherent in its attempts to explain away the most spectacular rupture in diplomatic relations between Canada and China since the first exchange of ambassadors back in 1970. Well, now we know why. There’s a lot going on in the background that Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland has not been able to reveal in her outright rejections of Liberal party patriarch Jean Chrétien’s formula for capitulating to China. The Chrétien formula is simple: 1. Abdicate from the Canada-U.S. extradition treaty and let Meng walk free. 2. Ask Beijing to be nice to us. 3. See what happens.
Freeland has quite sensibly noted that this would be a “dangerous precedent.” No kidding. What Freeland is dismissing is a proposition that Chrétien has been noisily but privately shopping around ever since Meng was detained. Last month, former Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney, in a move heavily freighted by message control and the floating of propositions, came straight out with it, publicly.
It would run like this: Ottawa sends Chrétien to Beijing, accompanied by his son-in-law André Desmarais, the Power Corporation heir and honorary chairman of the Canada-China Business Council (CCBC). The pair leads a delegation to propose a surrender on Chrétien’s terms, which are also, not coincidentally, China’s terms: Canada releases Meng and Beijing lifts its boot from Canada’s neck.
If Beijing agreed, it would be an offer Trudeau would be damned if he refused.
It’s quite true that Chrétien knows his way
around the parasitical Communist Party elites that have lately decided to scuttle any of the institutions of the global order that would resist Beijing’s efforts to reshape the world in its own image and likeness. Chrétien’s 15 years of service to Chinese and Canadian corporations as a lobbyist, adviser, deal-maker, consultant and errand runner began officially only days after he resigned as prime minister after a decade in office in 2003.
But what Freeland has not been able to say out loud is that sending Chrétien and his cronies from the CCBC as envoys to Beijing would be to surrender Canada’s foreign policy to the same Liberal party old guard that cleared the way for Beijing to put the boots to Canada in the first place. Neither has she been able to disclose that the Prime Minister’s Office has been subjected to sustained backroom browbeating from her party’s oldguarders, all along, to take exactly the course Chrétien is counselling.
This has all been far too awkward for the Trudeau government to come clean about. So instead, we’ve been expected to believe the cover story, the one about how the problem with Beijing’s various shouting ministers and emissaries is that they just don’t understand how Canada’s legal system works. The one about how they simply can’t get their heads around the idea that Trudeau can’t just call up a judge and clear the way for an otherwise untouchable member of the Red Royalty to fly away home to Shenzhen.
But whatever would have made them think such a thing was possible in the first place?
It’s because of what Beijing has been hearing loudly, clearly and consistently since last December, because that’s what Chrétien, former deputy prime minister John Manley, the dependably pro-Beijing think-tanker Wenran Jiang and quite a few others from that crowd have been saying, loudly, clearly and consistently, from the beginning. It’s this: all Trudeau has to do is say the word, and for the first time in its 48 years of existence, the extradition treaty between Canada and the United States can simply be ignored, just like that.
And Canada would be welcomed into China’s camp and turned against the United States at last. This is exactly what Beijing has lately succeeded in doing with fragile democracies around the world with its massive “Belt and Road” investment strategy, by its entrapment of developing countries with debt, and by threats and intimidation and generally pushing its immense weight around.
“I don’t think they know or care what kind of damage they’re doing to this country,” is the way a senior Team Trudeau insider described the Beijing-friendly yesteryear Liberals and their unsolicited interventions. “With what they’ve done, there’s no reason for China to take our protestations seriously.” (Chrétien has not responded to Maclean’s request for a response.) It’s no wonder that Xi Jinping and his ministers are furious that Trudeau hasn’t played along.
It didn’t help matters when U.S. President Donald Trump intimated that he could somehow monkey with the Justice Department charges against Meng if it suited the U.S. side in trade talks with China. The daughter of Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei, Meng is wanted on a U.S. Justice Department warrant from last August, containing 13 counts of bank fraud, wire fraud and conspiracy, all related to an investigation going back several years into Huawei’s alleged sanctionsevading racket in Iran.
A wholly unprecedented presidential scuttling of a Justice Department prosecution to get Meng off the hook is exactly what China has said Trump should do. It’s also exactly what John McCallum, the Chrétien-era cabinet fixture Trudeau appointed ambassador to China, was fired for in January, after loudly hoping Trump would do just that.
Former federal prosecutor Brian Michael told the Financial Times in March that if Trump took the course that Beijing is demanding and McCallum is enthusiastically supporting, “that would create a precedent whereby foreign governments think that criminal prosecutions are open to political interference.” Freeland has mounted the same defence in response to Beijing’s demands that Justice Minister David Lametti simply cancel Meng’s extradition proceedings. “When we think about the implications of setting such a precedent, we could easily find ourselves in a situation where, by acting in a single specific case, we could actually make all Canadians around the world less safe.”
And that’s the ugly, cynical truth of it all. Jean Chrétien and other disco-generation schemers from their own party want Trudeau and Freeland to get Lametti to do for Huawei’s Meng Wanzhou pretty well exactly what his predecessor, Jody Wilson-Raybould, was scandalously punished for refusing to do for SNCLavalin. It’s worth recalling that it was Wilson-Raybould who Manley singled out as the stubborn culprit behind Meng’s predicament. “If there’s a politician that’s on the hook on this,” Manley told the CBC last December, “it’s the attorney general, Jody Wilson-Raybould.” (Wilson-Raybould did not respond to Mac
lean’s request for comment.) It was Manley, too, who blasted the Trudeau government for not having dodged the whole rule-of-law thing to begin with by employing what he called a bit of “creative incompetence.” The idea there was that Canada should have deliberately allowed Meng to quietly slip away from Canada, or otherwise just pretend we’d lost the extradition warrant in the mailroom.
You’d think these big ideas from the Liberal party’s China-trade enthusiasts would
BEIJING HAS COME TO SEE THE LIBERALS AS THE POLITICAL WING OF THE CANADA-CHINA BUSINESS COUNCIL
be dismissed out of hand. And maybe you’d think that with the untold millions Huawei is spending in Canada on public relations efforts—the hiring of Liberal and Conservative insiders as consultants and strategists, the top-dollar presenting sponsorship of Hockey
Night in Canada, the lavish retention of bluechip opinion-moulding firms—that it would be able to do better than the desperate June 24 stunt Meng’s lawyers attempted to pull off in Vancouver.
Their three-page letter begins: “Given recent comments by former prime minister of Canada Jean Chrétien . . . ” And it ends by referring to the credit Chrétien has been allowed to get away with claiming, for standing up to the Americans and keeping Canada out of the war in Iraq. (Spoiler: George W. Bush didn’t even ask Chrétien to join.) It contained no new information and no new legal insight.
You might think that Beijing would know better, but by long and lucrative acquaintance, Beijing has come to see the Liberal Party of Canada as the political wing of the Canada-China Business Council. The CCBC is strewn with Liberal party grandees. Peter Harder, the CCBC’s former president, now leads the government side in the Senate. There are Conservatives involved in this, too. Mulroney, who was tasked with the job of going public with the Chrétien-Desmarais delegation gambit, is perhaps the most illustrious protege of the late Power Corporation elder Paul Desmarais Sr., the CCBC’s founding chairman.
As for Manley, he was also head of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives in 2016 when that blue-ribbon body co-produced a report with the CCBC sternly warning Canada to acquiesce to Beijing’s wishes for a free trade deal, which would have been the first for a G7 country. Manley is currently on the board of Telus, which stands to lose upwards of $1 billion if Huawei gets shut out of Canada’s fifth-generation (5G) internet connectivity rollout, as three former Canadian intelligence chiefs have advised, on national security grounds.
And all this is why it’s no wonder that Beijing has calculated that by the steady application of gangland-style persuasion—the kidnapping of diplomat-on-leave Michael Kovrig and entrepreneur Michael Spavor, the embargo on Canadian canola imports and Canadian meat products and so on—the Trudeau government will be gifted with the political excuse to surrender.
It’s why within a week of Meng’s arrest last December, Chrétien was on the phone to the PMO haranguing anyone who would listen that the extradition proceedings against Meng should be scuttled. It’s bad for business.
Manley has dismissed the case against Meng as “an attempt to get China to buy more soybeans from the Midwestern United States.” Chrétien has explained the warrant along similar lines: Trump tricked us into detaining her. This is hard to square with the fact that Meng’s arrest warrant was issued last August and the charges in the indictment arise from Justice Department investigations going back 12 years.
It’s here that the familiar cover story about insufficiently briefed big shots in Beijing falls completely apart. Xi Jinping is perfectly wellinformed on the subject of judicial independence. He knows exactly what an independent judiciary is. Just this past February, Xi wrote a 5,000-word essay in the Chinese Communist Party’s main theoretical journal, headlined “Strengthening the Party’s Leadership Over the Overall Rule of Law,” in which he makes it plain as day that he fully understands it to be the bedrock of “western constitutionalism.” It’s a defining feature of civilized countries that he insists his state-capitalist regime must never tolerate.
There is one person who could fix the whole thing in an instant, and it’s not Xi or Trump or Trudeau or Freeland or Lametti, and it’s not Chrétien or Desmarais, or Manley or McCallum. It’s Meng Wanzhou.
Meng claims to be innocent on all counts, and Meng’s boss, which is to say her father, says the same, and has gone further about Meng’s prospects: “We will count on the law to address these issues. We believe U.S. laws are open, transparent, fair and just.” This is obviously disingenuous, but it’s also one of the only unambiguously true things that can be said about this whole mess.
Instead of tying up Canadian and U.S. courts with comical lawsuits claiming her various constitutional rights have been stepped upon, all Meng has to do is instruct her lawyers to call up the Canadian Border Services Agency and tell them to come and collect her from her mansion in Vancouver and take her to the Canada-U.S. border so she can turn herself in. If Chrétien and Desmarais and the rest are so good at making things happen in the Canada-China relationship, maybe they might think about figuring out how to get Meng Wanzhou to do just that.