A chance for Ottawa to summon its spine

If China wants a new envoy, it can free our hostages

Poor little Lu Shaye. The notoriously obnoxious Ambassador Extraordinary, and Plenipotentiary of the People’s Republic of China to Canada, is leaving town.

Canada has not ordered Lu to leave, as several former diplomats and academics have advised. But Lu is going, all the same. Beijing is calling him away. News of Lu’s impending departure did not come in the usual fashion, in a formal notice to the office of Global Affairs Canada’s chief of protocol, nor in an official announcement out of the palatial Ottawa embassy of the

People’s Republic on St. Patrick’s Street.

Instead, word came unofficially by way of Ottawa’s diplomatic corps, among whom formal invitations from the Chinese embassy have been circulating this week to attend farewell receptions to mark the close of Lu’s “tour of duty” in Canada. While Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland’s office had not been advised of the development, even by late Tuesday, the Chinese embassy has provided Global Affairs Canada with formal notice that Lu is leaving. And everyone who knows what’s going on is being assiduously closedmouthed about it all, diplomatic sensitivities being what they are at the moment.

This will leave China without an ambassador in Canada for the foreseeable future. Canada is similarly without an ambassador in China. This is where the plot thickens, as we shall see.

The absence of a Chinese ambassador in Canada is neither here nor there, given Beijing’s recent abandonment of civilized diplomacy in favour of spiteful kidnapping, in the case of Canadian diplomat-on-leave Michael Kovrig and entrepreneur Michael Spavor.

According to Ambassador Lu, Canada’s protests about this conduct should be written off as “western egotism and white supremacy.” Then there’s the upgrading of Canadian Robert Schellenberg’s 15-year Chinese prison sentence, on a highly dubious drug-trafficking conviction, to the death penalty. Then there’s the sabotage of trade arrangements, most painfully Beijing’s shredding of $2.7 billion in Canadian canola exports.

All this is in clear retaliation for the December apprehension in Vancouver of Huawei’s chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, on a U.S. Justice Department extradition warrant. Lu has never made any bones about it. Meng is facing 13 criminal charges including bank fraud, obstruction and conspiracy, relating to Huawei’s alleged double-dealing in violation of U.S. sanctions on Iran.

Huawei, China’s “national champion” telecom giant, is a state-owned enterprise in everything but name, and Beijing insists that Canada must grant Huawei full access to Canada’s rollout of fifth-generation (5G) internet connectivity next year. Three former Canadian spy chiefs and Canada’s “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing partners in the U.S., Australia and New Zealand — the Brexit-broken United Kingdom’s decision is still up in the air — have warned that the national security implications are far too dire to let Huawei into Canada’s 5G networks. The Trudeau government’s official position is that it hasn’t made up its mind yet.

Here’s the plot-thickening bit. The reason Canada doesn’t have an ambassador in China at the moment is because Freeland quite properly fired the former Liberal cabinet minister John McCallum in January, after McCallum repeatedly uttered statements that gave the impression that he was serving as China’s ambassador to Canada, rather than the other way around.

Nobody in China is taking Canada’s telephone calls anymore, and it is highly unlikely that China would accept the credentials of a new Canadian ambassador who was not capable of at least giving the impression of being as obsequious as McCallum, who went so far as to publicly plead Meng’s case for her, after being told to shut up, and even after apologizing for being so brazenly unprincipled and out of order.

On Tuesday, in an interview with reporters in Ottawa, Ambassador Lu didn’t mention that he was on his way home. He made it clear that as far as Kovrig and Spavor were concerned — they’re up on concocted espionage charges that carry the death penalty in a judicial system with a 99-per-cent conviction rate — there’s nothing to discuss. Ditto canola. Cased closed. “But the Chinese government is waiting to make a joint effort with the Canadian side and meet each other halfway,” Lu said.

THERE WILL BE THE USUAL COMPRADORS FROM THE CANADA-CHINA TRADE LOBBY WHO WILL HAIL THIS AS PROGRESS.

The obvious meeting point: Beijing accepts the credentials of a Canadian ambassador who can convincingly kowtow in the customarily supine Canadian way, and Ottawa accepts the credentials of a new emissary from the monstrous police state controlled at every level by the thug Xi Jinping. And there will be the usual compradors and palm-greasers from the Canada-China trade lobby who will hail this as progress, as a step in the right direction. Count on it.

Alternatively, Freeland can summon the spine she has shown in dealing with Russia, and advise Beijing thus: Return the two Michaels to us, and you can send another of your creepy emissaries to take up residence over on St. Patrick’s Street, where the annoying, insolent little Lu Shaye used to be.