National Post (National Edition)
Canada humiliates itself again
It is nothing if not rich in irony, this latest dramatic plot twist in the ongoing “world stage” soap opera chronicling the embarrassing ups and downs of the Trudeau government's unrequited affections for Chinese strongman Xi Jinping. Of all people, Taiwan's heroic president, the 64-year-old feminist and liberal Tsai Ing-wen, has been forced to endure the misfortune of being dragged into the script for this week's episode.
Of all people: President Tsai is precisely the kind of dynamic middle-power personality the Trudeau Liberals, if we were to take them at their word about what they claim to stand for, would be falling all over themselves to be seen with. Nevertheless, in the last remaining setting at which Canada can still claim some international prestige — the Halifax International Security Forum (HFX), now in its 11th year — Team Trudeau has beclowned itself again, and this time it's at
President Tsai's expense.
The week began with a report from the impeccably-connected transatlantic news and analysis organization Politico, which has served as an HFX media partner and dialogue host. Canada, it seems, has been more or less blackmailing HFX organizers in an effort to stop the forum from presenting its annual showcase award for “Leadership in Public Service” to Tsai, whose quiet defiance of Beijing has inspired liberal democrats around the world.
Citing multiple sources, Politico reported that Canada has been threatening to pull its annual forum funding if Tsai is presented with the award, named after the late American senator John McCain. And that's why the 2020 winner of the honour has still not been announced. The forum was held “virtually,” last November.
Quizzed on the subject in the House of Commons by Conservative foreign-policy critic Michael Chong, Foreign Affairs Minister Marc Garneau declined to say, either way, preferring instead to repeat the usual empty boasts about his government's devotion to human rights. Questioned in proceedings of the House of Commons Special Committee on Canada-China Relations, Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan denied the Politico report, but in the most absurdly unconvincing way.
It's true that after 11 years of co-funding the annual summit, the Trudeau government has not yet decided whether to continue funding the HFX secretariat after this year, Sajjan confirmed. He then insinuated some kind of bad faith on the part of the forum's secretariat in Washington, D.C. by referring to “former Conservative staffers” who work there. Peter Van Praagh, the forum's founding president, was a policy adviser to Peter MacKay, the Conservative foreign affairs minister at the time the forum was founded in 2009.
It isn't exactly a testament to Canada's standing or integrity that all of this was unfolding against the backdrop of a Canadian Security Intelligence Service report, and a heavily redacted report from the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians, almost simultaneously released. The reports combine to paint a picture of Canada's academic, political and civil institutions as being riddled with foreign influence-pedlars and agents and proxies and hackers. As you might imagine, along with Moscow, Beijing shows up as an especially hyperactive culprit.
The irony of Tsai's conscription into this latest Canadian melodrama is that the former law professor embodies everything that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau would want to be, but isn't. There's clearly a weird resentment of her around the Trudeau cabinet. Without even trying, Tsai has earned precisely the effusive admiration of the world's liberal democracies that Trudeau has so desperately tried and failed to obtain for himself.
One might have thought that Canada should have been loudly rooting for Tsai to be honoured with the McCain prize. Tsai's Democratic Progressive Party is a sister organization of Canada's Liberal party in the Liberal International. She has broken barriers by presiding over the first samesex marriage law in Asia, and by rising from her place as the youngest of 11 children in a working-class family to become the first woman to lead a major Taiwanese political party.
Tsai enjoys relatively stratospheric approval ratings. Her strongest support comes from Taiwan's youthful urban demographics. She has opened up new terrain for Taiwan's indigenous peoples — Tsai herself routinely expresses pride in the indigenous Paiwan people among her ancestors — and she has gone out of her way to welcome refugees from Beijing's rampages in Hong Kong.
Most noticeably in this age of plague, Tsai's government has wrestled COVID-19 to the ground. The pandemic never had a chance in Taiwan. Tsai's government was the first to warn the world that something horrible was happening across the Taiwan Strait in Wuhan. Tsai's early measures and the compassionate discipline she brought to the task of keeping the coronavirus out of her country has kept the toll on her island nation of 23.6 million people to around 1,000 infections, and only 10 deaths.
But Xi's People's Republic refuses to recognize Taiwan's sovereignty — a belligerent imbecility Beijing forces upon Taiwan with increasingly reckless fighter-jet intrusions into Taiwanese airspace. And the reason Beijing can get away with it and Taiwan persists in a kind of diplomatic twilight in the first place lies in the notorious 1970 “Canadian formulation,” and Liberals still brag about it.
Devised by the government of Pierre Trudeau, it was the rhetorical trick that “takes note” of Beijing's illegitimate claims to Taiwan to get the awkwardness out of the way, the diplomatic sleightof-hand that set in motion the long humiliation of official Canada-China relations. It was copied by dozens of similarly weakwilled United Nations member states, and it ultimately provided the mechanism for China's admission to the UN, and Beijing's seat on the UN Security Council, and Taiwan's ouster.
In the way Beijing's Chrétienera ambassador to Canada put it a few years ago: “Canada helped to bring China back to the world community,” and as a consequence, “it can do its part now to bring the world to accept a peacefully rising China.” And that is the task that former prime minister Jean Chrétien turned to with his Team Canada expeditions and post-politics corporate career, rehabilitating Beijing's foreign relations from the doldrums brought about by the Communist Party's Tiananmen massacres of 1989. And it is the task Justin Trudeau threw himself into, as soon as his Liberal team was elected in November 2015.
When Tsai was re-elected in a landslide last year, the leaders of the world's liberal democracies nearly shouted their congratulations to her. Ottawa permitted an official with Canada's trade office in Taipei to notice in a Facebook post that Taiwan had undergone an election of some kind. A few weeks later, after Taiwan had come to Canada's aid with COVID-related shipments of personal protective devices, François-Philippe Champagne, then foreign affairs minister, pointedly refused to offer a word of thanks. He had to be publicly shamed into mentioning the name of Tsai's country out loud.
Tsai has taken the indignity Ottawa has forced her to endure this week in her customary quiet and graceful way. “In line with the shared values of freedom and democracy,” said Taiwan's foreign-affairs spokesperson Joanne Ou, “Taiwan will continue to maintain close contact and cordial ties with the Canadian government, HFX and other friends from all sectors of Canadian society.”
It was a decency and a courtesy Canada does not deserve.
TEAM TRUDEAU HAS BECLOWNED ITSELF AGAIN.