Stand up to China or give in to ‘hostage diplomacy,’ PM told
OTTAWA — The Liberal government faces contradictory calls to either stand up to China or give in to so-called “hostage diplomacy,” with particular pressure coming from stalwarts of former Liberal prime minister Jean Chrétien’s administration.
Allan Rock is the latest former Chrétien-era minister to advocate that the government end extradition proceedings against Meng Wanzhou, in hopes that China will release two Canadians imprisoned arbitrarily in apparent retaliation for the Huawei executive’s arrest in Vancouver in December 2018.
Rock said Wednesday that Chrétien himself supports his initiative.
“I spoke to Chrétien this morning because he called me to say he agreed with me,” Rock said, adding he did not speak to the former prime minister before making his public intervention in the Meng case.
Rock got further backup Wednesday from 19 former politicians and diplomats who wrote Trudeau urging that Meng be freed.
According to the CBC, which obtained the letter, the signatories included Chrétien-era minister Lloyd Axworthy, former Conservative minister Lawrence Cannon and former diplomat Robert Fowler, who was taken hostage in 2008 in Niger.
It was also signed by two former chiefs of staff to Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney — Hugh Segal and Derek Burney, who also once served as Canada’s ambassador to the United States.
A group of senators called on Justin Trudeau’s government to impose sanctions on Chinese officials over China’s treatment of its Muslim minority, its increasing restriction on freedoms in Hong Kong and its arrests of the two
Canadians, Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig.
The 12 senators are mostly Conservatives, but some were appointed on the advice of Liberal prime ministers, including Trudeau. In a letter, the senators said they want the government to use legislation, known as the Sergei Magnitsky Law, that allows it to target the personal finances of foreign officials responsible for violating human rights, freezing assets that are in Canada’s control and forbidding Canadian institutions to do business with them.
But another senator is pushing the government from the other direction. Sen. Yuen Pau Woo, leader of the Independent Senators Group, is urging the government to follow the advice of Rock and former Supreme Court justice Louise Arbour, who argue that Canada’s Extradition Act specifically allows the justice minister to terminate extradition proceedings at any time.
Trudeau and his justice minister, David Lametti, have maintained the minister may intervene only after a court has ruled on the Meng case and that, in the meantime, the rule of law requires that they not interfere in the matter.
“In the interests of the two Michaels, who have been in detention in China for many months now, and in the interests of the broader CanadaChina relationship,” Woo urged the government this week to take Rock’s advice to have “a full debate based on a legitimate foundation of facts, rather than an incantation of rubrics, like ‘rule of law’ and the ‘independence of the courts’ and the ‘sanctity of the judiciary.”’
The government’s representative in the Senate, Sen. Marc Gold, reiterated the government’s contention that “the minister of justice has no direct role to play until after the judicial proceedings at the final stage of the extradition process.”