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Glavin: Squeezed by China and Trump, Canada must rewrite foreign policy – fast
The events of the past few days should serve as a bracing warning to our government to overhaul its operating manual with China.
TERRY GLAVIN
Updated: December 13, 2018
Donald Trump is not what you would call a paragon of circumspection or tact at the best of times, so it should perhaps come as no surprise, but the American president has now poured buckets of gasoline on what was already a geopolitical bonfire in the case of Sabrina Meng Wanzhou, the Huawei chief financial officer detained in Vancouver earlier this month at the request of the U.S. Justice Department.
It’s bad enough that Beijing’s macabre propaganda machinery has been churning out the most bloodcurdling threats of punishment and consequence-suffering that Canadians should be expected to endure for our impertinence in merely acting in accordance with the law and abiding by a U.S. extradition request to detain Meng on charges of fraud and evading sanctions in laundering money out of Iran by deception, via Skycomm, a Huawei proxy corporation.
Quite apart from the casual contempt for due process, judicial independence and the rule of law implicit in his remarks on Tuesday, Trump gave every impression that Canada merely acted as an American lickspittle when the Mounties apprehended Meng during a Dec. 1 flight stopover at Vancouver International Airport.
“If I think it’s good for the country, if I think it’s good for what will be certainly the largest trade deal ever made – which is a very important thing – what’s good for national security – I would certainly intervene if I thought it was necessary,” Trump said.
With those words, Trump transformed the U.S. Justice Department’s evidence-rich case against Meng and a highly sensitive but otherwise fairly textbook extradition request into something more like a stack of high-stakes poker chips for him to play in his petty trade talks with Beijing.
Trump has played this game before. In the case against another Chinese telecom giant, ZTE Corp, Trump lifted a seven-year ban on the company after it had pleaded guilty to violating U.S. sanctions law by re-selling American-made parts and software to Iran and North Korea. After paying an $892-million penalty, ZTE was given a reprieve by the White House after President Xi appealed directly to Trump. In exchange for a further $1 billion, and after sloshing around millions of dollars to Washington lobbyists close to Trump, ZTE was rewarded by having its ban lifted.
Sleaziness of this type is America’s business and none of our concern, but Canada did not act on the Justice Department’s extradition request just so that American negotiators could up the ante in quarrels about tariffs, intellectual property and all those other Chinese trade irritants that Trump insists must be removed in order to make America great again.
That’s not what the Canada-U.S. extradition treaty is for.
Never mind that Trump had no idea about the Dec. 1 move to snag Meng. Never mind the State Department’s insistence that there was no connection between the U.S. Justice Department’s extradition request and Trump’s trade feud with Xi. The U.S. Justice Department’s case, which will have to be argued by Canadian government lawyers in extradition proceedings that will play out for months on end, is now tainted.
It was clear from the start that the optics were going to be awkward. Meng was arrested the same day that Trump and Xi were meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Argentina to settle the terms of a 90-day tariff-war truce to allow for trade negotiations.
It was clear, too, that the case in Canada would be burdened by weird legal intricacies. Canada can’t extradite anyone to face charges for a crime that doesn’t have an extremely close parallel in Canadian law. Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould was already going to have to stickhandle the asymmetry between Canada’s relatively parochial and largely useless sanctions laws and the extraterritorial aspects of American far-reaching sanctions laws.
Now, Wilson-Raybould has been put in the position of having to argue that the grubby ulterior motives Trump has slathered all over Meng’s case are wholly immaterial to the matter.
In the meantime, Beijing is turning the screws on Canada. Michael Kovrig, a senior adviser with the International Crisis Group (ICG) and a Canadian diplomat on leave, was nabbed by China’s Ministry of State Security in Beijing on Monday. According to a report in a Beijing newspaper, Kovrig is being investigated by state security officials on charges that he was involved in activities that “harm China’s national security.” China’s Foreign Ministry said earlier that if Kovrig was working for the ICG, he was committing a crime, because the ICG is not registered with the Chinese government.
Kovrig was known to have strong views opposing Huawei’s involvement in the development of fifth-generation internet technologies in western countries. Nobody knew his whereabouts Wednesday. Said Brock University’s Charles Burton, himself a former diplomat in China: “My heart goes out to Mr. Kovrig … I believe that he will be tortured in interrogation.”
As for Meng, who Chinese authorities say Canada “kidnapped,” she was released on a $10-million bail agreement Tuesday after hearings conducted in open court, where she was ably represented by competent counsel. Her family owns two mansions in Vancouver. Her father, Huawei’s president and founder, is a former People’s Liberation Army member. While she awaits her formal extradition hearings, she will be confined to metro Vancouver. She will wear an electronic ankle bracelet, and will be monitored and escorted around by a blue-chip security company whose services she will pay for herself. All that was missing from her bail arrangement was a wine steward and an aromatherapist. She says she looks forward to spending quality time with relatives and reading novels.
Meng’s case hasn’t just revealed Huawei to be the tool of the Chinese oligarchy and the menace to national security that Justin Trudeau’s government has been warned about, time and time again, by a succession of Canadian and American security and intelligence agencies – warnings the government has ignored.
The whole thing has exposed the charade of Canada’s rotten China policy, with its cavalier inattention to the increasingly savage police-state conduct China exhibits at home and abroad, and its absurd pretensions about strengthening and deepening “win-win” relationships in Canada-China trade and diplomacy.
The events of the past few days cannot be undone. They should serve as a bracing lesson, an opportunity to wholly rewrite Canada’s operating manual with China, a good thing, in the long run.
But for now, Canadians are standing alone at the edge of an abyss, with a Chinese noose around our necks and American shivs sticking out of our backs.
https://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/c...p-canada-needs-to-rewrite-foreign-policy-fast
The events of the past few days should serve as a bracing warning to our government to overhaul its operating manual with China.
TERRY GLAVIN
Updated: December 13, 2018
Donald Trump is not what you would call a paragon of circumspection or tact at the best of times, so it should perhaps come as no surprise, but the American president has now poured buckets of gasoline on what was already a geopolitical bonfire in the case of Sabrina Meng Wanzhou, the Huawei chief financial officer detained in Vancouver earlier this month at the request of the U.S. Justice Department.
It’s bad enough that Beijing’s macabre propaganda machinery has been churning out the most bloodcurdling threats of punishment and consequence-suffering that Canadians should be expected to endure for our impertinence in merely acting in accordance with the law and abiding by a U.S. extradition request to detain Meng on charges of fraud and evading sanctions in laundering money out of Iran by deception, via Skycomm, a Huawei proxy corporation.
Quite apart from the casual contempt for due process, judicial independence and the rule of law implicit in his remarks on Tuesday, Trump gave every impression that Canada merely acted as an American lickspittle when the Mounties apprehended Meng during a Dec. 1 flight stopover at Vancouver International Airport.
“If I think it’s good for the country, if I think it’s good for what will be certainly the largest trade deal ever made – which is a very important thing – what’s good for national security – I would certainly intervene if I thought it was necessary,” Trump said.
With those words, Trump transformed the U.S. Justice Department’s evidence-rich case against Meng and a highly sensitive but otherwise fairly textbook extradition request into something more like a stack of high-stakes poker chips for him to play in his petty trade talks with Beijing.
Trump has played this game before. In the case against another Chinese telecom giant, ZTE Corp, Trump lifted a seven-year ban on the company after it had pleaded guilty to violating U.S. sanctions law by re-selling American-made parts and software to Iran and North Korea. After paying an $892-million penalty, ZTE was given a reprieve by the White House after President Xi appealed directly to Trump. In exchange for a further $1 billion, and after sloshing around millions of dollars to Washington lobbyists close to Trump, ZTE was rewarded by having its ban lifted.
Sleaziness of this type is America’s business and none of our concern, but Canada did not act on the Justice Department’s extradition request just so that American negotiators could up the ante in quarrels about tariffs, intellectual property and all those other Chinese trade irritants that Trump insists must be removed in order to make America great again.
That’s not what the Canada-U.S. extradition treaty is for.
Never mind that Trump had no idea about the Dec. 1 move to snag Meng. Never mind the State Department’s insistence that there was no connection between the U.S. Justice Department’s extradition request and Trump’s trade feud with Xi. The U.S. Justice Department’s case, which will have to be argued by Canadian government lawyers in extradition proceedings that will play out for months on end, is now tainted.
It was clear from the start that the optics were going to be awkward. Meng was arrested the same day that Trump and Xi were meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Argentina to settle the terms of a 90-day tariff-war truce to allow for trade negotiations.
It was clear, too, that the case in Canada would be burdened by weird legal intricacies. Canada can’t extradite anyone to face charges for a crime that doesn’t have an extremely close parallel in Canadian law. Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould was already going to have to stickhandle the asymmetry between Canada’s relatively parochial and largely useless sanctions laws and the extraterritorial aspects of American far-reaching sanctions laws.
Now, Wilson-Raybould has been put in the position of having to argue that the grubby ulterior motives Trump has slathered all over Meng’s case are wholly immaterial to the matter.
In the meantime, Beijing is turning the screws on Canada. Michael Kovrig, a senior adviser with the International Crisis Group (ICG) and a Canadian diplomat on leave, was nabbed by China’s Ministry of State Security in Beijing on Monday. According to a report in a Beijing newspaper, Kovrig is being investigated by state security officials on charges that he was involved in activities that “harm China’s national security.” China’s Foreign Ministry said earlier that if Kovrig was working for the ICG, he was committing a crime, because the ICG is not registered with the Chinese government.
Kovrig was known to have strong views opposing Huawei’s involvement in the development of fifth-generation internet technologies in western countries. Nobody knew his whereabouts Wednesday. Said Brock University’s Charles Burton, himself a former diplomat in China: “My heart goes out to Mr. Kovrig … I believe that he will be tortured in interrogation.”
As for Meng, who Chinese authorities say Canada “kidnapped,” she was released on a $10-million bail agreement Tuesday after hearings conducted in open court, where she was ably represented by competent counsel. Her family owns two mansions in Vancouver. Her father, Huawei’s president and founder, is a former People’s Liberation Army member. While she awaits her formal extradition hearings, she will be confined to metro Vancouver. She will wear an electronic ankle bracelet, and will be monitored and escorted around by a blue-chip security company whose services she will pay for herself. All that was missing from her bail arrangement was a wine steward and an aromatherapist. She says she looks forward to spending quality time with relatives and reading novels.
Meng’s case hasn’t just revealed Huawei to be the tool of the Chinese oligarchy and the menace to national security that Justin Trudeau’s government has been warned about, time and time again, by a succession of Canadian and American security and intelligence agencies – warnings the government has ignored.
The whole thing has exposed the charade of Canada’s rotten China policy, with its cavalier inattention to the increasingly savage police-state conduct China exhibits at home and abroad, and its absurd pretensions about strengthening and deepening “win-win” relationships in Canada-China trade and diplomacy.
The events of the past few days cannot be undone. They should serve as a bracing lesson, an opportunity to wholly rewrite Canada’s operating manual with China, a good thing, in the long run.
But for now, Canadians are standing alone at the edge of an abyss, with a Chinese noose around our necks and American shivs sticking out of our backs.
https://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/c...p-canada-needs-to-rewrite-foreign-policy-fast
