Canada's anemic response to China

Canada's anemic response to China TERRY GLAVIN  May 22, 2019 

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is at long last talking tough with China, we’re told. Not only that, but there’s a senior Canadian parliamentarian in China, right now, talking tough about the arbitrary imprisonment of diplomat-on-leave Michael Kovrig and entrepreneur Michael Spavor, and about Beijing’s sudden embargo on billions of dollars’ worth of Canadian canola exports.

The evidence for the amusing claims about Trudeau’s tough talk is a single milquetoast discombobulation the prime minister offered to reporters on Tuesday after touring an aluminum plant in Sept-Îles, Que.

“China is playing stronger, making stronger moves than it has before to try and get its own way on the world stage and western countries and democracies around the world are pulling together to point out that this is not something that we need to continue to allow,” he said.

The tough-talking parliamentarian, Rob Oliphant, Liberal MP for Don Valley West, was appointed to serve as Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland’s parliamentary secretary only a couple of weeks ago. Oliphant happens to be among seven members of the 59-member Canada-China Legislative Association (CACN) who are traipsing around Shanghai, Nanjing, Hong Kong and Macao at the moment. It’s a routine junketeering escapade of the sort the ostentatiously useless CACN regularly enjoys in China.

Or perhaps it’s not entirely useless. The CACN is regarded as quite useful by the United Front Work Department, the Chinese Communist Party’s multi-billion-dollar overseas influence-peddling and diaspora-bullying enterprise. CACN members frequently banquet, confer and liaise with the UFWD, and the junkets also allow Canadian parliamentarians to mix and mingle with the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, the rubber-stamp legislature of subservient sweatshop billionaires with which the CACN maintains cordial relations.

At least Oliphant is unlikely to be kidnapped and hustled away in a car with black-tinted windows and ministry of public security licence plates. In any case, Freeland’s Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, won’t even take her calls. Canadian cabinet ministers have been burning up the telephone lines to their counterparts ever since Beijing began its retaliations for the apprehension of the Communist Party’s untouchable Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer for the Chinese telecom giant Huawei, last December. None of them has taken our calls. The CACN’s last guided tour was in January, to no effect, as if it were necessary to say.

It is useful to recall that Wanzhou, wanted by the U.S. Justice Department on several counts of bank fraud and misrepresentation in the course of dodging American sanctions in Iran, is the daughter of Huawei’s big boss, Ren Zhengfei. It should also be remembered that daddy is a ranking Communist Party member and former People’s Liberation Army officer who still manages to pass himself off outside China as a wholly independent corporate chief executive officer who would never dream of complying with the rigid provisions of Chinese law requiring Huawei to collaborate with Beijing’s intelligence agencies, on command. Besides, 99 percent of the holding company that owns Huawei is owned by a “trade union” that does not answer to Huawei workers, but instead reports directly to the Communist Party’s central committee.

Huawei is the “national champion” corporation and cutting-edge high-tech population control and surveillance behemoth that Xi Jinping has assigned to lead Beijing’s technological war with the world’s liberal democracies. And Team Trudeau is still pretending that Huawei is a serious contender for Canada’s rollout of fifth-generation (5G) internet connectivity. This is so, even though three former Canadian intelligence chiefs have called Huawei a national security threat, as have the Americans — Democrat and Republican (long before Donald Trump came along) — the Australians, and intelligence agencies in New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Japan, Taiwan, Poland, and on and on, even Vietnam.

Beijing has been quite clear: Canada must abrogate the terms of the Canada-U.S. extradition treaty, suspend Meng Wanzhou’s court proceedings, allow her to leave her $15-million mansion in Vancouver’s posh Shaughnessy neighbourhood where she’s living while awaiting hearings, and let her return to Shenzhen as she pleases.

continued at https://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/glavin-canadas-anemic-response-to-china