We Don't Have to Trade With China

We traded with China and all we got was this lousy coronavirus, gulaged nationals and the Liberals:

The fraud charges facing Meng in the United States must be hypothetically replicable in Canada with sufficient precision as to warrant Meng’s extradition to face the music in New York. Meng’s lawyers argue that the charges facing Meng in the United States do not meet that standard. The 13 counts against Meng — fraud, wire fraud and conspiracy — as outlined in a warrant issued last August, relate to Huawei’s meticulously documented exertions in end-running U.S. sanctions on Iran, going back more than a decade.

But those sanctions differed from Canada’s Iran sanctions, so it comes down to complicated questions about fraud, and it’s all wonderfully complex and intriguing.

But reasonable people will understand fraud as a vice involving dishonesty, trickery, sleight-of-hand, swindling and related varieties of self-dealing monkey business, and each of these have in their way contaminated the public debates about Meng’s case. Those debates are inextricably bound up in the matter of Beijing’s barbaric retaliatory kidnapping and imprisonment of diplomat-on-leave Michael Kovrig and entrepreneur Michael Spavor, along with a variety of costly trade reprisals and threats of more punishments to come.

The culpability of quite a few yesteryear Liberal party big shots in giving Beijing every impression that these sorts of strong-arm tactics would work in Canada is at issue as well, or at least it should be. We are expected to believe, for instance, that Jean Chrétien, John Manley and Eddie Goldenberg, in relaying Beijing’s ransom demands — the crudest being a “prisoner exchange,” Meng for Kovrig and Spavor — are sage and wizened statesmen whose advice is offered in a public-spirited way, in the national interest. After all, we’re talking about a former prime minister, a former deputy prime minister, and Chrétien’s former chief of staff.

The charade here is that Jean Chrétien has been a senior skid-greaser in the China trade racket ever since he resigned in 2003, and he currently serves as a trusted counsel with Dentons LLP, which serves as the public face of the Chinese corporate law conglomerate otherwise known as Beijing Dacheng. Manley is a senior adviser with Bennett Jones LLP and a director of Telus Corp., which is up to its eyeballs in Huawei gear and is quaking at the thought of Huawei being properly barred from Canada’s 5G internet roll-out on national security grounds. Bennett Jones’ clients roster includes several of Beijing’s ministries, agencies and state-owned enterprises, and the firm’s “co-head of government affairs and public policy practice” is none other than Eddie Goldenberg.

The prisoner-exchange remedy they’ve proposed relies on some heretofore undisclosed assurance from Beijing that indeed the two Mikes would be surrendered if only Prime Minister Justin Trudeau would hornswoggle from Justice Minister David Lametti an unseemly intervention on Meng’s behalf of the sordid kind he failed to procure from Jody Wilson-Raybould in the SNC-Lavalin affair.

The gambit also relies on Canadians believing Beijing’s propaganda contrivance to the effect that U.S. President Donald Trump got us into this mess and Canada is acting as his lickspittle for going along with what is actually a venal Trumpist trade-war subversion of the U.S. justice system to the purpose of injuring the interests of Huawei for purely mercantile reasons.

A crude iteration of this formulation appeared on placards outside Holmes’ courtroom on Monday. “Free Ms. Meng. Equal Justice!” “Bring Michael home! Trump stop bullying us!” Setting aside the question of which of the Michaels the protesters were content to leave locked away in a Chinese dungeon, it turns out that the placard-bearers had no idea what they were doing there. They’d been paid by someone known to them only as “Joey,” or alternatively by “a representative of China.” Some got $100. Others got $150. The play-acting protesters appear to have been convinced they were supposed to be extras in a music video. ...

It was not only because of the opaquely structured firm’s shadowy associations with Beijing’s vast surveillance-and-espionage apparatus that U.S. intelligence agencies, and even Canada’s intelligence agencies, were sounding the alarm. Huawei was skirting sanctions in Iran, drawing Canada into a vortex of possible pain. We were warned, but Ottawa thought it would be clever to take advantage of the United States’ national-security vigilance in curtailing Huawei’s liberties south of the border. So Canada went out of its way, with red carpets and subsidies, to luxuriate in Huawei’s research investments north of the border.

So it takes quite some cheek for Canada to beg American help and to demand solidarity from Canada’s European allies in standing up to Beijing when our own foreign affairs minister, François-Philippe Champagne, refers to the persecution of Kovrig and Spavor as mere “consular cases” that should not interfere with deepening Canada’s trade relationship with China. And Environment and Climate Change Minister Jonathan Wilkinson is pleased to issue all the requisite permits to the China National Offshore Oil Corporation to drill for oil in the Flemish Pass Basin. And the trade delegations come and go, and Trudeau sends warm wishes to the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department front groups in Canada as they celebrate 70 years of Communist rule in China, and on and on.

Why would any country stick its neck out for us if we’re not even willing to stick up for ourselves?

Ask Justin and his coffers.