China, With the Candlestick, In the Conservatory

Justin's undying love for China's basic dictatorship became a joke during the 2015 election. His efforts to replace the US with China as Canada's major trading partner yielded only the deeper-held belief that Justin would gladly shift the global economic dynamic in favour of a country that would later hold two Canadian nationals hostage.

Did one mention how Chinese businessmen lined the coffer of Justin's dad's foundation? Who could forget a thing like that?

China must consider itself lucky that, despite treating Canada like a lap dog, it still can count on its North American vassal state to carry water for it:

Despite mounting evidence in Wuhan – from mass ordering of urns and dramatically heightened incinerator operation – and a report by US intelligence that China was undercounting their Coronavirus infections and deaths, Hajdu defended China’s false numbers ...

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Ms. Hajdu was asked about China’s conduct in the wake of a report from Bloomberg News that said U.S. intelligence officals have told the White house Beijing has concealed the full extent of the coronavirus outbreak in China, where the novel coronavirus first appeared.

The health minister was asked whether she trusts China’s statistics and how Canada can be assured it has accurate pandemic modelling if Beijing has been low-balling its data.

She said Canada has not seen any evidence that China has under-reporting the impact of the virus.

“There is no indication that the data that came out of China in terms of their infection rate, and their death rate, was falsified in any way,” she told reporters at an Ottawa briefing Thursday.

“In fact it you look at the death rate overall in China it’s much higher than the one we’re seeing now.”

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“Your question is feeding into conspiracy theories that many people have been perpetuating on the internet and it’s important to remember that there is no way to beat a global pandemic if we’re not willing to work together as a globe.”

Yes, about that:

China first contacted the World Health Organization about COVID-19 on Dec. 31, 2019, soothingly claiming what we now know is a highly-contagious, potentially deadly coronavirus, was “preventable and controllable.”

But a March 23 reconstruction of events by the National Review — “The Comprehensive Timeline of China’s COVID-19 Lies” — convincingly argues that by the time China finally acknowledged on Jan. 20 that COVID-19 was capable of human-to-human transmission — having previously suppressed growing evidence of this going back to mid-December —  it was already too late to stop its global spread.

A review of cell phone transmissions by the New York Times published March 22 — “How the Virus Got Out” — shows that by Jan. 20, millions of people had already been in and out of the pandemic’s original epicentre in Wuhan, a city of 11 million, where it is believed to have originated in a seafood and live animal market.

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The city began lifting its lockdown on Saturday after two months of mandatory shutdown, with a complete lift of restrictions set for April 8. Funeral homes in Wuhan have been handing out the cremated remains to families every day, but rumors began circulating after one funeral home received two shipments of 5,000 urns over the course of two days, according to photos reported by Chinese media outlet Caixin, which were later censored.

Reports of the funeral’s crematoriums working nonstop also raised questions.

“It can’t be right … because the incinerators have been working round the clock, so how can so few people have died?” a man surnamed Zhang told RFA.

Wuhan residents said the government was paying families 3,000 yuan for “funeral allowances” in exchange for silence.

“There have been a lot of funerals in the past few days, and the authorities are handing out 3,000 yuan in hush money to families who get their loved ones’ remains laid to rest ahead of Qing Ming,” Wuhan resident Chen Yaohui said, in a reference to the traditional grave tending festival on April 5.

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Another popular estimate is based on the cremation capacity of the funeral homes, which run a total of 84 furnaces with a capacity over 24 hours of 1,560 urns city-wide, assuming that one cremation takes one hour.

This calculation results in an estimated 46,800 deaths.

A resident of Hubei province, of which Wuhan is the capital, said most people there now believe that more than 40,000 people died in the city before and during the lockdown.

And if unsubstantiated rebuttals don't work, there's always refusal to answer direct questions:

“Obviously, there’ll be many, many questions as this is all worked through over the coming months and indeed years on how this was handled, what lessons are taken, who did well, who didn’t do as well, and who was perhaps not as forthcoming with the global community as they should have been. Those are questions, though, for future times,” Trudeau said Thursday.

At least the Japanese have the b@lls to call China out:

Even so, use of the term "Wuhan virus" has spread among other politicians, particularly United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and conservative Japanese lawmakers. On his Twitter account, Yamamoto has written of "disaster relief to fight the Wuhan virus," among other mentions. 

Taro Aso, the deputy prime minister and minister of finance who also heads the ruling Liberal Democratic Party's (LDP) Shikokai faction, of which Kono is also a member, has also referred to a "Wuhan virus" in press conferences.

Also:

The British politicians, in particular, were “furious” over China’s organized campaign of misinformation, its alleged attempts to then “exploit the pandemic for economic gains,” and its “atrocious animal rights record.”

It’s loud and angry, whereas Canada’s response to China and the pandemic is largely muted and far from transparent.