Trading With China is Like Trading With a Sociopathic Extortionist

Actually, that's exactly what it's like:

A Canadian man detained in China for over two and a half years has been convicted for espionage by a Chinese court and sentenced to 11 years in prison.

A guilty verdict in the case of Michael Spavor, who was detained by Chinese authorities in 2018, was announced by a local court in the northeastern Chinese city of Dandong on Tuesday.

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I'm sure:

China’s decision to move forward with verdicts in two court cases involving Canadians this week is no coincidence, according to Canada’s Ambassador to China.

 

(Sidebar: this Meng.)

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Oh, you don't say?:

Federal Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole accused Beijing on Tuesday of using the death penalty for political purposes after a Chinese court upheld the sentence of a Canadian sentenced to death in a drug case.

O’Toole also reopened the door to a Canadian boycott of next year’s Winter Olympics in China, warning the Chinese government’s recent actions show Canadians are not safe in the country.

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The Department of Public Works hired offshore consultants to check if federal agencies bought slave-made goods from Asian contractors. The $70,531 study by the University of Nottingham was completed in May but not made public: “I take this situation very seriously.”

 

I'll just leave this right here: 

The British government has sourced PPE from factories in China where hundreds of North Korean women have been secretly working in conditions of modern slavery, according to evidence uncovered by the Guardian.

The Guardian’s findings indicate that hundreds of thousands of protective coveralls ordered for the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) have come from factories using North Korean labour in the Chinese city of Dandong.

The three-month investigation has also found evidence of North Korean labour being used in factories exporting PPE to the US, Italy, Germany, South Africa, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Myanmar.