We Don't Have to Trade With China

 An argument against being the vassal state of a hideous, totalitarian, racist state of Marxist kleptocrats:

The Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) “collaborated” with the Chinese military on coronavirus experiments in the years leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a report from the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) released Friday.

The WIV provided financial support and its staff conducted experiments from 2017 to 2019 to improve China’s understanding of viruses “for [the] defensive and biosecurity needs of the military,” according to the report. However, coronaviruses WIV researchers and People’s Liberation Army (PLA)-associated scientists worked on were unlikely to have been the cause of COVID-19, DNI determined.

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A senator who threatened to sue Canadian media over China coverage took more state-sponsored trips to the People’s Republic than any other parliamentarian, records show. Senator Victor Oh (Ont.), a Mississauga developer, accepted six junkets at China’s expense to promote trade and “cultural exchanges.”

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Immigrants taking the citizenship oath at federal ceremonies receive as keepsakes a maple leaf pin made in China, records show. The Department of Immigration last year ordered a quarter-million pins from a Chinese vendor: “This is our national symbol.”

(Sidebar: did they actually show up, or were they absent because of more pressing things than a citizenship ceremony?)

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An inquiry, everyone knows, will be an utter waste of time and money.

Regime change or get used to living on your knees:

The government’s fixer, Dominic LeBlanc, has been drafted in to retrieve another Charlie Foxtrot situation and says he has asked the opposition parties to come up with potential names to lead an inquiry and its terms of reference.

Those talks are said to be close to completion, with the government having accepted in principle that a public inquiry is the only way forward.

But the opposition should be en garde. For a government that says it has nothing to hide, this government is acting as if it absolutely has something to hide.

When Justin Trudeau announced his intention to appoint a special rapporteur in late March, he also asked two (semi) independent committees to conduct their own investigations — the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP) and the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency (NSIRA).

The former is a committee of parliamentarians; the latter a panel of experts, mainly law professors. Both are nominally independent but report to the prime minister and the relevant ministers, rather than to Parliament. Both are more focused on national security accountability and compliance by government departments than on what the Chinese are up to in Canada.

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Yet, both have a high level of security clearance and could provide useful information to Canadians, if given the chance.

But this is the point where people should ignore Trudeau’s honeyed words and focus on what his government is actually doing.

When he asked the two committees to look into foreign interference, he promised transparent investigations. He said he spoke to the chairs of NSICOP (David McGuinty) and NSIRA (Marie Deschamps) and “underscored that Canadians need to have faith in their institutions and deserve answers and transparency.”

Both chairs have been pushing the government to allow their committees to read the same confidential documents that Johnston reviewed to write his first report in May.

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The government has jealously guarded documents deemed to be “cabinet confidences” — namely, the record of cabinet discussions that in the Westminster system are deemed top secret.

Last fall, NSICOP wrote to the prime minister complaining that its previous investigations have been hamstrung by lack of access to cabinet documents.

McGuinty told the Senate defence committee that an overhaul of the legislation governing his committee is needed to allow it unfettered access if it is to fulfill its mandate.

But it was only after Johnston’s first report landed in late May, and the special rapporteur recommended that all documents provided to him also be made available to the two committees, that the government agreed to waive the ban on cabinet documents.

(Sidebar: this rapporteur.)

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The reluctance to be “open by default,” as per the Liberal election promise, is apparent in the very unusual move taken by NSIRA chair Marie Deschamps this week. She wrote to the prime minister, complaining that only a “limited number of documents” have been released to her panel.

“In order to ensure the integrity of our review and not limit or influence our evidence base, NSIRA must have access to all documents contained in any class of documents provided, rather than a subset of those documents,” she wrote.

From the outset, Trudeau and his ministers have emphasized how much Canadians deserve answers and transparency.

Yet, from day one, the government has appeared to be running interference, thereby stoking suspicions about what it is hiding.

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In the House of Commons during Question Period, the government has refused to say who received the memo. At committee meetings studying China’s interference, the government has been less than forthcoming with some, such as Morrison, admitting they received the memo but at other times, refusing to say who else received it.

The memo, titled “PRC Foreign Interference in Canada: a Critical National Security Threat,” should have set off alarm bells just by the title alone. The contents, stating plainly that the People’s Republic of China, PRC, was targeting MPs and the families of MPs seen as hostile to China should have woken someone up in sleepy Ottawa, but it didn’t happen.

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Bill Blair, then Canada’s public safety minister, has said he didn’t see the memo. He’s had many explanations, none of them satisfactory, on why he didn’t see it, and the only logical conclusion is that he’s bad at his job. Despite Katie Telford, Justin Trudeau’s chief of staff, stating that Trudeau reads every security briefing, he claims never to have seen it.

The memo, issued a little over three weeks before the Trudeau Liberals called the 2021 election, had to have been seen by someone. The public safety minister’s chief of staff or someone in his office must have seen the memo before choosing not to do anything.

In early May, The Toronto Sun submitted requests under Canada’s Access to Information Act to obtain copies of the tracking records for the memo. It’s customary for intelligence memos such as this to be tracked, so the government can keep records of who has received the information.

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Despite asking the Privy Council Office and Public Safety for the tracking records, both replied that they couldn’t find anything.