We Don't Have to Trade With China

Does China still own us?:

The government’s leader in the House of Commons told the Liberal MP spearheading a drive to grant jailed Hong Kong publisher Jimmy Lai honorary citizenship to shelve a motion supporting its award, just before she was about to present it on Wednesday.

Judy Sgro, a veteran Liberal MP, had gained the support of MPs from all parties for a unanimous consent motion raising the plight of Mr. Lai, who has been held in solitary confinement for four and a half years.

Mr. Lai, a British citizen and publisher of the now shuttered pro-democracy Apple Daily newspaper, was arrested in Hong Kong on conspiracy and sedition charges in December, 2020.

The businessman, who has close family and business ties to Canada, has been held in solitary confinement in a maximum-security prison for 4½ years, and denied bail and a trial by jury.

He is on trial for violating a Beijing-imposed national-security law that critics say is emblematic of the erosion of rights and freedoms in the former British colony.

Ms. Sgro said there is support across Parliament to award him honorary citizenship. And she was surprised to be approached by Steven MacKinnon, the government House leader, on Wednesday and told she could not present it.

“I had everybody on side and ready to move forward yesterday at noon. But then somewhere, something went off the rails,” she said on Thursday. “Parliamentarians that have come to me and say, like, what happened? When they came and told me, and you can’t do that. And I said, I’m going to do it anyway. I was furious with them.”

“He was clearly very frustrated with having to come to me and tell me this, because he knew how much I had been working on it,” she said.

Ms. Sgro said she plans to persevere, saying that she had planned for the motion to be passed before the G7 leaders’ summit starting in Alberta this weekend.

Mr. Lai’s lawyers say that granting him honorary citizenship could prove enormously important for Mr. Lai’s case, raising the profile of his case and placing an onus on Canada to help him.

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The former CEO of the Canadian subsidiary of China’s largest bank says he was instructed to “ignore” Canadian law and “circumvent” Canadian regulators, alleging he was fired for not following these directions.

 Lubin Wang, 51, former head of ICBK, the Canadian subsidiary of the state-owned Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), China’s largest bank, filed a lawsuit in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice for wrongful dismissal earlier this year, alleging he was pressured to scale back or abandon efforts to comply with Canadian regulations.

 Wang says his efforts to reform ICBK’s operations to comply with recently adopted Canadian legislation—including the Foreign Influence Transparency and Accountability Act, passed in 2024, and a 2023 law expanding federal oversight of regulated institutions—were met with “opposition and obvious discontent” from senior leadership at ICBC, the bank’s parent company in the People’s Republic of China (PRC).