Cold Comfort In Small Victories.

In the unraveling of Justin Trudeau's "post-national" Canadian state, a spring in one's step isn't an easy thing to keep. So step lively, people.

This is advice I give myself anyway and I was making the best of it in print today in the National Post and the Ottawa Citizen: At least someone's finally investigating China's election meddling. Subhead: Short of the full public inquiry that's needed, a House of Commons committee continues to ask top security officials tough questions. The answers are revealing.

I make an effort to take heart in the testimony of RCMP commissioner Michael Duheme before the House of Commons Committee on Procedure and House Affairs to the effect that the Mounties are now running 100 foreign-interference investigations, at least two dozen of which are election-related.

Top Mountie Michael Duheme (paraphrased): ‘We had to read about all this in the newspapers. What’s wrong with you people?’

Top marks as well to the Opposition committee members, perhaps especially the bull terrier Michael Cooper, who drew much more out of the multi-portfolio’d Global Affairs deputy minister David Morrison (who was formerly and briefly posted as Trudeau’s part-time temporary National Security Adviser for several months, if you really needed any more evidence of how unseriously Team Trudeau treats national security) than the Liberal government would have wanted.

I got into as much of it as I could in my Postmedia piece, space permitting - do read it all there.

There was a lot to cover in the several hours of proceedings. But there’s a little door that was opened on Tuesday that just might lead through the obstacle course Trudeau and his ministers have laid down against Opposition efforts to get at just what Beijing was up to on the Liberals’ behalf in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections. And also at just what it is the Trudeau government has been taking such extreme measures to hide all this time.

You can watch Cooper pry the door open here. Morrison seems to have confirmed the (former) Global News investigative reporter Sam Cooper’s (too many coopers!) fiercely-denied bombshell report about a Privy Council intelligence memorandum outlining the disbursement of $250,000 from Beijing’s Toronto consulate to a network involved in the campaigns of 11 mostly-Liberal candidates in the 2019 election.

“Independent Special Rapporteur” David Johnston, along with Trudeau and his cabinet and caucus, have insisted that Sam’s report was false.

Morrison, as it happens, ordered up the very memorandum in question. On Tuesday he said it was top secret and could not be shared with the committee, but he also said: “For the record, most it has already been published by Global.” Wait, what?

The Conservatives’ Cooper reads Morrison’s response this way: Justin Trudeau and his crew have repeatedly claimed there is no evidence of a clandestine transfer of funds from Beijing to a network of 11 candidates in 2019.

Morrison “admitted” that this information has been there all along in that memorandum. Therefore, says Cooper: “PMJT has been lying to Canadians for months.”

Which is not implausible.

Sam Cooper, who lit the election-interference fuse that has blown up in Trudeau’s face, is beleagured and embattled, but unbowed. He has left Global News as of this week, but he hasn’t left journalism. He’s striking out on his own.

He’s an old friend and we’ll be having a conversation, in a podcast for paying subscribers, right here in the Real Story newsletter, in a day or two.

Three More Reasons To Whistle Past The Graveyard

Vladimir Kara-Murza, Honorary Canadian

“For the entire day I have been looking for the right words to express my gratitude to everyone involved in this amazing gesture of solidarity and I’m still speechless. My heart is full.”

Those were the words of Evgenia Kara-Murza upon learning that her husband Vladimir was granted honorary Canadian citizenship on Tuesday. The multi-partisan decision in the House and the Senate, led by Ontario Senator Ratna Omidvar, followed on a campaign by the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights to bestow the honour on the Russian human-rights hero.

A journalist, historian and unbelievably courageous politician, Kara-Murza was sentenced to 25 years in prison on April 17 for the crime of treason, arising from his tireless opposition to Vladimir Putin’s barbaric invasion of Ukraine. His honorary Canadian citizenship is a small victory, and tangentially personal - Vladimir is a senior fellow with the Raoul Wallenberg Centre, and so am I, which sounds braggy but it isn’t, honest.

I’ve never had to put up with an ounce of the hardship Vladimir Kara-Murza has had to endure by the ton. I was merely sanctioned and barred from Russia last year. By then, Kara-Murza had already survived two assassination attempts and survived several stints as a political prisoner. Then the whip came down in April. He joins more than 20,000 Russian patriots jailed by the Kremlin since Russia launched its full-scale war on Ukraine in February last year.

Kara-Murza was a central figure in Canada’s adoption of Magnitsky-style sanctions laws. His sentence in April is believed to be the harshest for a political prisoner since the rise of Putin’s gangster state. I wrote about Kara-Murza’s sentencing on the day he was taken away, here: “Russia will be free. Tell everyone.” The Wallenberg Centre’s press release is here. “His wife and children need him free. Russia needs him free. The world needs him free. We won’t stop until he is free.”

A Canadian patriot slams the brakes on Ottawa’s role in a big Beijing bank?

On Wednesday morning, Bob Pickard, the Canadian head of global communications for the Beijing-controlled Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, released a statement that was strangely terse for a big-money public-relations guy:

“As a patriotic Canadian, this was my only course. The Bank is dominated by Communist Party members and also has one of the most toxic cultures imaginable. I don’t believe that my country’s interests are served by its AIIB membership.”

Well, holy cow.

One of the reasons Beijing’s proxies in Canada were mobilized against Erin O’Toole’s Conservatives in the 2021 federal election campaign was O’Toole’s adamant opposition to the Trudeau government’s decision to invest in the AIIB. The sensible view was that throwing in with the AIIB would be slavishly idiotic because the bank would just serve as a front for Xi Jinping’s global debt-trap strategies.

O’Toole vowed to pull Canada out of it. By the AIIB’s reckoning, Canada has already sunk $US995 million into the AIIB since joining in 2018.

After Pickard’s dramatic high jump on Wednesday, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland also had a dramatic thing or two to say.

“The Government of Canada will immediately halt all government led activity at the bank and I instructed the Department of Finance to lead an immediate review of the allegations raised and of Canada’s involvement.”

All options are open and a decision would be coming quickly, Freeland said. “The review I am announcing today is to be undertaken expeditiously and I’m not ruling out any outcomes following its completion.”

Pickard released his initial statement on Twitter, as one does these days. In a follow-up Tweet, he wrote: “The CCP members are feared in the Bank. They are like a third rail that people are afraid to touch. It is a hidden constituency of insiders one is told never to mess with. They are like the hidden real power structure inside the Bank. Time for transparency at AIIB which is misleading its members.”

Speaking with the Globe and Mail, Pickard said: “In the bank, just about every department has a Communist Party member, including my department. Is that the way things should be done in a multilateral institution? They always claim it is apolitical, but inside it’s very political, and Communist Party political.”

As for her own decision, Freeland said: “As the world’s democracies work to de-risk our economies, by limiting our strategic vulnerabilities to authoritarian regimes, we must likewise be clear about the means through which these regimes exercise their influence around the world.”

Well. That’s refreshing. Funny thing about Freeland. As I’ve noticed more than once, on those rare occasions when the Trudeau government does anything useful on the “world stage,” if I must use that pathetic term, Freeland seems to have a hand in it.

Sorry Russia, we’re taking your Antonov and giving it to Ukraine

Only days after Russia invaded Ukraine in February of 2022 a gigantic Antonov N-124, one of the world’s biggest winged objects and one of only 26 still flying after first entering service in the 1980s, arrived at Pearson International Airport. The day the plane landed, Ottawa closed Canada’s skies to Russian aircraft, so the Antonov was stranded. Owned by the since-sanctioned Russian firm Volga-Denpr Airlines, the Antonov has been sitting on the tarmac at Pearson all this time, racking up hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid runway fees so far.

After Trudeau’s surprise trip to Kyiv over the weekend, Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly confirmed that Canada was going to throw in the Antonov as part of the assistance package Trudeau announced in Ukraine. This was no big surprise.

This is Chrystia’s Freeland’s file, and back in April, when he was visiting Ottawa, Ukrainian prime minister Denys Shmyhal expressed his satisfaction with meeting Trudeau and Freeland and moving ahead with new sanctions on Russian entities: “In particular, against Volga-Denpr company. Preparing for the confiscation of the AN-124 plane and other assets of the aggressor in Canada and transfer them to the benefit of Ukraine.”

So no big surprise but it could be a very big deal.

So far, the NATO countries have seized Russian assets, but none have confiscated assets to turn them over to Ukraine. This is a stupid and craven policy that bends a knee to western corporations that have a lot of money at stake. Oh dear, the implications!

A proper policy should be: Too damn bad. This is war.

Sanctions and asset seizures have been conventionally premised on the idea of motivating errant states to correct their behaviour. When you’re dealing with monsters like Vladimir Putin, this premise will make sense only to half-wits and diplomats. Rebuilding Ukraine is going to cost hundreds of billions of dollars. Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government in Kyiv quite rightly expects Russia to pay for its crimes.

The Americans and Europeans may be finally coming around. The White House is fidgety but several European states are eager to get on with it. Roughly $300 billion in Russian Central Bank assets have been frozen by western banks, and the European Union is leaning heavily towards a policy of taking those seized Russian assets and capital, and the loot Russian oligarchs have got tied up in frozen bank accounts, and putting it all to good use.

I’ll believe it when I see it, but there’s a good deal of chatter making the rounds of the usual law firms that the Antonov - even though there’s the business of unpaid fees and the fact the old airplane is likely in need of a costly servicing after sitting for so long - could be a kind of test case.

But this is the least Canada could do.

Starting this week and running to June 23, the NATO countries are currently engaged in the biggest air-deployment exercise in NATO’s history, simulating an attack on a NATO country. Organized by Germany, the exercise involves 25 countries and 10,000 soldiers, sailors and airmen, and 250 aircraft.

Canada isn’t even there.

Here’s my colleague John Ivison in the Post:

“In a shocking and embarrassing development, the Department of National Defence said that “while the Royal Canadian Air Force remains ready to deploy NATO-committed assets as required,” it was unable to accept Germany’s invitation for Canadian aircraft to participate because “many of our aircraft and personnel are currently committed to modernization activities such as the Hornet Extension Project … and training new and existing fighter pilots and technicians as part of our ongoing reconstitution efforts.”

Embarrassing, yes. Shocking. maybe not so much.