My Mother The Spy: Not fond of Putin

Bonus: I make more enemies worldwide. And Jean Charest gets away with it again.

First, a little tribute to my own ma on this Mother’s Day evening. She’s 100 years old, she’s still reigning champion (most days, anyway) in trivia contests and spelling bees at the wonderful care home where she holds court and takes visitors when the Covid rules allow. She’s a bit forgetful; short-term memory isn’t what it used to be, but she laughs about that. She’s bright and sparkly as always.

Today she told me what she thought of Vladimir Putin. “A rotter.” She’s quite upset about what she’s hearing out of Ukraine, having played her own part in fighting fascists back in the day. She was one of the “Bletchley girls” associated with Alan Turing’s enigma-code project.

Here’s some brief background from a wee bursary set up in her honour. Here’s a yarn about her exploits. “The U-Boats were sinking all the big ships that America was sending to us with food, ammunition, everything. They were all going to the bottom. We knew we were losing all these ships, but we didn’t know what we were doing was going to help. It did. We knew where the submarines were once we broke the code. We knew where they were going.”

That’s my ma, Eileen Glavin, and she can beat your ma in trivia matches and spelling bees.

Today is also VE Day. Ma’s brother Patrick was only 19 when he was killed fighting the Nazis. It was near Hanover that he fell, only three weeks before VE Day. Broke granddad’s heart, and he moved the family back to Ireland. Ma stayed behind in England on account of a lad she’d met in uniform - my dad, a Corkman who’d crossed the Irish Sea to sign up with Ireland’s ancient enemy to fight Nazis. Going back home after having worn a British uniform wasn’t exactly advisable in those days. He’d been a member of the underground Na Fianna Éireann when he was younger but God help you if you’d been in the regular Irish Army and signed up with the British back then. In De Valera’s Ireland it meant “seven years’ starvation, seven years’ destitution, and to find themselves branded, as far as the State can do so, as pariah dogs, as outcasts, untouchables. . .”

All this is how my crowd ended up in Canada.

Anyway, that victory in Europe has been totally up-ended in Ukraine, and the worldwide war on mothers and on all women and girls continues most savagely in Afghanistan. This week, it’s back to the burqa, thanks to the outside world’s moral slovenliness and the high fashion of “troops out” sensibilities among the rich and famous of the NATO capitals. As of this weekend Afghan women must shroud themselves again, now that they can no longer hold down a job if there’s a man suitable to the work, or go to school beyond the sixth grade, or visit a public park if there are men around, or travel any distance unaccompanied by a male relative. And so on.

I could say Congratulations, this is the peace you wanted to all those “progressive” Americans who demanded that the United States make Pakistan happy by capitulating to the Taliban, abandoning Afghan women to their own devices. But they’re now shouting at one another about who’s to blame for the Roe-vs.-Wade calamity. So I’ll hold my tongue. Apparently we mustn’t “impose our values on another culture” anyway. Also it’s Mother’s Day and I don’t have the time to work up a proper opinion about all that and there have been enough men wading into it already, and in any case I’m away from my usual column-writing duties. And I’m stressed out enough on the second of two special projects that have been taking up my time. A big scary deadline looms.

Also I’m still dealing with the fallout from the first project, which took up the whole front page of last weekend’s National Post with a turn inside to most of Page 8: The curious case of Khaled Barakat. It’s curious because a man the Israelis say is a senior member of the terrorist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine comes and goes as he pleases from Vancouver. And the PFLP “proxy” group he’s so intimately associated with was formally registered as a not-for-profit corporation in Canada only three days after that same outfit, Samidoun, was listed as a terrorist group in its own right by the Israeli authorities. And that’s just where it starts.

The inside story is here, from this very newsletter. Among other things I tried to make plain was why Canada’s Jewish community would be concerned about the sort of bloodcurdling incitements for which the PFLP is known, and where they might lead. It was only a week ago that Hamas leader Yehya Sinwar incited Israel’s Arab minority this way, “get your cleavers, axes or knives ready” to avenge the deranged alarums about Israelis “storming” the Al Aqsa mosque compound on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. On Thursday night, three more Israelis were butchered to death, this time in an axe and knife attack in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish town of Elad. Seven others were injured. That’s 17 “random” murders of Israelis over the past few weeks.

I got into some of the initial fallout from my Post piece along with a great deal of the cloak-and-dagger backstory in last Monday’s newsletter, and since then there have been developments. There’s a story about my story in The Jerusalem Post. B’nai Brith Canada has launched a petition calling on Ottawa to deport Barakat. And Senator Leo Housakos brought it up in the Senate:

Senator Leo Housakos @SenatorHousakos

Today, I asked @SenMarcGold how the Trudeau government can be taken seriously on their pledge to fight #Antisemitism when they allow people like Khaled Barakat to thrive in Canada? WATCH:

Bryan Passifiume’s story about all that was also on the front page of the Post and as you might expect, what Bryan got from the Prime Minister’s Office was no answers and not even an acknowledgement of his questions, just a reference to the Public Safety and Global Affairs ministers’ offices. And then no replies from them, except a referral to the Canada Border Security Agency, which declined comment due to Barakat’s “privacy” rights. But the whole dang story has been reported in this very newsletter so you should subscribe, here, just click.

Speaking of which, newsletter readers may recall that only a couple of weeks ago the Kremlin named me among 61 Canadians, “senior government officials, active and retired military personnel, representatives of the expert community and leading media” on a sanctions blacklist. I’m to be “indefinitely prohibited from entering the Russian Federation.”

Apparently there are also quite a few other people from all over the place who don’t like me very much. It is alleged that there is a Zionist plot afoot, “an intensified campaign by the pro-Israel lobby in Canada to smear Palestinian activists and their supporters.” And it’s all my fault. Or I’m in the middle of it. I’m a terrible person, in any case: “All of this recent hysteria can be traced back to the one article written by Terry Glavin.” The article in question: The Curious Case of Khaled Barakat.

And my goodness, the list of people and organizations that don’t like me is a long one (you can sign the petition if you want):

The Canada Palestine Association-Vancouver, BDS Vancouver-Coast Salish, the (pro-Moscow) Communist Party of Canada, the (pro-Assad) Hamilton Coalition to Stop The War, The (generally pro-war, but never mind) Vancouver Peace Council, the (pro-Maduro) Venezuela Peace and Solidarity Committee, the Toronto Raging Grannies, and so on.

Also, from far away: the Arab Palestinian Cultural Club in Lebanon, the Communist Youth of Sweden, Nevadans for Palestinian Human rights, Las Vegas, the Palestine Solidarity Alliance, South Africa, the Palestinian Union in Latin America, and something called “Peace, Justice, Sustainability NOW” in Florida. And more than 90 individuals, none of whose names ring a bell, unless I missed someone.

I’ll tell you someone who has every right to be displeased with me these days. It’s Jean Charest, the former Conservative cabinet minister, former Liberal premier of Quebec, and current contender for the Conservative Party leadership, which was vacated by Erin O’Toole in some sort of internecine party imbroglio involving the Truckist pandemonium in Ottawa.

Charest was in the news this week because of an all-candidates’ debate in which perhaps the most shouted-about and commented-upon exchange involved frontrunner Pierre Poilievre peppering Charest about how much he was paid for his services to Xi Jinping’s “national champion” global telecommunications giant, Huawei Communications Technologies.

The consensus in polite Conservative opinion seems to be that in doing so, Poilievre was being ungentlemanly and badgering in his tone, as in asking Charest to “come clean” about how much he was paid for his services to Huawei. Poilievre asked him the question “over and over, in broken-record mode,” as the National Post’s John Ivison puts it.

I have no opinion on the subject. You can watch the exchange here. I’ll leave the matter of Conservative debate etiquette to columnists more familiar with the subject, but I will observe that the Conservative gerontocracy will not be pleased with Poilievre no matter what he says. So far as I can gather they all consider Poilievre unelectable in certain necessary Toronto districts, owing to his associations with what I like to call the party’s hillbilly bloc. No offence to hillbillies.

Anyway, the answer to Poilievre’s “how much did you get paid” question, among several other awkard questions, is known to this newsletter’s subscribers, especially to paying customers, who got all the sordid background in this newsletter, and especially in this newsletter, more than a month ago. It was in excess of $70,000 a month. That’s what went to Charest, with some cash going to retired uber-mandarin Wayne Wouters, with a bit of budget thrown in for on-call associates of the firm with which Charest is a senior partner, McCarthy Tétrault. The company is as much a sort of blue-chip consultancy as a law firm, and has all sorts of big-money clients in Xi Jinping’s corporate torture state.

What surprises me, and it takes a lot to surprise me, is that Charest is still getting away with the fiction that he had something to do with freeing “the two Michaels.” That would be Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, the two Canadians the Chinese state held hostage all that time in the expectation that their kidnapping would secure an exchange for Huawei’s on-the-lam sanctions evader, Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou, facing extradition in Vancouver. The strategy failed, despite all the help Beijing got from Canada’s well-to-do “friends of China” crowd.

Charest was banging on like this during that leadersship debate, and he pulls this stunt by pawning off what he calls the “evidence,” a single statement by Kovrig’s ex-wife Vina Nadjibulla. As reported by Ivison: “I am grateful for Mr. Charest’s efforts to find a resolution to Meng Wanzhou’s extradition case and for his solidarity for my advocacy of Michael’s release.”

Well, bully for Charest for making friendly phone calls to Nadjibulla. But nothing Charest did or has claimed to have done had anything to do with the Michaels’ release. Don’t believe me, then listen to Canada’s ambassador to the U.S., Kirsten Hillman. Facts matter, and the facts as I reported them are these: Charest’s deal with Huawei was a function of the company’s determination to embed itself within Canada’s 5G network (see also the Global News report here). Charest’s job was to assist Huawei in the delicate work of navigating around Canada’s national security roadblocks.

Nearly three years ago Charest went to Huawei - it wasn’t the other way around - with a package deal to provide all manner of consultations and issues management and “strategic advice” on the 5G file, interacting with senior public officials and engaging in advocacy and intelligence issues and schmoozing and gladhandling with Team Trudeau.

Charest worked on behalf of Huawei to the purpose of overcoming the hurdles that are supposed to be maintained by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the Commmunications Security Establishment. And he should be at least partly credited, if you’re so inclined, with stunting Canada’s intelligence-sharing relationship with the other partners in the 5 Eyes network - the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.

So, one minute he’s helping Huawei get its way on 5G, the next minute he’s running for the Conservative leadership, and hey presto, he now says Huawei shouldn’t get its way on 5G, because that’s party policy. Amazing. If the Conservatives foreign-influence registry law had ever made its way through Parliament, remember, Charest would have had to register his own name. And now he wants to be Canada’s prime minister. Again: Huawei did not ask for nor rely on Charest’s legal advice in Meng’s case - and certainly didn’t pay Charest (I mean, please) to help “free the two Michaels.” That’s not what Charest was brought in to do, and that’s not what he did.

And no, I am not in the tank for Poilievre or anyone else in the Conservative leadership race. I am neither a “Conservative” nor a “conservative,” no matter the company I am happy to keep around the National Post.

And if you want to put me on your enemies’ list for any of this, take a number. But I’m warning you, you’ll have to answer to my ma.