Smoke, Mirrors and Baloney in Bali.
The Dear Leader cult around Trudeau is every bit as fervent in its devotions as Donald Trump's MAGA crowd. They'll forget, excuse, rewrite or ignore absolutely anything.
The developments in the China beat have been unfolding at a disorienting pace these past few days so it’s forgiveable that a lot of people who should know better are forgetting how the world ended up in this mess and the role Canada played in making it this way (see Dominic Barton & the Damage Done, parts 1 & 2).
My column in print in the National Post and the Ottawa Citizen today, Xi Jinping takes Justin Trudeau down a peg: Again this week, Canada’s prime minister was reduced to having his ears boxed by the object of his unrequited affections, is mostly about Liberal spin and the Trudeau government’s amazing talent for turning sows’ ears into silk purses.
Sow’s ear: Trudeau is revealed to have covered up a national-security scandal implicating his party’s friends in Beijing and their influence-peddling network in Canada in a federal election interference operation. Silk purse: Headlines like The Guardian’s “Trudeau raises ‘serious concerns’ about Chinese interference in talks with Xi,” the BBC’s “Trudeau accuses China of ‘aggressive’ election interference,” ad nauseum.
Sow’s ear in Bali on Wednesday: The prime minister is reduced to having his ears boxed by Xi Jinping himself for having resorted to a bit of grandstanding to mollify public opinion back in Canada. Silk purse, of sorts, in the Toronto Star: Was Justin Trudeau caught off-guard or doing Canada proud?
Gosh. Who can say?
Most of this newsletter is for everyone but there will be a paywall break down below. So. . .
Anyway, to understand what’s happening in Canada-China relations right now it’s necessary to understand where we are now, exactly, and how we got here. Keeping track of that embarassing trajectory and where it’s put us has been a big part of my job in recent years so forgive me if I insist on drawing attention to certain mileposts.
The abduction of the two Michaels was a really big deal, an abject international humiliation of Beijing’s most supine and accommodating suitor among the governments of the G7. Follow the footprints backwards and you find yourself in a place ten years before Canadians had even heard the name Meng Wanzhou, the Huawei heiress and chief financial officer whose detention on a U.S. Justice Department arrest warrant for fraud and conspiracy was the Canadian impudence that Xi Jinping set out to punish by kidnapping the two Michaels.
And why do you think Xi Jinping figured he could open up a fatal split in the tightest bilateral relationship in the G7, and that Canada would cave and do Beijing’s bidding and throw out our vaunted “rule of law” principles to the advantage of China’s “national champion” telecom giant? Because that’s what former prime minister Jean Chretien and his one-time deputy prime minister John Manley and the sycophantic think-tanker Wenran Jiang and quite a few others said Canada could and should be made to do. To his later regret, former Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney was in on the idea as well.
Ten years ago Meng was the grand dame of the Chinese princeling caste in Metro Vancouver, where she reigned from her opulent Shaughnessy mansion. That caste was the new Liberal Party base that had been encouraged to settle by the tens of thousands in their ill-gotten real estate boltholes in the upscale neighbourhoods of Metro Vancouver and Metro Toronto. They’re well settled now.
And they are everywhere, and they are vocal and shameless. During the Hong Kong solidarity demonstrations across Canada, the South China Morning Post reported that flag-waving pro-Beijing princelings would show up in convoys of honking Ferraris, McLarens, Porsches and Aston Martins. In one incident, Vancouver Police had to close off 10th Avenue and guard the doors of a Chinese church where pro-democracy demonstrators had taken refuge.
They’re now rallying behind a former Hydro Quebec employee facing charges of espionage on China’s behalf. Just pop into the latest little investigation by this newsletter’s friends over at Found in Translation. It’s just a glimpse, but it should make you shudder.
They have friends in high places, and while we’re properly zeroing in on a Beijing-directed interference campaign in the 2019 election, we should never forget that Canadian Hongkongers, pro-democracy Chinese exiles, activists from the old Cantonese communities, Uyghurs and Taiwanese have been the ones who have suffered most from this sort of thing. Amnesty International and the Canadian Coalition on Human Rights in China have worked tirelessly to draw attention to Beijing-directed harassment and intimidation in Canada. They’ve been documenting the way Beijing exerts its influence here “on elected officials, Chinese-Canadian media outlets, social media, and academic institutions.”
They’ve tried to make the Trudeau government pay some attention to the “cyberbullying, death threats, racist insults, and aggressive counter-protests” they’ve had to endure. “Many of these cases are clearly linked, either directly or indirectly, to Chinese state actors,” Amnesty and the Coalition have reported. To little effect.
Ten years ago I was making a nuisance of myself in the Ottawa Citizen and the National Post by pointing out that the Americans weren’t going to put up with Canada’s accommodation of Beijing’s overseas influence and resource-acquisition operations forever.
The Obama administration had just begun an investigation into Huawei’s circumvention of the 2010 U.S. Comprehensive Iran Sanctions law. In Canada, Huawei’s clients included Telus, Bell Canada, Wind Mobile and Sasktel, and among Huawei’s Iranian partners were Zaeim Electronic Industries, which boasted clients in the Khomeinist regime’s defence ministry, the Iranian secret police and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
But we thought we were clever. Ten years ago the former Liberal cabinet minister Martin Cauchon had already anticipated the Trudeau government’s China policy of encouraging Bejing’s investments in Canada. He put it this way: “There is a saying that if you can’t beat them, join them.”
Ten years ago, you should remember, the prime minister was the Conservative Stephen Harper. For calling attention to the ironies in Trudeau’s dressing-down by Xi Jinping in Bali this week I’ve upset quite a mob from Trudeau’s legion of disciples. My offence is I won’t pretend there’s nothing darkly funny in Trudeau purporting to defend Canadian sovereignty to Xi Jinping’s face after having invited and encouraged Beijing’s sordid influences in Canada’s economic and political life at every opportunity and as official policy since 2015, when he settled into the Prime Minister’s Office.
The Tru-Anon script runs the same way, every time. You’re Fox News North, you write for those Conservative Potsmedia rags, and this: “What about FIPA?”
As if FIPA has anything to do with this anyway, it was the investment-protection deal Harper’s diplomats stupidly signed with Xi’s emissaries back then, which the Liberals in fact supported when the NDP and the Greens wanted to back out of it. It doesn’t matter that I’m an equal-opportunity scold, having had a few things to say about Harper’s FIPA deal when he signed it: The Sopranos, with "Chinese characteristics": The pact makes China-trade business executives willing accessories to the beggaring of the Chinese people.
None of that matters to the Trudeau cult. It’s like CNN’s Jake Tapper noticed last year: "Careful for acknowledging facts or Tru-Anon will attack you."
Anyway, the Americans have finally had enough of all this, and that’s what you’ll see if you peer through all the smoke from those headlines about Trudeau purportedly “standing up to China,” and Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland ventriloquizing U.S. Secretary of State Janet Yellen’s remarks about “friend-shoring” critical mineral resources.
A “collision” with the Americans is coming if the Trudeau government persists in its disastrous corporate and diplomatic intimacies with Beijing while expecting business-as-usual access to the American economy and security umbrella. That’s the thing former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Evan Feigenbaum was so candid about in his unreported remarks in Ottawa a couple of weeks back.
“I confidently predict to you that the United States is going to bring the hammer down,” Feigenbaum said, pointing out that the Biden administration has gone so far as to invoke the 1950 Defense Production Act to keep Beijing’s long reach out of North America’s lithium, nickel, manganese, cobalt and graphite resources, for starters. And Congress has set aside $1 billion to that purpose. “It’s going to bring the hammer down and try to coerce compliance on a lot of these controls.”
This is what all the smoke from this week’s headlines is obscuring. It’s about to get really crazy. The spinning is going to make you dizzy.
Here’s why.