The Liberals' "liberal" pretensions

Hanging out with the Ikhwanist extreme right. Stabbing Ukraine in the back. Complicity in Muslim slavery & funding Beijing's genocide deniers in Canada. And you thought the truckers were bad.

Uyghurs undergoing “vocational training” in Xinjiang.

Before we get into it. . . I was away from column duties at the National Post & the Ottawa Citizen for much of April & May to take on two fairly major projects for the Post, The Curious Case of Khaled Barakat and Year of the Graves. I’ve been busy the past few days with what might end up in at least one similarly exhausting effort, which is why you haven’t got a newsletter from me in more than a week, after a spate of newsletters almost every other day.

Not sure if I’m going to need away-time from my column again. I’ll keep you posted. Meantime, here are three newsletters in one.

1. Worried about racist hate and the far right in Canada? Good.

Perhaps it’s true that there are dangerously fewer than six degrees of separation between Conservative leadership contender Pierre Poilievre and certain freakish truckist characters, as Global News’ Rachel Gilmore contends. And maybe the Poilievre campaign goes too far by claiming “Global News is content to be a Liberal mouthpiece.”

But maybe Poilievre is onto something by responding: “No wonder trust in the media is at an all-time low,” because Gilmore’s argument relies unhelpfully on a primary “expert” whose activist organization has been lavished with at least $560,000 from the Trudeau government over the past couple of years. Its latest Heritage Canada project was that “toolkit” for teachers that casts aspersions on the Conservative Party, insinuates that the Red Ensign is a hate symbol and encourages students to beware of certain “problematic” politicians.

In any case, it doesn’t look like there were any major news media on hand at all this past weekend in Toronto where not a single degree of separation distanced Housing, Diversity and Inclusion Minister Ahmed Hussen from an organization whose leaders are openly devoted to the “ideological fusion of Nazism and Islamism” in the political theology of an antisemitic demagogue who was a slobbering admirer of Adolf Hitler.

Say what you like about Poilievre. Here’s Hussen on Sunday:

Ahmed Hussen @HonAhmedHussen

Yesterday, I joined the Muslim community in #Toronto with @MACNational to celebrate Eid al-Adha. To everyone who came out, it was great to see you. #EidMubarak!

I’ll quibble with Hussen’s claim that he “joined with the Muslim community in Toronto” on Saturday because there’s no such thing. There are several major and minor Muslim faith and advocacy organizations in Toronto and across Canada in a magnificent constellation of confessional, ethnic and linguistic diversity. It’s just that for whatever reason, the MAC seems to be a Team Trudeau favorite, having been blessed with more than $3 million in federal “anti-hate,” youth engagement and security funding over the past three years.

Say what you like about the degrees of familiarity separating certain Conservatives from horn-blaring convoy yahoos, but to my knowledge no Conservative candidate has been spending public funds on an organization that brings in preachers to give speeches about how homosexuality is filthy, homosexual acts warrant the death penalty, Christians who protect Jews from murderers are traitors and a man should be permitted to beat his wife.

If you think I’m lathering it on a bit about the MAC leadership’s devotion to the Muslim Brotherhood and its lodestar, Hassan Albanna - who pledged to “continue the struggle” against Jews and Zionism after the fall of the Third Reich, which is exactly what the Muslim Brotherhood is up to even now, via Hamas, the military wing Albanna’s brotherhood founded in Palestine - don’t take my word for it.

The MAC says it “strives to practice Islam as embodied in the Quran and the teachings of the Prophet (peace be upon him) and as understood in its contemporary, comprehensive, and balanced context by the late Imam Hassan Albanna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

There was a time when liberals and the left had no qualms about situating the Ikhwanists (the Brotherhood) on the far right and were under no illusions about whether there was anything “progressive” about Albanna’s political theology. For a magisterial account of the way Albanna’s Nazi-inspired jihadism in the aftermath of the Holocaust ended up preposterously construed by so much of the Euro-American “liberal” establishment as some sort of national-liberation phenomenon, you really must read what Jeffrey Herf has to say.

Herf’s essay might help explain why Team Trudeau sees no problem here and why the “Anti-Hate Network” has raised no alarums about any of this, even though it’s antisemitism, misogyny and homophobia, red in tooth and claw, staring us all straight in the face.

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2. In the global struggle against Uyghur slavery, which side is the Trudeau government on?

We really care a lot about Islamophobia, right? Right?

Xi Jinping’s state-capitalist regime in Beijing is driven by a brutally-enforced official policy of Islamophobia. It’s not some theoretical or “systemic” bug in the system of the sort you hear Liberals banging on about here in Canada. In Xi’s China, Islamophobia is a defining, deliberate, explicit and elaborately rationalized feature of the entire system.

My column last week looked into the Trudeau government’s weird circumlocutions, non-answers and evasions that provide cover for its official indifference to the traffic in slave goods from the occupied territory of Xinjiang. That’s where Beijing has enslaved millions of Uyghurs, Hui, Kazak and other Muslim minorities in forced-labour industrial complexes and prison camps.

Long story short: Canada’s policy response to public outrage about the genocidal persecution of Muslims in China is more or less a consciousness-raising exercise for corporate executives worried about the potential for reputational damage to their brands attending to the possibility of being caught profiting from the lucrative traffic in slave goods.

This suits the Canada-China Business Council just fine. The thing to notice: For decades, the Americans have had laws barring goods made by forced labour from entering the United States. Canada is only now getting around to it, and it’s only because of the renegotiated NAFTA that Ottawa is being forced to at least give the appearance of getting serious. Here’s the Globe and Mail’s Bob Fife on the case last Friday, with US trade Trade Representative Katherine Tai:

Canada has repeatedly been faulted for failing to do anything to stop imports of goods made with forced labour despite the commitment in the renegotiated NAFTA to do so. Unlike the U.S., Canada has yet to stop a single such import since mid-2020, when Ottawa amended the Customs Tariff Act to prohibit forced-labour imports. The Globe has reported that a single shipment of goods impounded by Canadian authorities was later released after the importer successfully challenged the seizure.

A single shipment. Later released. Meanwhile, in just the year from October 2020 to last September, the Americans intercepted more than 1400 shipments of forced-labour imports.

In the U.S., the implementation and enforcement of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) is going to be a mammoth operation, and it’s not going to work without the Trudeau government making a deliberate decision to end Canada’s reputation for profiting from the traffic in slave goods from Xinjiang. The Americans are waiting on some sign from Ottawa that Canada is serious about ensuring that Canada’s markets will no longer accomodate slave goods diverted from U.S. ports.

“. . . Canada, still holding out on a Xinjiang-specific trade act, could make or break the UFLPA, at least in the initial stages, observed Sarah Teich, an international human rights lawyer based in Canada who has flagged the danger of goods banned in the United States simply rerouting via Canada, which has a free trade agreement with Washington.”

That’s the point the NBA star and Uyghur Rights activist Enes Kanter Freedom was making in his appeal to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last month, which the PMO subjected to a runaround as grotesque as the one I had to contend with when trying to get a straight answer to a simple question about it all last week.

Here’s Senator Leo Housakos, who’s been on the case for quite some time now: “Justin Trudeau has ignored my legislation calling for a ban, he’s ignored Enes Freedom’s plea to even consider it, and he’s ignored the irrefutable proof that there’s even a Uyghur genocide taking place. Will our closest ally finally be able to get him to do the right thing?”

Good question. It’s not just that Team Trudeau doesn’t give a damn what I think or what Enes Kanter Freedom thinks or what the Uyghur Rights Action Project or Senator Housakos or the Americans think about Canada’s corporate dealings with the slave empire headquartered in Beijing. It’s that Team Trudeau doesn’t care what Canadians think, or what the rest of the world thinks, either:

A Pew global attitudes survey from two weeks ago, 19 countries, with a median of 79 percent saying China’s contempt for human rights is a “very serious problem.”

Canada’s bloated and deeply-embedded China trade lobby and the Fort Pearson fuerdai are still trying to make a silk purse from the sow’s ear of Trudeau’s fevered China dream, a whole-of-government organizing principle that Trudeau campaigned on when he was running for the Liberal leadership a decade ago. Canada’s new China policy, it turns out (after three years of promises to unveil it) is simply to pretend this is not what’s going on.

Whose mistake was it to provide funds for anti-Uyghur propagandists here in Canada who are central to Beijing’s overseas influence operations? It wasn’t a mistake. It’s policy.

In my column last week I mentioned that I’d been trying unsuccessfully to get an answer from the federal government’s newly-created Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise about a complaint from a coalition of 28 human rights organizations led by the Uyghur Rights Action Project. The complaint involves at least 14 major companies that are using Canada as a dumping ground for goods produced with forced labour in China. It’s been more than a week now, and I still haven’t heard back. But that’s nothing.

For ten years, the Canadian Network on Corporate Accountability lobbied for the creation of a human rights ombudsperson “with real powers to investigate abuses and redress the harms caused by Canadian companies operating abroad.” The Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise was the thing the Trudeau government responded with, in 2018. At the time, Ottawa got great public-relations points for it.

Here’s how it’s going: “Despite its explicit and public commitment, the government subsequently bowed to industry pressure and gutted the office’s powers before it even got off the ground. In April 2019, the government created a powerless advisory post that differed little from the discredited offices that had come before it. . . It remains an ombudsperson in name only, without the independence and powers that are the foundation of an effective office.”

Why is it, exactly, that for all the Liberals’ boasts about their commitment to “‘Environmental, Social and Governance” standards, last month Hong Kong Watch was able to identify significant investments in blacklisted Chinese state operations in Xinjiang, including the Chinese military, by the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Canada’s Civil Service Superannuation Fund, several provincial pension funds and university endowment funds?

Among these investments: several sanctioned companies on the U.S. Entities List and corporations like Zhejiang Dahua Technology and iFlytek, both of which are involved in the ubiquitous surveillance infrastructure in Xinjiang, including technology associated with Xinjiang’s internment camps.

It’s not just that Ottawa is turning a blind eye to the traffic in slave goods in Canada. The CCP Investment Board invests in blacklisted companies in Xinjiang that rely on slave labour to produce goods that are sold into Canadian markets after being turned away from U.S. ports. Blacklocks Reporter revealed Monday that a review of the CPP Investment Board’s filings turned up $4 million worth of shares in China’s Longi Green Energy Technology Company - the world’s largest solar module manufacturer. Longi is deeply implicated in slave labour in Xinjiang.

The CPP Investment Board’s Code of Conduct: “We are honest and transparent and we stick to our word.”

No, you aren’t and you don’t.

“We lead by example and speak up about any conduct we observe that contradicts our principles.”

No, you don’t.

3. A win for the Kremlin, a betrayal of Ukraine.

This indecency can’t be fully understood any other way. Either we’re devoted to Vladimir Putin’s crushing defeat and Ukraine’s total victory or we’re not.

And we’re not, as the Trudeau government made plain over the weekend in deciding that a half-dozen turbines in Montreal for maintenance and repairs by the German firm Siemens will be sent along to Russia, via Germany, on the contested pretext that they’re required to keep natural gas flowing through the Nordstream 1 pipeline from Russia. Western sanctions on Gazprom, replicated by Canada, should have meant the turbines would stay where they are, in Montreal.

Except sanctions, shmanctions, and Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly’s simultaneous announcement of sanctions on 29 individuals and 15 entities at the core of the Kremlin’s vast propaganda apparatus are all well and good, but a deliberate distraction. When a critical decision in liberal democracy’s existential global struggle falls to such soft-palmed statesmen as Germany’s Olaf Scholz and our own Justin Trudeau, you can count on them to pipsqueak. It’s as simple as that. It’s just how they roll.

Germany’s economy minister Robert Habeck told Bloomberg that releasing the turbines “would remove an excuse for Russian President Vladimir Putin to keep the conduit closed. . . . I ask for understanding that we have to take this turbine excuse away from Putin.” The Russians shut down the flow of gas through the pipeline Monday for what is supposed to be scheduled maintenance. Here’s Scholz on the turbines: “It would be good if they would be there, even though they are not necessary.”

I see we’re supposed to take the U.S. State Department’s endorsement of Trudeau’s capitulation as a “diplomatic boost” to Trudeau, rather than as what it is, which is a bluff to give the impression of NATO unity. Even if it weren’t, U.S. President Joe Biden can be and has been, in his way, every bit as duplicitous as Russian mob boss Vladimir Putin.

Conveniently out of the limelight, again, is the Chretien-era fixture Stéphane Dion, Canada’s ambassador to Germany, special envoy to the European Union, and the Russian oligarchy’s best friend in the Anglosphere back when he was foreign minister in Justin Trudeau’s first cabinet. While the European Union was in upheaval in the days following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Dion was hanging out down in Yerevan with bigshots from the only country in the 47-member Council of Europe to support Russia’s bloody invasion.

So count me rather less than enthusiastic and not so gullible as we’re all meant to be about all this. The Ukrainian Canadian Congress wants the House of Commons Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development to immediately reconvene to look into what’s really going on here.

Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson says the turbines were necessary for “Europe’s ability to access reliable and affordable energy as they continue to transition away from Russian oil and gas,” and that without the turbines, “the German economy will suffer very significant hardship.”

I don’t know about this newsletter’s subscribers but I’m a bit more concerned about Ukraine’s suffering. Besides, Wilkinson has had months to put Canada’s natural gas exports on a war footing for Europe, and his government has had several years. Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014.

Here’s the Ukrainian-Canadian Congress CEO and Executive Director, Ihor Michalchyshyn: “This decision by our Government is, in our view, in contravention of the will of Parliament. The House of Commons unanimously concluded that the Russian Federation is committing genocide against the Ukrainian people. The maintenance and return of these turbines to the NS1 pipeline will mean that Russia’s state coffers will receive more European money – thus fuelling Russia’s genocide against Ukraine.

“Moreover, Canada’s Parliament recently adopted legislation that gives the authority to the Government to seize Russian assets in Canada. The ramifications of Canada’s capitulation to Russian ultimatums will be far-reaching and widely felt. A precedent has been set wherein the Russians know that at the first sign of difficulty, our Government will submit to Russian blackmail and energy terrorism.”

What we should all be focused on is the total annihilation of Vladimir Putin’s military & economic power, and Ukraine’s complete and final victory. We should all remember that the NATO capitals’ commitment to the defence of Ukraine is a only a function of the mass outpouring of rage and revulsion among the electorates of the liberal democracies. It’s not because Biden or Trudeau or Britain’s Boris Johnson thought it up by themselves.

The leader of the free world is Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and no one else deserves to command our loyalty against his leadership in Ukraine’s struggle for survival. Not Trudeau, not Biden - no one. And here’s what President Zelenskyy said on Monday:

“If a terrorist state can squeeze out such an exception to sanctions, what exceptions will it want tomorrow or the day after tomorrow? This question is very dangerous. Moreover, it is dangerous not only for Ukraine, but also for all countries of the democratic world.

“The decision on the exception to sanctions will be perceived in Moscow exclusively as a manifestation of weakness. This is their logic. And now, there can be no doubt that Russia will try not just to limit as much as possible, but to completely shut down the supply of gas to Europe at the most acute moment. This is what we need to prepare for now, this is what is being provoked now.”

President Zelensky, in Kyiv. The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry summoned Canada’s ambassador to condemn Canada’s capitulation as “an absolutely unacceptable exception to the sanctions regime against Russia.”

Putin’s slaughter of innocent civilians continued Monday as Russian missiles rained from the skies in Kharkiv, and the districts of Saltivka and Kyiv, and Odesa. Emergency crews on Monday were still pulling people trapped in the rubble of a five-storey apartment building in the town of Chasiv Yar following a Russian missile attack on a residential quarter in the town over the weekend. There are 33 known dead so far. The last body recovered Monday was that of a nine-year old.

In Kharkiv on Monday, six people were killed in Russian rocket attacks on civilian neighbourhoods. Among the dead: a man and his 17-year-old son. They were in the family car, on their way to pick up the boy’s university admission certificate.