Weekend Newsletter Special: The Comprador in the Conservative leadership race keeps digging. Here's the bedrock Jean Charest is about to hit.
Weekend Newsletter Special: The Comprador in the Conservative leadership race keeps digging. Here's the bedrock Jean Charest is about to hit.
I've done some digging of my own. It turns out the whole thing is greasier than I thought, and I thought it was pretty greasy to begin with. . .
Subscribers to this newsletter will know from the Real Story of a couple weeks ago that on the evening of March 10 in Calgary, when the party’s Laurentian gerontocracy officially ushered him into the Conservative leadership race, the former Quebec premier Jean Charest told quite a lot less than the whole truth when reporters questioned him about how he’s been earning a living lately.
In that newsletter I pointed to a series of blank pages in the curriculum vitae Charest presented to reporters at the Wild Rose Brewery that night. Specifically, what was missing was the lucrative role Charest played for Huawei Technologies Company, Xi Jinping’s “national champion” telecommunications giant, as a navigator and guide through Ottawa’s national-security checkpoints. Huawei’s end goal was its hoped-for central place in Canada’s 5G (fifth-generation) internet-connectivity rollout, a prospect that gives Canada’s intelligence community nightmares.
I can fill in some more of those pages now.
That newsletter set out why this is important - Charest wants to be Canada’s prime minister, remember - and most of the content was for all subscribers and not just paying customers (subscribe, and take out a paid sub, you won’t regret it). What I found most scandalous in Charest’s claim was his boast that he had somehow played a gallant role in the liberation of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor from their Chinese jail cells last year. And what I’ve learned since that newsletter will also be mostly available to this newsletter’s “free” subscribers, but only mostly. So again, buy a sub. It’s only $5 a month, $50 a year. Seriously.
Charest is certainly not alone in contriving melodramatic hogwash out of the whole sordid Meng & the Mikes episode. There’s an entire journalistic sub-genre recounting the derring-do and intrepidness of such useless figures as Dominic Barton, who was Canada’s ambassador to China throughout most of the ordeal. Barton was as much Beijing’s choice as Ottawa’s for the ambassador’s job as was his precedecessor, John McCallum, whose adherence to Beijing’s line and devotion to Meng Wanzhou was so embarrassing he had to be fired.
But Charest’s claims, I mean, holy smokes. In that March 12 newsletter I couldn’t help but point out that the role he scripted for himself was comically absurd on its face, and also - how to put this delicately - wholly unsupported by what any reasonably well-informed person would call “the facts.” So, here we are, and there have been developments, as they say. It turns out that there’s a more to the story, even more than the version Huawei was cornered into reluctantly divulging to Global News’ Alex Boutilier on March 15.
It’s not just that the service Charest and his firm McCarthy Tétrault provided Huawei had nothing to do with the legal antic-making that the global corporation’s chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou was making in her efforts to evade extradition to the United States to face conspiracy and fraud charges relating to a sanctions-evading operation in Iran.
It’s not just that Charest’s work was much more about Huawei’s hopes to persuade the Trudeau government to set aside any worries about being frozen out of the intelligence-sharing networks that come with membership in the “Five Eyes” grouping, along with the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.
It’s that Huawei didn’t even ask for Charest’s legal advice in the matter of Meng Wanzhou’s courtroom strategies, and from what I’ve been able to gather, neither Charest nor anyone on the McCarthy Tétrault team he brought with him provided Huawei with any such thing. That’s not what Huawei brought them in to do, and it’s not what they did.
It’s also that in the generous understandings that Charest set out to procure from Huawei for himself and his McCarthy Tétrault team in the early months of 2019 - a lavish deal that came with an initial retainer in the neighbourhood of $70,000 a month and continued until at least the final weeks of 2021 - Huawei’s interest in “extradition” issues barely warranted a passing reference. It barely rated as an afterthought. Huawei already had a battery of lawyers at Meng’s beck and call anyway.
A clue to this was there all along the composition of the McCarthy Tétrault “team” Charest brought with him. It was, in sum, Jean Charest, and former uber-bureacrat Wayne Wouters, who showed up as McCarthy Tétrault’s “strategic and policy advisor” in 2015 almost immediately after exhausting pretty well all the top jobs in the federal government over a 30-year career span. Secretary of the Treasury Board, Clerk of the Privy Council, and more deputy-minister postings as there are stars in the night sky.
The Team’s on-call auxiliaries: Barry Sookman, the digital technologies brainiac who can talk law and cloud computing in his sleep; Grant Buchanan, whose broadcasting and telecommuication clients have included Beijing’s propaganda channel CCTV, the CBC, the BBC, and the Saudi Communications Commssion; and sanctions law whiz John Boscariol, who possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of trade law, anti-corruption law, economic sanctions, national-security trade measures and defence trade controls. I’ve relied on his expertise myself. He was pitched to Huawei as the team’s extradition-law guy. But even John’s lengthy McCarthy Tétrault resume mentions nothing about extradition law.
It’s pretty clear that the Meng & the Mikes imbroglio was never intended to be Charest’s priority during his service to Huawei, let alone a cunning ploy in some Mission from God Charest had taken on to get the Mikes back home. So let’s watch Charest do some more digging, shall we? Here he is trying to explain himself to the CBC’s Vassy Kapelos on Power & Politics last weekend.
First off, no matter how many telephone calls Charest had with Michael Kovrig’s partner Vina Nadjibullah, and no matter how nice Nadjibullah says he was to her, Charest did absolutely nothing by way of “helping the families bring the two Michaels home.” Zip. Nada.
How the Michaels ended up released by Beijing has been more than adequately explained by Canada’s ambassador to the United States, Kirsten Hillman: “As the resolution for Ms. Meng was heading towards success, the Chinese government made its decision. And its decision was that it was no longer in its interest to continue holding the Michaels, and so they started the process in talking to our officials in Beijing about making arrangements to have the Michaels leave.”
Charest says it's because the Conservative Party’s position is that Huawei's 5G presence would be "a threat to national security" that he now says Huawei’s 5G presence would be a threat to national security. Whatever he really thinks, we’re left to guess, because he says the work he did with Huawei - which was pretty well all about securing Huawei’s presence in Canada’s 5G system - was somehow not working against Canada's national security interests. Also: as prime minister he’d ban Huawei from 5G.
We have a tangled web problem here.
And he still refuses to divulge what it was he was doing for Huawei, exactly. "There's no lawyer who comments on the work they did for one or another client," he told Kapelos. That’s not actually true. In any case, a law degree does not entitle anyone who wants to be Prime Minister to deceive, mislead, or hide what they've been up to in their private business life.
McCarthy Tétrault, meanwhile, told the Journal de Montreal on Thursday that they’re not telling what work Charest did for Huawei, or even whether he did anything for them at all, and won’t say who Charest’s other clients are, or were, either. Charest has more than once boasted that he has clients in China. Now that he’s running for Conservative leader with the hope of eventually become prime minister, he says we’re not allowed to know whatever it was he was doing for whoever those clients were or are.
So I guess it falls to me to tell you what I’ve confirmed: Charest went to Huawei nearly three years ago with a package deal to provide all kinds of buzzwordy “strategic advice” on policy and gladhandling senior public officials and advocacy and intelligence and issues management and schmoozing and weedling with Team Trudeau, everything right up to the edge of outright lobbying.
It was all about Huawei’s zeal to embed itself within Canada’s 5G.
Oh yes, extradition issues too. To the extent that Charest did any work for Huawei that touched on the imprisonment of Kovrig and Spavor, it was in aid of springing Huawei’s Meng Wanzhou, whose detention was the cause of Chinese supreme leader Xi Jinping flying into a rage and making hostages of Kovrig and Spavor in the first place. Huawei’s legal strategy was to delay and stall and keep the pressure on, in the hopes that Team Trudeau would cave, tell the Americans to go pound sand, and let Meng leave her Vancouver mansion for another of her mansions in Shenzhen.
“I never shied away from criticizing the government of China in the last few years no matter what I was doing, and I've done it publicly," Charest told Kapelos. But not only did Charest shy away from it when it really mattered, he served as a megaphone for Beijing’s disinformation and propaganda to the effect that the problem was the Americans, specifically President Donald Trump. “Our policy toward China has been hijacked by Donald Trump,” Charest told a trade panel on November 5, 2019, several months after taking on Huwaei as a big-spending client. “We should not be kowtowing to another government with regard to our relationship with China.”
Meng Wanzhou’s detention was not Trump’s doing, not even close (see the previous newletter about Charest if you don’t believe me), no matter how fashionable it became in Canada to parrot that line. And Charest would have known that at the time. But the dissing of Americans and the yearning for trade pacts with the People’s Republic’s billionaires go way back with Charest.
Throughout his three terms as the Liberal premier of Quebec, Charest couldn’t get enough of China, hosting and leading trade delegations, swanning around with Beijing’s emissaries. He was forever bellyaching that Stephen Harper, the former Conservative prime minister, wasn’t moving fast enough to negotiate trade deals with Xi Jinping’s police state. In 2011, Charest’s Plan Nord, his vision of opening up Quebec’s northern resource wealth to Asian investment, was a forerunner of Prime Minister Justin Tudeau’s big ideas for Canada, five years later. "China will become, as of 2011, our second most valuable economic partner. And that will be the case for the foreseeable future."
Two years ago, when the Globe and Mail first drew attention to his associations with Huawei, Charest was just as tightlipped about what he was up to back then as he has been lately. And McCarthy Tetrault was just as reluctant to discuss Charest’s relationship with Huawei as it is now. And Huwaei wasn’t prepared to admit they even had a relationship with Charest, back then.
When the Journal de Montreal asked Huawei what the former Liberal premier was doing for the telecom giant, exactly, the question had to be put to Huawei’s public-relations chief in Quebec, Sabrina Chartrand - who also happened to be the Quebec Liberal Party’s candidate for the Quebec riding of Groulx in the 2018 election. “It is certain that as a multinational which operates in 170 countries, we retain the services of lawyers and external experts to obtain advice.” That was as far as she would go with the Journal de Montreal. Chartrand is also a senior advisor to the Quebec chapter of the Canada-China Business Council.
Anyway, there are more gory details about all this below the paywall, which starts below this paragraph. Because this edition of The Real Story is a bit of a break from our attention to the catastrophe in Ukraine, and because every time President Volodymyr Zelenskyy asks NATO for help the news media is full to bursting with “Oh no, it’s World War III” scenarios, I have something to disclose below, as I promised in last Thursday’s newsletter, to paying customers. It’s exactly how to know when the world as we know it really is at an end, and where the End Times will kick off, exactly. I’ll provide instructions on how to get there, on foot, as promised, from my ma’s family farm back in County Clare.
The paywall starts here.