The Canadian consensus on China is breaking down
National Post, 03 July 2020
Canada’s China consensus had a very long roll. But the inertia is no more. Mulroney has seen to that.
I am delighted to offer a correction to my column last week on China. In light of the letter sent by 19 grandees to the prime minister advocating a prisoner swap — Huawei’s Meng Wanzhou for the “two Michaels” — I wrote that former prime ministers Brian Mulroney and Jean Chrétien had already stated that they were in favour of cutting a deal to spring Meng.
To the contrary, Mulroney is against the prisoner swap. In an interview with the Globe and Mail this past week, Mulroney inveighed against the prisoner swap and called for “an immediate and urgent rethink” of Canada’s relationship with the aggressive and lawless Chinese regime. For good measure, Mulroney also came out against permitting Huawei to participate in Canada’s 5G mobile network.
My correction, happily offered, is really a recognition that Mulroney has corrected himself. In June 2019, Mulroney suggested sending Chrétien and André Desmarais of Power Corporation to China, to work out a deal regarding Meng and the two Michaels. Mulroney said this week that he now regrets that suggestion, as he did not know at the time that Chrétien would advocate for a prisoner exchange. Several senior members of the Chrétien government have made that argument in various ways in the last six months.
About the letter from the 19 grandees, I wrote that the subtext was more important than the text. The text called for a prisoner swap, a capitulation to the Chinese taking our citizens hostage. The subtext, I argued, was that leading members of Canada’s foreign policy establishment had changed their line on China. No longer was the argument that engaging China would lead to reform, but rather that the Chinese regime was irreformably thuggish. The Chinese Communists are running a gangster state, and sometimes the best way to deal with gangsters is to give into them.
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