Where lies Liberal loyalty: Canada or China?

National Post, 18 February 2021

The rot of appeasement that reached its nadir during the Chrétien years is well-advanced within the current federal government.

Reading our extensive China coverage these past days, the mind turned to the ever-relevant question posed by the late George Shultz, Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state.

After his death earlier this month at the grand age of 100 — he was born when Woodrow Wilson was president — nearly every obituary explained how he would greet new American ambassadors, who had to report to the boss before heading abroad. He would take his new colleague over to a globe and ask: “Which is your country?”

The new ambassador would invariably rotate the globe slowly, perhaps feeling patronized by this elementary geography test, before laying a manicured finger upon, say, South Korea or Kenya.

“No,” Shultz would reply, rotating the globe himself and pointing to the United States. “This is your country.”

Point made. Ambassadors were American representatives to other countries, not other country’s representatives to the United States.

Our current federal government got that spectacularly wrong with our former man in Beijing, John McCallum, who famously said upon his appointment as Canadian ambassador to China that his policy was “more, more, more” — whatever China wanted, McCallum wanted more of it.

As between Beijing’s interests and Ottawa’s interests, McCallum reliably opted for the former. Or more accurately, there was never a conflict between the two, as he saw Canada’s interests as facilitating whatever China wanted. After the kidnapping of the Two Michaels, McCallum rolled out his usual apologist and appeasement routine, which was a little too much. Ambassadors are at least supposed to pretend to have an interest in justice for Canadians detained abroad. Justin Trudeau had to fire him.

But the firing of McCallum two years ago was the exception. He was too indiscreet about putting China at the centre of his globe. As for the rest of the government, its conduct this past coronavirus year does invite the question: Which is your country?

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