It is inconceivable to me that Chinese activity had any significant influence on a Canadian federal election. This, however, does not mitigate the gravity of the facts that have been revealed about the attempt by the People’s Republic of China to meddle in internal Canadian political matters and, more importantly, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s response to it. Rarely have I witnessed such a prominent officeholder in any serious country flounder around so helplessly. Every sophistry imaginable was thrown out like bursts of antiaircraft fire in response to entirely legitimate demands that the prime minister explain his and his party’s conduct. Early on we got the reflexive answer, like a compulsive tick, that it was a racist question to ask why Trudeau supported a Liberal candidate after being warned about his links to the Chinese government. This was somehow an ethnic slur on Chinese-Canadians. A herniating mass of disquieted reports from responsible Canadian intelligence authorities cannot be dismissed as manifestations of racial prejudice. That response is so contemptible that it raises a serious question about Justin Trudeau’s fitness for high public office, even before we examine the facts of the issue.
Just about as fatuous is another compulsive reflex of the Canadian soft-left, whose pre-emptive evasive methods for dealing with any political question is to drag former U.S. president Donald Trump into it. Any question about the legitimacy of an election is portrayed as a replication of Trump’s complaints about the 2020 American presidential election. None of what happened in the United States in 2020 has the slightest relevance to the issue of Chinese official intervention in Canadian elections and the invocation of Trump is just a gigantic red herring that’s so absurd, it is a po-faced confession of the Liberals’ inability to explain their conduct.
As these concerns about China were emerging through leaks from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service to Global News and the Globe and Mail, there were the usual opening gambits that the allegations were unfounded. No alleged statements of fact were specifically refuted, but the entire line of questioning was declared to be erroneous, scurrilous, malicious and probably defamatory, but none was specifically refuted and no differing official versions of these events have ever been given. As the credibility gap widened and the tenor of media and opposition questions became more accusatory, the improvised responses became even more nonsensical. At one point, Justin Trudeau inflicted upon his questioner an orotund confection of pious claptrap about how hard his government worked to free the two Michaels, who were arbitrarily detained by the Chinese in reprisal for our detention of a Huawei executive at the request of the United States government under our extradition treaty with that country (which we should cancel, because the American criminal justice system has almost as little integrity as that of the People’s Republic of China, and we shouldn’t be sending anyone into it). The reference to that Huawei incident does, however, bring to mind the fact that the immense Chinese telecom giant was largely built upon one of the most colossal acts of industrial espionage in all of history, which helped drive one of our greatest Canadian companies, Nortel, into insolvency. Ever the chumps for the delectation of the Chinese Communists, we falsely prosecuted the officers of Nortel and did nothing in retaliation to the Chinese. It is little wonder that the People’s Republic thinks it is worth a try to put its ham fist on the scale of a Canadian election.
Under the greatest pressure that he has faced in over seven years as prime minister, Trudeau’s response was so inadequate, it will deepen the crisis. He attempted the feeblest of all hand-offs: “a special rapporteur,” which is specious international bureaucratic baffle-speak for an inquiry of unspecified objectives and authority to look into the matters objected to, and with no hint of who the rapporteur might be. A rapporteur is usually a recording secretary who provides a summary of proceedings at a supposedly brainy international conference. Like many French words and expressions, it implies a certain sophistication while lacking any definition.
I think the greatest significance of the controversy over Chinese interference in Canada is not that it had any appreciable impact on our last two federal elections, but rather the appearance, supported by my sources in the upper ranks of the Liberal party (the fact that I have some will be distressing to many supporters of that party), that this is a move to change leaders. This should be resisted. Trudeau hasn’t done anything he has to resign for — the corruption and cynicism of the Liberal party are not his doing, they came in with W.L. MacKenzie King more than a century ago, although Trudeau is a beneficiary of them. If he gets the high jump, the Liberal establishment will likely try to bring in the former governor of the banks of Canada and of England, Mark Carney. He is an accomplished man but he was a disastrous governor of the Bank of England. He made himself a witless puppet of the then-prime minister and chancellor, David Cameron and George Osborne in what was known as “Project Fear,” a titanic effort to frighten the British public into overlooking the fact that a unified Europe would, by British standards, be undemocratic and would permanently separate Britain from the senior members of the Commonwealth and from the United States, with which countries it has more in common and a more serene history. European institutions, though well-intentioned, are authoritarian and unaccountable and a poor substitute for the parliamentary and common-law regime that Britain has carefully built up over centuries.
Carney is also a green zealot who misused the Bank of England to thrust it into absurd environmental advocacy and is now biding his time by promoting environmental, social and governance (ESG) principles. Canada would take a long step towards its most exalted destiny if it rejected the green terror, ended its war on the oil and gas industry, acknowledged the need for fossil fuels and replaced the anti-capitalist bunk of ESG with a reaffirmation that all corporations must obey the law, act responsibly, be good employers and try to produce a profit for their shareholders. Illustrative of the fantasyland where the Liberal leaders now dwell is Chrystia Freeland’s candidacy to become secretary general of NATO. That office has always been held by a European, as the military command has been held by an American; if we wanted to try to change that, we should not have allowed our Armed Forces to shrivel and atrophy for the last 30 years. After prime ministers Jean Chrétien, Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau disarmed us, we could hardly hold our own with Denmark.
Trudeau should indeed be replaced, but by the voters elevating the leader of the Opposition, and not by the elitist fixers, hustlers and snake oil salesmen in the boiler room of the Liberal Party of Canada doubling down on the colossal policy errors of the past seven years.
National Post
Post a Comment