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Hostage Diplomacy
Strategic Vision vol. 10, no. 49 (May, 2021)
Despite its ties to China, Liberal Party of Canada is mishandling relations
Dean Karalekas
ROC President Tsai Ing-wen meets Canadian Trade Office in Taipei Executive Director Jordan Reeves on July 7, 2020.
photo: Office of the President, ROC
Republic of China (ROC) President Tsai Ing-wen was awarded this year’s John McCain Prize for Leadership in Public Service, according to a May 3, 2021, announcement by Canada’s Halifax International Security Forum (HFX). This event is noteworthy for several reasons, primarily because it is rare for a leader in Taiwan to be openly recognized by an international forum or organization, given the pressure customarily exerted by Beijing against such actions. More tellingly, the conferral of the award was covered widely in the media once it emerged that Canada’s Liberal Party government had attempted to put the kibosh on the attempt to honour Tsai.
It was reported by Politico that an official with Canada’s Defense Ministry, in a November 9, 2020, phone call with HFX President Peter Van Praagh, issued an ultimatum: if you give Tsai the award, Canadian Defense Minister Harjit Sajjan will not speak at your forum, as had been previously planned; Moreover, the government will pull its funding for the event. After the details of the ultimatum were leaked to the public, a scandal ensued, forcing the government to backtrack on its threat.
The incident lays bare the primary problem hampering Canada-Taiwan ties, and that is the Liberal Party of Canada. While most international reporting on the HFX award framed the story as an example of the Canadian government (or worse yet, the people of Canada) kowtowing to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), in fact this regrettable behaviour was largely confined to the ruling Liberal Party. Indeed, Canada’s loyal opposition, the centerright Conservative Party, found itself in agreement with the New Democratic Party (NDP)—perhaps the most left-leaning of Canada’s mainstream parties—in declaring Tsai to be an ideal candidate for the McCain award, and raised a motion for the government to continue funding the HFX.
If both the right and left sides of Canada’s political aisle both support Taiwan in its efforts to raise its international profile in the face of obstruction from Beijing, then it would seem odd that the nation’s socalled Natural Governing Party, the relatively centrist (at most, center-left) Liberal Party, should be so obstinate in its submission to Beijing. There are a few possible reasons for this.
It could perhaps be cowardice. The Liberals may believe that browbeating Taiwan—and President Tsai in particular—will put them in PRC President Xi Jinping’s good books. This is especially important at a time when the PRC is holding two Canadian citizens hostage—Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor—on trumped-up espionage charges, in obvious retaliation for the Vancouver arrest of Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. CFO Meng Wanzhou on charges of bank and wire fraud surrounding violations of the trade sanctions on Iran.
A group of Canadian and Taiwanese hikers summit Nanhu Mountain. People-to-people ties have always been strong between the two countries.
photo: CTOT
Detainment discrepancies
It is worth noting, for comparison’s sake, that while the Michaels languish in prison cells, in which the lights are reportedly left on 24/7, and they are routinely denied access to lawyers and consular representatives, Ms. Meng remains free to travel in her chauffeured black SUV to the restaurants and shops of Vancouver, provided she’s back home by 11 p.m. to her US$4.2 million mansion where she waits out the court challenge to her extradition order. Given the discrepancy in the conditions of their respective detainment, it seems more likely that Ottawa will be the one to blink first, though this tit-for-tat hostage diplomacy has been ongoing for two years now and shows no signs of being resolved anytime soon.
Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau meets with Meeting Chinese tycoon Jack Ma, founder and executive chairman of Alibaba Group.
photo: Fortune Global Forum
A second possible reason is the enormous influence that Beijing wields in Canadian politics. A recent national security review by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), which investigates and reports on the threat of foreign interference from countries like China and Russia, cautions that Canada presents an “attractive and permissive target,” endangering the “foundations of our fundamental institutions, including our system of democracy itself” by failing to adequately counter the efforts by Beijing’s United Front Work Department to infiltrate diaspora communities, political parties, large corporations, and of course universities. A report by an Ottawabased think tank, the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, details those efforts, which include the use of “cooptation, bribery, incentivization, disinformation, censorship, and propaganda,” among other methods. The Chinese-Canadian community is particularly victimized by Beijing’s attempts to exert power overseas, with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) enjoying “near total control of Chinese-language media in Canada,” according to one media report. Moreover, the CCP’s ability to leverage the popular social media and mobile payment app WeChat as a conduit of disinformation has been well-documented. It is also an easy platform on which to organize coordinated action, such as in the case of a 2008 civic election in British Columbia, when Vancouver Police and the RCMP investigated a CCP-affiliated organization for allegedly attempting to buy votes for preferred candidates using the WeChat app. In a similar incident, according to a senior manager at CSIS, the PRC consulate in Toronto was found in 2014 to have been dispatching Chinese students to visit the homes of Chinese Canadians, to pressure them into voting for specific candidates.
Former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien has been called the most pro-China prime minister of the past quarter century.
photo: Michael Ignatieff
Cultivating candidates
The candidates that the United Front Work Department goes to such lengths to elect are, in many cases, those that have already been cultivated by the CCP to represent its interests in the halls of power in Canada. In recent years, a number of scandals have emerged onto the public stage surrounding Canadian politicians and civil servants found to have been benefiting from potentially unethical ties with various Chinese government organizations. These include former Ontario MPPs Vincent Ke and Michael Chan, as well as Canada’s disgraced former ambassador to China, John McCallum.
Even retired prime ministers are not immune to China’s charms, or above taking lucrative sinecures in Chinese-Canadian joint ventures once their tenure as leader is over. Former Liberal PM Jean Chrétien, who broke a longstanding Canadian political tradition in which former leaders demur from voicing political opinions after leaving office, was rebuked for using his pulpit to call for the extradition proceedings against Ms. Meng to be dropped, prompting a MacLean’s editorial to ponder, “Whose side is Jean Chrétien on?”
In 2010, Richard Fadden, then director of CSIS, revealed to CBC News that cabinet ministers in at least two provinces were under suspicion of being controlled or influenced by Beijing—in addition, he called attention to the high degree of industrial espionage being perpetrated against Canadian companies. At the time, the government did not want to call attention to what was happening, likely for fear of upsetting China, and the House of Commons Security Committee rewarded Fadden’s diligence and perspicacity by recommending his ouster.
Pierre Trudeau meets with Mao Zedong in China, in 1973. PM Trudeau pushed to have the PRC admitted to the United Nations.
photo: Canadian Archives
A third possibility is the tremendous power exerted by the Trudeau family and its bizarre affection for communist regimes. If Canada has a political elite, its apex is the Trudeaus. The scion of the family, Canada’s current Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, has made no secret of his desire to forge closer ties with the PRC and has famously expressed his admiration for Beijing’s “basic dictatorship.” Indeed, recent attempts by his Liberal government to implement federal control over citizens’ online speech, by-passing any House of Commons debate to push the Internet regulation broadcast Bill C-10, smack of following the CCP’s example, and inserting the state into the bedrooms of the nation. (Full disclosure: the author and Trudeau were classmates up at university).
A family tradition
In many ways, Trudeau’s admiration for China appears to be a family tradition. His renowned father Pierre Trudeau, whose four terms as prime minister very much redefined Canada’s values and identity for the postmodern era, was one of the first Western leaders to officially recognize the CCP regime in Beijing, on October 13, 1970. Two years later, Trudeau the elder became the first Canadian prime minister to visit the PRC, giving the CCP regime face even as the people of China were suffering from the violence of the Cultural Revolution. After becoming prime minister in his father’s footsteps, Trudeau the younger wasted little time in attempting to forge closer ties with China, though often in ethically questionable ways. He caused a scandal when he broke Liberal Party guidelines (and his own ethical rules governing preferential access, or the appearance of preferential access, in exchange for political donations) by attending a CAD1,500-a-plate Liberal Party cash-for-access fundraiser at the home of Chinese Business Chamber of Commerce chair Benson Wong, the Globe and Mail reported.
Also in attendance were several Chinese billionaires, political advisers to Zhongnanhai, and a senior apparatchik in China’s state promotional network, as well as one wealthy donor who, at the time, was seeking the Canadian government’s approval to open a bank aimed at the Chinese diasporic community. Pointing this out is not to suggest that Trudeau himself accepted cash or favors in exchange for access, or for the enactment of specific preferential policies; rather that Trudeau’s naiveté and adoration for Beijing routinely cause him to be incapable of showing good judgment on issues where China is concerned.
Whatever the reason, the well-considered impression is that Canada’s Liberal Party is hopelessly in thrall to Beijing. Ironically, in spite of this unrequited love (or maybe because of it), Sino-Canadian ties are at their lowest point in decades, with both the Chinese side (the PRC’s consul- general in Brazil called Trudeau a “running dog” who ruined what had been friendly relations) and the Canadian side (MacLean’s described the state of the Canada-China relationship under Trudeau as “smoking rubble”) decrying this falling-out on the Liberal’s watch.
The good news is; it doesn’t have to stay this way. If the Liberal Party—and the Trudeaus in particular—are as close to China as they appear, then they will know something about Chinese culture: they will know that the Chinese respect strength, not weakness. Intentionally browbeating Taiwan—and President Tsai in particular—in the hopes that Xi Jinping will look favorably on them and consent to release his two Canadian political hostages is not the way to earn respect in China’s eyes. Quite the opposite.
The Liberal Party, if it lived up to its values, would be Taiwan’s biggest supporter. Therefore, a better tack would be to embrace Taiwan: take every opportunity to boost Canada-Taiwan ties, and to call for Taiwan’s full membership in various international organizations, such as the World Health Organization, where—if the two countries’ respective COVID-19 response is anything by which to judge—Taipei’s assistance and expertise would be far preferable to Beijing’s obstructionism and political brinksmanship. Launch an exploratory committee to examine the feasibility of recognizing the government of the ROC; begin drafting a Canadian equivalent to America’s Taiwan Relations Act, which would allow Ottawa to sell defensive weapons to Taipei; Invite high-ranking members of the ROC government to speak in Parliament, and send high-ranking members of the Canadian government on visits to Taipei. Do all this, and then see how fast Beijing is willing to come to the table to discuss the release of its Canadian hostages.
Even if the above policy recommendations do not result in the immediate resumption of negotiations on the detainment of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, it would be good for the Liberal Party to earn back a little bit of the integrity it once had, and in doing so, improve Canada’s faltering image in the global community. It would also help to effect a rapprochement between two countries with shared values.
The Taiwan of today is not the Taiwan of 1970: they believe in the values of democracy, human rights, freedom of religion, and of the press, and of individuals to live their lives free of government coercion. Moreover, the Canada of today is not the Canada of 1970: we do not need to cozy up to an authoritarian regime—one that imprisons its ethnic minorities and takes our own citizens hostage—just to differentiate ourselves from America. We can, and should, live up to the Canadian ideal of a values-based foreign policy, just as we can, and should, make good on the Liberal Party’s stated commitment to the belief that the dignity of each individual man and woman is the cardinal principle of democratic society, and the primary purpose of all political organization and activity.
Dean Karalekas is an affiliated research fellow with the Centre of Austronesian Studies at the University of Central Lancashire. He can be reached for comment at dkaralekas@hotmail.com
