The baseline was hug a PLA soldier and ride off on a unicorn into a trust-based sunset together. It wasn’t that the Canadian government didn’t know what was going on in China.
Alexandria, VA: A few days ago, I got an email from an American friend that read: “Canada is turning into our Nepal.” He included a link to an article about how Canada had allowed members of the PLA to observe the Canadian military’s winter survival training on a Canadian military base in 2018.
His point was Canada, my homeland, was becoming dangerously compliant to China.
The report was based on a freedom of information request by Canadian journalist Ezra Levant of Rebel News. Mr Levant had asked the Canadian government for information on a specific Canada-China military engagement. What he got back was 34 pages of lists, letters and emails detailing a specific moment in Canadian bureaucratic history, when the Department of National Defence/Canadian Armed Forces (DND/CAF) was tussling with Canada’s equivalent of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), Global Affairs Canada (GAC), over whether to engage with the PLA.
Not only did Mr Levant get more than he asked for, the bits that would normally be redacted by being blacked out were only greyed out, and so were legible. Someone wanted the story to be known. Mr Levant posted the whole thing online at TheChinaFiles.com.
Most of the correspondence is from early 2019. That was a tense time in Canada-China relations. On 1 December 2018, Canada arrested Meng Wanzhou in response to an extradition request by the US. Meng was an executive at Huawei, and the daughter of the founder. On 10 December, China arrested two Canadians, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, now known as the “Two Michaels”, in what is widely considered an overt case of hostage “diplomacy”.
The question for Ottawa was how to respond. The newly released documents show a clear division between foreign policy and defence…read more.