When a Beijing-controlled telecommunications conglomerate is spending untold millions on elaborate influence-mongering and public relations efforts in order to bully Canada into giving into its demands—the hiring of Liberal and Conservative insiders, the sponsorship of Hockey Night in Canada, the lavish retention of blue-chip opinion-moulding firms—you’d think it would be able to do better than this.
I mean the stunt the lawyers for Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou attempted to pull off in Vancouver on Monday. What it boils down to is a three-page hodgepodge of distortion, truth-twisting and manipulative appeals to Canadian vanity, all constructed around the unwarranted exalted-statesman status of a yesteryear Prime Minister who has been greasing China’s wheels for a living, to Canada’s continuing disadvantage, for the past 15 years.
Its first sentence begins: “Given recent comments by former Prime Minister of Canada Jean Chrétien …” And it ends by referring to the credit Chrétien has been allowed to get away with claiming, for standing up the Americans and keeping Canada out of the war in Iraq, for at least as many years as that. Nominally authored by lawyers Richard Peck, David Martin, Scott Fenton and Eric Gottardi, the “press release” contains no new information and no new legal insight. It’s nothing much more than a disingenuous appeal to Canadians to get behind an objectively rancid idea.
The pitch is that Justice Minister David Lametti should be encouraged to do for Huawei’s Meng Wanzhou pretty well exactly what his predecessor, Jody-Wilson-Raybould, was scandalously punished for refusing to do for the bosses at SNC-Lavalin. Apparently oblivious to how that turned out, and despite Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland’s bedrock, no-way, not-in-a-million-years response going back months, the lawyers want Lametti to directly intercede in judicial extradition proceedings against Meng, and just let her walk free.
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See Also:
(1) Why China sees Canada as a chicken
(2) Bombardier cashes out while taxpayers get stiffed
(3) When the prime minister becomes a joke, who’s the joke on?
(4) Enough’s enough. Ban and boycott Huawei until China backs off
Mr. Cretin is in it for the benefit of Mr. Cretin because there is no whore like an old whore.
On a different note, welcome back Jack, you have been missed.