Remember when John McCallum was telling Chinese officials to ease up on sanctions against Canada because it was an election year? That was so weird.
“Anything that is more negative against Canada will help the Conservatives, [who] are much less friendly to China than the Liberals,” the former cabinet minister and Canadian ambassador to Beijing, who had already been sacked from the latter post for assorted indelicacies, told the South China Morning Post a few weeks ago. It would be “nice,” he added, “if things will get better between now and [Canada’s federal] election [in October].”
What kind of person, you may have thought at the time, links events a half a world away to a looming election at home? And then this week’s events brought an answer, if one hadn’t already occurred: the kind of person who works with Justin Trudeau.
Say hello to Paul Thoppil, assistant deputy minister for the Asia-Pacific over at Global Affairs Canada (universally shortened, in Ottawa, to “GAC,” pronounced “gack” and followed with an obligatory apologetic chuckle). He’s the guy who’s been working the phones lately, reaching out to retired Canadian diplomats and reminding them that it’s an election year.
“In this time of high tension and in an election environment, we all need to be very, very careful,” McCallum’s predecessor David Mulroney told the Globe, paraphrasing a call he received last week from Thoppil.
I want to emphasize that the specifics of Thoppil’s counsel to Mulroney were quite low on the scale of jackboot oppression. He just wanted Mulroney to call in for a briefing on Ottawa’s current China policy before mouthing off to reporters. Or rather, Thoppil may or may not have wanted Mulroney to call in, but his boss’s boss’s bosses at the Prime Minister’s Office sure did: “He said … ‘I’ve been asked by PMO: before you comment on aspects of China policy, it would be good if you called in and got the latest from us on what we’re doing,’” Mulroney told the Globe, again paraphrasing Thoppil.
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See Also:
(1) Supreme Court Judgement R. v. Stillman
(2) Trudeau Liberals are hardly the party of science
(3) Military justice system doesn’t breach charter rights, Supreme Court rules
(4) Evidence grows that the Harper gang had nothing on this Liberal bunch
(5) Memo to Trudeau – negativity isn’t working for the Democrats
