Canada urged to get tough with China

Colin Robertson has an opinion piece in the Globe and Mail today informing us that China’s been bullying us, and it’s high time that Ottawa muscle up.

That’s the kind of militaristic malarkey one would expect from a “vice-president and fellow at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute.” CGAI, a registered Canadian “charity,“ is essentially a lobby group funded by the US defense industry. It works tirelessly to convince whichever party is in power that Canada is bedevilled by existential threats, meaning Russia and China, and our very sovereignty is at risk if we don’t throw gobs of money to the US-dominated armaments industry.

To convince the party in power to indulge such foolishness, it helps to get the public onside, and that’s where Canada’s newspaper of record comes in. Its role is to provide a platform for the kind of confrontational propaganda we see today. A casual perusal of the list of “fellows” at CGAI shows that Canada’s elite opinion-shapers are already convinced of the righteousness of their scare-mongering, but it never hurts to get the rabble on board.

What Robertson wants the rabble to get riled up about today is the ongoing Meng Wanzhou hostage taking. That was Canada’s first strike. China retaliated by taking two citizens and our canola producers hostage. That’s where things stand, and that’s where they’ll stay stuck, at least till Mr. Trudeau mans up and decides we’re gonna fight back!

Robertson invokes the “rule of law” a couple of times in the course of his article. This mysterious phenomenon is frequently trotted out by the apostles of American Exceptionalism and their acolytes in the me-too nations, sometimes called the “Five Eyes.” Contrary to what you might think if you took the term literally, abiding by the “rule of law” in no way precludes the Nations of Virtue running roughshod over international law as we favour recalcitrant countries with crippling economic sanctions, regime change operations, and when all else fails, bomb lesser civilisations back to the stone age.

Robertson carefully avoids any mention of Meng Wanzhou’s original crime; allegations that her employer, Huawei, violated US sanctions against Iran. Would the rule-of-law fetishists please explain by what rules of which laws it is America’s right to dictate to the world who is permitted to do business with whom?

The long and the short of the Huawei debacle is that PM Fluffy, in his aimless meanderings through the meadows of international diplomacy, managed to step in a particularly putrid cowpie. Now he’s got shit on his colourful socks and doesn’t know what to do.

He doesn’t need to get tougher.

He needs to get smarter.