The first airlift of Canadians trapped in the quarantined Chinese city of Wuhan took place on Thursday. A second flight is currently scheduled for next Tuesday, February 10. 

            In the meantime, at least 12 other countries have been able to evacuate their citizens from Wuhan. News reports identify the U.S., Australia, Japan, South Korea, France, Morocco, Germany, Kazakhstan, the U.K., Russia, Netherlands, and Myanmar.

            How come they could do it, and Canada took so long?

            Foreign Affairs Minister François-Philippe Champagne blamed part of the delay on weather conditions in Hanoi, Vietnam. 

            Health Minister Patty Hajdu conceded that the federal government was initially caught off guard and had "a slow start in terms of organizing" the evacuation plane.

            I don’t buy it. 

            Kazakhstan was better prepared for a health crisis than Canada was? Give me a break!

Is there a connection?

            Although nobody is saying it out loud, there seems to me a connection between the delays encountered in getting Canadian citizens out of China and the highly publicized court case in Vancouver, B.C. deliberating the fate of Meng Wanzhou.

            Meng is, of course, the chief financial officer for the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, and the daughter of Huawei’s founder, Ren Zhengfei. Huawei is the world’s largest telecommunications company, having surpassed both Ericsson and Nokia. Huawei is also the flag-bearer for the new China, courted in some parts of the world, and feared in other parts. 

            The U.K. has chosen Huawei to build its fifth generation (hence 5G) telecommunications networks; the U.S. has banned Huawei from even bidding on new networks. Although Huawei is officially listed as a privately owned corporation, the U.S. is terrified that it either is, or could be, an arm of the Chinese government. And that any equipment it supplies might have a trapdoor into classified data. 

            Cambridge Analytica has already demonstrated the possibilities of tapping supposedly private data. Russia apparently hacked Hilary Clinton’s emails in the 2016 presidential election campaign. 

            China has already reacted to Merg’s arrest with its own quid pro quo – two Canadians imprisoned without trial, another sentenced to death. 

Doing the U.S.’s bidding

            Meng is at least getting her day in court, even though she herself is not on trial. Rather, Canadian law is.

            On August 22, 1918, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York issued an arrest warrant for Meng, alleging that Meng had conspired to defraud several banks of moneys supposedly for Huawei, but actually for Skycom, an entity alleged to be entirely controlled by Huawei, which was alleged to be dealing with Iran, thus breaking to U.S. sanctions against Iran. 

            Did you follow all those levels of allegation?

            On December 1, 2018, Canadian authorities arrested Meng as she passed through Vancouver International Airport en route to Mexico. Two years later, she got her day in court.

            The trial is solely to determine whether Meng should be extradited to the U.S. so that she can be tried there. 

Legal principles

            There’s no question that Canada has an extradition treaty with the U.S. 

            But one provision of that treaty is that people can only be extradited only if what they were supposed to have done was also a crime in Canada. 

            Here’s where things get complicated. 

            Is Meng accused of breaking U.S. sanctions against Iran? If so, her lawyers argue, she could not have committed a crime, because at the time of her alleged offence, Canada had no sanctions against Iran. Canada and the U.S. both withdrew their sanctions in 2016. 

            Donald Trump re-imposed sanctions in the U.S. two years later. But Trump does not make Canadian law. Canada did not follow suit – perhaps trying to prove that it was not, in the words of the late Ray Hord about former Prime Minister Lester Pearson, “a puppy-dog on the U.S.A.’s leash.”

            Therefore, Meng’s legal team insist, she does not qualify for extradition. 

            Or is Meng accused of bank fraud? That’s a crime in both countries. IN that case, the Canadian court has to examine whether she did commit fraud. Which effectively puts Meng herself on trial, in a trail that’s not officially about her at all. 

Tit for tat

            I doubt that the Chinese government sees Meng’s trial as only about the principles of Canadian extradition law. I suspect that, like Donald Trump, they see everything as politics. Whether it’s canola exports, extradition treaties, or refugees fleeing the corona virus.

            Of course I can’t prove any of this. But it sure looks to me as if China’s treatment of Canadians seeking to get out of Wuhan is their own not-so-subtle form of quid pro quo. 

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Copyright © 2020 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups encouraged; links from other blogs welcomed; all other rights reserved.

                       To send comments, to subscribe, or to unsubscribe, write jimt@quixotic.ca

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YOUR TURN

Most of the letters about last week’s semi-tongue-in-check column on laws that aren’t laws expressed sympathy for Joan’s continuing slow decline. Only a few of you tackled the substance of the column, such as it was.

Tom Watson thought I was writing about him, in describing the Peter Principle: “In high school I hated English. I blamed it on the teacher who never changed her voice level from the start of a class to the end, leaving me caring as much about Macbeth as the pommel horse in the gym (didn't like that either). So I went to work for an international firm, managing offices which included doing accounting. Then, when I was 35, I switched and have spent the bulk of my time over the past 45 years either speaking or writing words. I therefore hope that at my age I have finally reached the level of incompetence that is my destiny.”

            My closing line was, "...whatever you believe today to be absolute, certain, and unchangeable, you will have to reconsider. Maybe sooner than you think."

            To which Deborah Lawson replied, “Sometimes fiction points the way. In Stargate: Atlantis (Season 2, Episode 14, "Grace Under Pressure"), a puddlejumper [is a fictional flying vehicle that operates both in space and in the atmosphere]  pilot tries to goad the passenger [a scientist] by asking, ‘As a scientist, doesn't it bother you that most of your work, no matter how brilliant, will eventually be considered misguided? ... Given enough time, everything is pretty much proven wrong, right? ... Everything from the earth being flat, to the sun revolving around us? Scientists get it wrong more times than they get it right.’

            “Although this is a fictional conversation, I've often thought the observation has an element of truth to it. We stumble along in our current scientific understandings until something comes along that disproves or challenges what we've considered to be scientific ‘fact.’ Science sometimes advances only when we recognize the fallacy of something we've previously considered indisputable.”

Steve Roney saw the same line as a kind of Cretan paradox: “If true, it is not true—you will soon have to reconsider it.” 

            Steve and I will never see eye-to-eye on the American political situation. In his view, “You have the current political paradigm shift reversed. Mitch McConnell is not a representative of the old paradigm, but allied with the new paradigm, the unexpected new political realignment. It is perhaps significant that the leading candidates for the Democratic nomination this time are generally quite old. That looks like an example of Kuhn’s thesis, of the older paradigm dying away with the old generation.

            “In time a new paradigm may rise on the left to match the new ‘populist’ paradigm on the right—with Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage in Britain now too. But it may take another generation.

            As I expected, Steve challenged my corollary to Godwin’s Law, rejecting proof-texting from the Bible as conclusive in any argument: “The Bible is held to be the inspired word of God by all branches of Christianity: Orthodox, Catholic, Lutheran, or Reformed. And by Judaism. And, with a caveat, by Muslims. Even outside these traditions, it would still count as a compendium of the wisdom of the ages. It would actually be hard to imagine a better authority to clinch an argument than a biblical reference.” 

            Well, umm, how about Proverbs 14:6-8?

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TECHNICAL STUFF

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PROMOTION STUFF…

To use the links in this section, you’ll have to insert the necessary symbols. (This is to circumvent filters that think some of these links are spam.)

                       Wayne Irwin's “Churchweb Canada,” is an inexpensive service for any congregation wanting to develop a web presence, with free consultation. http://wwwDOTchurchwebcanadaDOTca. He set up my webpage, and he doesn’t charge enough.

                       I recommend Isabel Gibson’s thoughtful and well-written blog, wwwDOTtraditionaliconoclastDOTcom. She also runs beautiful pictures. Her Thanksgiving presentation on the old hymn, For the Beauty of the Earth, Is, well, beautiful -- https://www.traditionaliconoclast.com/2019/10/13/for/

                       Tom Watson writes a weekly blog called “The View from Grandpa Tom’s Balcony” -- ruminations on various subjects, and feedback from Tom’s readers. Write him at tomwatsoATgmailDOTcom (NB that’s “watso” not “watson”)

ALVA WOOD ARCHIVE

                       The late Alva Wood’s collection of satiric and sometimes wildly funny columns about a mythical village’s misadventures now have an archive (don’t ask how this happened) on my website: http://quixotic.ca/Alva-Wood-Archive. Feel free to browse all 550 columns.