Last week, the diplomatic spat between Canada and China turned deadly: A Canadian man was sentenced to death for drug smuggling. Although the case is not explicitly tied to the arrest of Huawei Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou in Vancouver, several details point, disturbingly, to retaliation.

The U.S. must join Canada in pushing back on China's seemingly wanton use of citizens as pawns.

The sentence also comes after China detained two Canadian citizens, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, on seemingly bogus charges of endangering national security. The Chinese ambassador to Canada, Lu Shaye, all but admitted that the two were detained in retaliation, writing in an op-ed:



I have recently heard a word repeatedly pronounced by some Canadians: bullying. They said that by arresting two Canadian citizens as retaliation for Canada’s detention of Meng, China was bullying Canada. To those people, China’s self-defence is an offence to Canada.



The man now facing the death penalty, Robert Lloyd Schellenberg, was originally arrested in 2014 in China on drug-smuggling charges. He was tried in 2016 and given a 15-year sentence. But his appeal, on Dec. 29, 2017, resulted in the Liaoning Provincial High Court sending his case back to a lower court for retrial.

At the retrial on Monday, the court decided Schellenberg was still guilty and now deserved the death penalty.

That the case was decided in a single day with only 20 minutes of deliberation is telling. Notably, China invited international press to cover the trial. This farcical trial was clearly intended to send a message to Canada and, likely, the United States.

Beijing is showing us what it's willing to do to get Western compliance with its demands. In this case, they want Meng's release.

Canadian Prime Minster Justin Trudeau called for allies to join Canada in pushing back. “It is of extreme concern to us as a government, as it should be to all our international friends and allies, that China has chosen to arbitrarily apply [the] death penalty.”

He's right, and the U.S. must stand with Canada here. Letting China get away with this would set an awful precedent. It would also be an abandonment of our Canadian allies who got into this mess through their cooperation with us. Canada arrested Meng on a U.S. extradition warrant to face U.S. charges.

The best way to persuade China not to follow through with the threatened execution is likely to make it clear there will be consequences. Canada can't do that without the U.S.

The U.S. must not leave Canada to stand alone against the use of human pawns in diplomacy.