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Moreover, while it may be tempting to see this as the latest shot in the ongoing U.S.-China economic war — the arrest happened on the same day U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping were meeting at the G20 in Buenos Aires — in neither the U.S. nor Canada is it possible to detain people, even foreigners, at the whim of the government of the day.

In fact U.S. authorities have been investigating Huawei, and Meng herself, for some time, on suspicion of violating U.S. export sanctions on Iran. If there is not persuasive evidence against her, no Canadian court will approve her extradition; if there is not proof beyond a reasonable doubt, no American court will convict her.

The more significant coincidence of timing, perhaps, is with the renewal of Chinese interest in a free trade agreement with Canada. That China has targeted most of its rhetorical fire not on the U.S., which requested the arrest, but on Canada, which carried it out, is not hard to explain: it has calculated Canada is the weaker link.

The question is whether the Chinese are justified in that calculation. The Trudeau government has seemed at times all too cozy with China: from the prime minister’s promiscuous attendance at private fundraisers with Chinese billionaires, to the strangely hasty greenlighting of the sale of Norsat International to China’s Hytera Communications, to his apparent readiness to discuss an extradition treaty with one of the world’s most repressive police states, the “basic dictatorship” Justin Trudeau once named as the government he most admires on earth seems to hold a strange fascination for him. Indeed, Canada is alone among the countries in the “Five Eyes” intelligence network in refusing to block Huawei from participation in the next generation of wireless telephone infrastructure, known as 5G.