Article content continued

Photo by Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press

But those sanctions differed from Canada’s Iran sanctions, so it comes down to complicated questions about fraud, and it’s all wonderfully complex and intriguing.

But reasonable people will understand fraud as a vice involving dishonesty, trickery, sleight-of-hand, swindling and related varieties of self-dealing monkey business, and each of these have in their way contaminated the public debates about Meng’s case. Those debates are inextricably bound up in the matter of Beijing’s barbaric retaliatory kidnapping and imprisonment of diplomat-on-leave Michael Kovrig and entrepreneur Michael Spavor, along with a variety of costly trade reprisals and threats of more punishments to come.

The culpability of quite a few yesteryear Liberal party big shots in giving Beijing every impression that these sorts of strong-arm tactics would work in Canada is at issue as well, or at least it should be. We are expected to believe, for instance, that Jean Chrétien, John Manley and Eddie Goldenberg, in relaying Beijing’s ransom demands — the crudest being a “prisoner exchange,” Meng for Kovrig and Spavor — are sage and wizened statesmen whose advice is offered in a public-spirited way, in the national interest. After all, we’re talking about a former prime minister, a former deputy prime minister, and Chrétien’s former chief of staff.

Photo by Jennifer Gauthier/Reuters

The charade here is that Jean Chrétien has been a senior skid-greaser in the China trade racket ever since he resigned in 2003, and he currently serves as a trusted counsel with Dentons LLP, which serves as the public face of the Chinese corporate law conglomerate otherwise known as Beijing Dacheng. Manley is a senior adviser with Bennett Jones LLP and a director of Telus Corp., which is up to its eyeballs in Huawei gear and is quaking at the thought of Huawei being properly barred from Canada’s 5G internet roll-out on national security grounds. Bennett Jones’ clients roster includes several of Beijing’s ministries, agencies and state-owned enterprises, and the firm’s “co-head of government affairs and public policy practice” is none other than Eddie Goldenberg.