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“I regret that my comments with respect to the legal proceedings of Ms. Meng have created confusion. I misspoke. These comments do not accurately represent my position on this issue.”

So now repents John McCallum, ambassador of Canada to the People’s Republic of China, in a statement issued by the Department of Foreign Affairs. Plainly he did not misspeak: the now-infamous comments to Chinese-language media earlier this week, questioning whether the Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou should be extradited to the United States to face charges of bank fraud, were delivered at length and with evident forethought.

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Whether they represent his position, however, is another matter. Perhaps they represented someone else’s.

There are three possibilities. One, the ambassador was publicly contradicting the government that employs him, at the most sensitive possible moment, with two Canadians held hostage by the Chinese government, plus another under sentence of death, in obvious retaliation for Meng’s arrest. This is conceivable — McCallum has a history of saying odd things — but unlikely.