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The security implications are obvious. Yet the takeover was approved earlier this month with only a routine security screening, not the kind of formal security review by defence and security experts that cabinet can order in cases like this. Two former directors of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, Richard Fadden and Ward Elcock, have said they would have recommended such a review. For its part, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which reports to the U.S. Congress, has expressed its alarm, saying the deal “raises significant national-security concerns for the United States as the company is a supplier to our military.”

Worse than the Trudeau government’s apparent complacency in the face of such concerns has been its dissembling. Innovation, Science and Economic Development Minister Navdeep Bains, who approved the deal, told Parliament that it had in fact been the subject of a full security review, while the prime minister went so far as to claim that every foreign takeover is given the same scrutiny. Neither statement was true.

The whole issue may blow over, if a rival bid for Norsat by a U.S.-based investor, Privet Fund Management, is accepted in place of Hytera’s. But it still raises troubling questions about the Trudeau government’s approach to China, and the lens through which it views the regime.

All we can really do, as we try to balance principles and self-interest, is ensure it remains a trade-off

It’s too crude to say it had something to do with the prime minister’s notorious series of “cash-for-access” dinners with Chinese billionaires. But it may well have something to do with his patented mix of deep cynicism and flower-child naiveté — the kind that led him to name China’s “basic dictatorship” as the system of government he most admires, the kind that emerged in that embarrassing encomium to the late Fidel Castro that never managed to mention political prisoners or mass executions.