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That’s not what the Canada-U.S. extradition treaty is for.

Never mind that Trump had no idea about the Dec. 1 move to snag Meng. Never mind the State Department’s insistence that there was no connection between the U.S. Justice Department’s extradition request and Trump’s trade feud with Xi. The U.S. Justice Department’s case, which will have to be argued by Canadian government lawyers in extradition proceedings that will play out for months on end, is now tainted.

Photo by Andy Wong / AP

It was clear from the start that the optics were going to be awkward. Meng was arrested the same day that Trump and Xi were meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Argentina to settle the terms of a 90-day tariff-war truce to allow for trade negotiations.

It was clear, too, that the case in Canada would be burdened by weird legal intricacies. Canada can’t extradite anyone to face charges for a crime that doesn’t have an extremely close parallel in Canadian law. Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould was already going to have to stickhandle the asymmetry between Canada’s relatively parochial and largely useless sanctions laws and the extraterritorial aspects of American far-reaching sanctions laws.

Now, Wilson-Raybould has been put in the position of having to argue that the grubby ulterior motives Trump has slathered all over Meng’s case are wholly immaterial to the matter.

Photo by Justin Tang / The Canadian Press

In the meantime, Beijing is turning the screws on Canada. Michael Kovrig, a senior adviser with the International Crisis Group (ICG) and a Canadian diplomat on leave, was nabbed by China’s Ministry of State Security in Beijing on Monday. According to a report in a Beijing newspaper, Kovrig is being investigated by state security officials on charges that he was involved in activities that “harm China’s national security.” China’s Foreign Ministry said earlier that if Kovrig was working for the ICG, he was committing a crime, because the ICG is not registered with the Chinese government.