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Less than two months ago, Canada’s concerns with China were very different than they are today.

At the end of November, Finance Minister Bill Morneau was in Beijing to give a talk to the Canada China Business Council.

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It was one of those events that wouldn’t have garnered much attention back home were it not for the fact that Canadian media ended up being inexplicably barred from entering the event by the Chinese government. They’ve never been into freedom of the press but it was troubling to see our own media on the receiving end.

That is now the least of our worries. Although it was a first-hand reminder that the Chinese Communist regime does things a little differently than we do them over here.

On Monday we learned just how differently, when the news broke that a Canadian man, Robert Lloyd Schellenberg, was sentenced to death in a Chinese court for drug smuggling.

Now, the issue isn’t that they have the death penalty. Or even so much that they’re sentencing a Canadian to death, which is still the first such case of its kind. No, the issue is that they’re making it clear that it’s done to punish us.