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Photo by Jacques Boissinot/CP

Or perhaps it’s not entirely useless. The CACN is regarded as quite useful by the United Front Work Department (UFWD), the Chinese Communist Party’s multibillion-dollar overseas influence-peddling and diaspora-bullying enterprise. CACN members frequently banquet, confer and liaise with the UFWD, and the junkets also allow Canadian parliamentarians to mix and mingle and network with the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, the fraudulent, rubber-stamp legislature of subservient sweatshop billionaires with which the CACN maintains cordial relations.

At least Oliphant is unlikely to be kidnapped and hustled away in a car with black-tinted windows and ministry of public security licence plates. And in any case, Freeland’s Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, won’t even take her calls. Canadian cabinet ministers have been burning up the telephone lines to their counterparts ever since Beijing began its retaliations for the apprehension of the Communist Party untouchable Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer for the Chinese telecom giant Huawei, last December. None of them have taken our calls. The CACN’s last guided tour was in January, to no effect, as if it were necessary to say.

Photo by Joseph Nair/AP

It is useful to recall that Wanzhou, wanted by the U.S. Justice Department on several counts of bank fraud and misrepresentation in the course of dodging American sanctions in Iran, is the daughter of Huawei’s big boss, Ren Zhengfei. It should also be remembered that daddy is a ranking Communist Party member and former People Liberation Army officer who still manages to pass himself off outside China as a wholly independent corporate chief executive officer who would never dream of complying with the rigid provisions of Chinese law requiring Huawei to collaborate with Beijing’s intelligence agencies, on command. Besides, 99 per cent of the holding company that owns Huawei is owned by a “trade union” that does not answer to Huawei workers, but instead reports directly to the Communist Party’s central committee.