Just as nauseating is the surfeit of federal, provincial and municipal politicians who remain deeply integrated and indebted to Beijing's influence-pedlars and corporate lobbyists in Canada.

It was because Justin Trudeau decided to skip the federal leaders’ Munk Debate on Foreign Policy scheduled for Tuesday Oct. 1 at Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto that the event was called off and quite a few embarrassing questions were avoided. Not least among those questions is this one: In the epic global struggle underway at the moment between totalitarianism and the rest of us, whose side is Canada really on, anyway?

In Hong Kong on Tuesday, police fired 900 rubber bullets, 190 bean bag rounds and roughly 1,400 tear gas canisters at tens of thousands of protesters who somehow managed to find their way to rallies to protest the Chinese Communist Party’s 70th birthday party, despite the city being practically on lockdown with dozens of malls and 11 Metro stations closed. It was the most violent day of civil unrest since the United Kingdom gave Beijing the keys to the city in 1997. The youngest of the 269 Hongkongers arrested was 12. The oldest was 71.

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In Beijing, 15,000 troops marched in line with intercontinental ballistic missiles and hypersonic drones from China’s new-warfare airborne armada in Tiananmen Square, filing past a massive parade stand where the megalomaniac Xi Jinping stood waving, dressed in a grey Mao suit. In Hong Kong, among the 74 people aged from 11 to 75 who were hospitalized Tuesday was 18-year-old high school student Tsang Chi-kin, now recovering with a collapsed lung after being shot by police in the chest at point-blank range.

In Hong Kong on Tuesday, police fired 900 rubber bullets, 190 bean bag rounds and roughly 1,400 tear gas canisters at tens of thousands of protesters.

It is bad enough that the Trudeau government’s policy has been to pretend none of this is even happening, and to persist in the catastrophic objective of ever-deeper economic integration with China that has dominated Liberal foreign policy and trade policy for a quarter of a century.

This remains the case despite Beijing’s hostage-taking of the diplomat-on-leave Michael Kovrig and entrepreneur Michael Spavor, and despite Beijing’s crippling embargo on a variety of Canadian agricultural exports, and despite Beijing’s militarization of its ambitious global “belt and road” initiative, the purpose of which Xi Jinping is helpfully explicit about. The point of it all is to disassemble the “rules based international order” that Liberals recite by rote as the wellspring of Canadian prosperity and security since the Second World War.

Just as nauseating is the surfeit of federal, provincial and municipal politicians who remain deeply integrated with and indebted to Beijing’s influence-pedlars and corporate lobbyists in Canada. It is also by rote that they recite the nauseating, predictably self-aggrandizing excuses their make for themselves. It’s always about the need for “dialogue,” and other such point-missing gibberish.

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Canadians long ago wised up to this, and so lately the Liberals kowtowing to Beijing prefer to do so quietly, hoping the rest of us won’t notice. Such was the case when it was revealed last weekend that Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan had been a guest of honour at a Sept. 22 reception and ceremony in Vancouver celebrating the 70th anniversary of the bloody and tyrannical rule of the Chinese Communist Party.

In Sajjan’s case, the excuse on offer was that he was attending in his capacity as the Liberal candidate in Vancouver South, and you know, diversity and all that, and besides, he didn’t stay for dinner, and after all, he did say something about how Beijing “needed to address the consular cases” of Kovrig and Spavor. As if these were merely consular cases. As if these excuses absolve Sajjan of the indecency of serving as a photo-opportunity propaganda mannequin for the butchers of Beijing.

In Ottawa on Tuesday, a group of pro-democracy Hongkonger-Canadians were followed and harassed by pro-Beijing thugs as they left their small rally on Parliament Hill. They say they were stalked as their made their way along Wellington Street, blocked from entering O’Connor Street and surrounded until police arrived to escort them into the ByWard Market area. The group Ottawans Stand With HK say they have reported several death threats to Ottawa Police and the RCMP.

Across the country, in Richmond, B.C., the RCMP were called after a group of high school students who put up a “Lennon Wall” at the Aberdeen Skytrain station supporting Hong Kong’s democracy movement were harassed by a group of Beijing supporters who ripped down their display. In Vancouver, at the University of British Columbia, a similar demonstration supporting the Hong Kong protests was attacked by pro-Beijing activists.

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All this might have made for some useful context to a real-world crisis with its front lines in the streets of Hong Kong and deep implications for Canadian security and the Canadian economy, had the federal leaders’ foreign-policy debate gone ahead Tuesday night. Instead, the parties exchanged their usual, boring, fact-deficient goads and challenges.

Photo by JONATHAN HAYWARD / THE CANADIAN PRESS

Conservative leader Andrew Scheer announced that he’d cut foreign aid by 25 per cent, redirecting the savings to tax cuts and to sub-Saharan countries in genuine need. But he strayed into fantasy in his claim that more than $2 billion of Canada’s $6 billion foreign-aid outlay goes to “middle and upper-income countries,” some of which are anti-democratic pariahs. Scheer’s announcement could have been grounded in a useful critique of the way the Trudeau government handles its foreign-aid files in police states. But it wasn’t, and it came off instead like a sop to the rednecks and foreign-aid begrudgers who have bolted the Conservative Party for Maxime Bernier’s People Party of Canada.

The Liberals, meanwhile, lathered it on well enough all by themselves. Like this, in an Oct. 1 Liberal Party press release: “Scheer supported capitulation on NAFTA, and now he wants to renegotiate the deal, threatening to plunge Canada’s economy into crippling trade uncertainty.”

That’s something that can be said of Jagmeet Singh’s New Democratic Party, which claims an intention to reopen the United States-Canada-Mexico free trade pact the three countries negotiated to replace NAFTA, following one of U.S. Donald Trump’s tantrums. But it’s not something that can be truthfully said of Scheer’s Conservatives.

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Scheer insists, of course, that it was Trudeau who “capitulated” on NAFTA, but on the main Liberal allegation, here’s Scheer, two weeks ago, during a conversation with reporters on the Conservative campaign plane during an overnight flight to Vancouver: “We will proceed with the deal as Justin Trudeau signed it. We will inherit his failure, and we will do everything we can in my term as prime minister to fix the mess he has come back with.”

On foreign policy, the NDP has little to say of any use to anyone. As for the Greens, it’s all climate change, all the time, and fair enough.

The one good thing about the cancellation of the federal leaders’ Munk Debate on foreign policy is that Canadians were spared the embarrassment of watching their federal party leaders make excuses for themselves while the existential struggle for the future of democracy in the world is being fought street by street, mall by mall and plaza by plaza, in the streets of Hong Kong.

Terry Glavin is an author and journalist.

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