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Every now and then the mumbo jumbo nation-states employ to fill in the awkward silences of diplomacy — the ordinarily necessary humbug of half-truth and hogwash — reaches a point that is, by conventional means, pretty well indescribable. Not quite a matter of outright lies, maybe, but something far more outrageous than rhetorical embroidery.

We reached that point last week in Canada’s formal responses to Beijing’s absurd conviction of Canadian missionary Kevin Garratt on phony espionage charges he had been held on since 2014, and his immediate deportation to Canada. We passed that point this week in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s inaugural address to the UN General Assembly in New York.

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It is bad enough that Canadians are expected to put up with rubbish emanating from the office of Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion that is indistinguishable from the published opinions of the Canada-China Business Council and the Central Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist Party. It had already got to the point that Canadians were expected to believe Garratt’s arrest two years ago was not a vindictive confinement in retaliation for then-foreign minister John Baird’s audacity in noticing publicly Chinese hackers had penetrated the National Research Council in Ottawa.