The Two Michaels/Meng Wanzhou affair is generating a medley of reactions this week. They range from immense relief in Canada that Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor have returned home after being held hostage for 1,020 days in China, to celebration in China, where Huawei executive Meng is seen as national heroine for – as the Chinese view it – bravely enduring detention in Vancouver after being unjustly arrested to face politically tainted charges laid against her in the United States, criminal charges that would never have been laid against a lower profile corporate executive.
As the U.K. Guardian put it yesterday, it is “a saga that rapidly turned from a narrow legal dispute into an escalating geopolitical battle.”
While the Trudeau government could take grim satisfaction from demonstrating that Canada is a country of law – even if the law in question, the Canada-U.S. extradition treaty, is easily abused to create more delay than justice – the Chinese government will use the saga to demonstrate that hostage diplomacy does work.
China was quick to claim victory in the propaganda war. In Shenzhen, a cheering crowd greeted Meng as she stepped off a plane chartered by the Chinese government to bring her home from Vancouver. “Finally, I have come back home,” she declared. “After a torturous more than 1,000 days waiting, I have finally come back to the embrace of my motherland. As an ordinary Chinese citizen, I have suffered for three years overseas. Every moment I was stranded overseas I could feel the strength and warmth, given by my people and the government.”
Almost lost in the excitement over the release of the Meng, Kovrig and Spavor was the plight of several other Canadians still being held in China. They include Huseyin Celil, a dual Chinese-Canadian citizen and an advocate for his people, the Muslim Uyghurs, who was arrested in 2006 and has not been heard from since China cut off contact with his family five years ago, and Robert Schellenberg, arrested on drug charges in 2014, who is now facing the death penalty.
According to Erin O’Toole, the party he leads is not his father’s or grandfather’s party. He has used both generations to argue that, notwithstanding their election defeat, today’s Conservatives are the modern party that the country needs to meet the future.
However, a few statistics are revealing. There are a total of 115 urban constituencies (as defined by Elections Canada) in the cities of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. How many of these 115 seats went to the modern Conservative party a week ago?
Only eight. That’s right – eight of 115! The Liberals took 86 of the 115, the Bloc Québécois 15 and the NDP six.
Perhaps O’Toole’s modern Conservatives need to take a second look at their urban strategy.
Another telling statistic: only 5 per cent of the new Conservative caucus self-identify as members of a racialized minority.
Today’s Conservative party is older, whiter and less urban than it has been in the recent past, at a time when the country’s electorate is getting younger, more urban and increasing in its numbers of visible minorities.
I’m not at all sure what O’Toole was trying to prove by reaching back to the party of his father or grandfather. It seems to me the party is marching backward into its brave “new” future.
He has other problems to address in the coming months, starting with beating back challenges to his leadership. He won’t succeed by pursuing his announced intention to fight the minority Liberal government every step of the way. Voters sent a clear message to all MPs and all parties last week: Get back to work, stop the political games.
They did not append an asterisk stating, “this instruction applies to all leaders and parties except for Erin O’Toole’s Conservatives who are free to practice opposition in the traditional take-no-prisoners fashion.”
The public clearly wants the minority Parliament to succeed. Success will require cooperation. Obstruction will spell failure.
Cambridge resident Geoffrey Stevens is an author and former Ottawa columnist and managing editor of the Globe and Mail. His new book, Flora! A Woman in a Man’s World, co-authored with the late Flora MacDonald, is being published in October by McGill-Queen’s University Press. His column appears Mondays. He welcomes comments at geoffstevens40@gmail.com.