Canada’s media foments anti-China campaign after Meng arrest
By
Roger Jordan
19 December 2018
Since Canada, acting at Washington’s behest, arrested senior Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, Canada’s major media outlets have gone into high gear to justify her seizure as “lawful” and to depict China as a menace to Canada and the world.
The criminal charges the US has brought against Meng are transparently trumped up and politically motivated. Yet this has not stopped the media from greeting China’s complaints over Meng’s arrest with hoots, and from portraying Canada as under attack from an overbearing and bellicose China.
The Globe and Mail gloated, in a December 14 editorial titled “The end of the Trudeau government’s China delusion,” that Meng’s Dec. 1 detention and the subsequent tit-for-tat arrest of two Canadian citizens in China have put paid to the Liberal government’s plans for a free trade deal with Beijing. “The case of Meng Wanzhou has torpedoed the Trudeau government’s China policy,” enthused the Globe, the traditional mouthpiece of the Bay Street financial elite. “At the same time, it has also sunk China’s Canada policy. Call it a win-win.”
The neoconservative National Post was equally jubilant. Writing in the wake of the arrest by Chinese authorities of former Canadian diplomat Michael Kovrig and businessman Michael Spavor, the Post declared their arrests could “prove useful,” because “they ought to make it impossible for our prime minister, or any future prime ministers, to keep turning a blind eye to the criminal and thuggish nature of Beijing’s rulers.”
This turns reality on its head. The Beijing regime is no doubt authoritarian, representing as it does the capitalist oligarchy that emerged from the Stalinist bureaucracy’s restoration…