In The Line, Jen Gerson outlines the PM’s latest display of insouciance in regard to anything involving China, their ruling Communist party, or the Chinese military:
The Globe and Mail reported last week that Canada’s top infectious disease research centre, the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, had hosted and otherwise collaborated with guest researchers and scientists from China — including some with links to that country’s military or government. O’Toole asked about this in the House, and Trudeau gave a very routine Trudeauvian non-answer. O’Toole and other Tories kept up the questioning, Trudeau eventually responded with this (as per Hansard): “Mr. Speaker, we have always and will always take this threat seriously. Public safety officials have met with more than 34 universities to help them keep their research safe. In 2020, CSIS engaged more than 225 different organizations, including universities, to ensure that they were aware of foreign threats. I also want to mention that we are seeing a disturbing rise in anti-Asian racism. I hope that my Conservative Party colleagues are not raising fears about Asian Canadians.”
Sigh. Where do we begin?
First of all, though this may shock our readers, the Sun papers, and its columnists, have been known to exaggerate their criticisms of the PM. The PM gave a more substantive answer than Lilley gave him credit for. You can disagree with the PM — see below! — without getting cute with what he actually said. The racism line was dumb, and shitty. It was beneath the PM and unfair to the legitimate questions that were being asked. Trudeau shouldn’t have said it, and he was right to get called out for it.
So yes, a dick move by the PM — in a hundred years, maybe one of his descendants can apologize for it. But let’s not take our eye off the ball.
Trudeau’s answers were more than Lilley suggested, but they’re still not good enough. O’Toole and the Conservatives are onto something. China’s ruling regime is aggressive, brutal, and thuggish. They’re a threat to security abroad, they’re committing outright crimes against humanity against their own religious minorities, they’ve crushed Hong Kong underfoot, and they’re actively hostile to Canada. None of this is racist to note.
And yet our federal Liberals remain alarmingly unable to admit any of this. We don’t buy that it’s just a matter of political expediency, an awkward but necessary consequence of the ongoing detention of the two Michaels. Hell, we wish that the Liberals were just being publicly cautious with their real views on Beijing while remaining clear-eyed about the threat behind closed doors. The evidence continues to suggest that the federal Liberals, from Trudeau on down, remain hopelessly naïve about the nature of Beijing’s rulers, even as more and more of our allies are getting real about what the next generation or two of geopolitics is gonna look like for the Western alliance. (Which Canada remains a part of, whether Trudeau likes it or not.)
The growing tensions with a rising China are a big deal. It is only going to become a bigger deal. The Liberals need to get with the program. We hope to see more on this across the Canadian media — and hopefully it’s a bit more useful and productive than what the Sun ran with this week. The Liberals look terrible on this file already for entirely legitimate, serious reasons. We don’t need to pop our aging joints as we stretch and contort ourselves to make it seem so.
