Terry Glavin: Canada's rule-of-law system held up, even as Trudeau abused it for the sake of SNC. Now Ottawa must defend it against pressure from Beijing.
On Friday, Justice Canada announced that an “Authority to Proceed” had been issued to begin formal extradition proceedings in the explosive case of Huawei Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou, who is facing charges in the United States on several counts of defrauding banks in violation of U.S. sanctions on Iran.
To imagine a similarly corrective uproar unfolding in Beijing, you’d have to picture an alternative universe in which one of President Xi Jinping’s many untouchable military-industrial sweatshop complexes is subjected to the impudence of an otherwise wholly unimaginable public corruption prosecution. And President Xi can’t seem to make the charges go away.
On the very day the Globe and Mail reported the first sensational allegations that the Prime Minister’s Office had been improperly badgering Wilson-Reybould to intervene in the criminal fraud and bribery charges facing SNC-Lavalin, Trudeau was asked whether the Chinese should continue to take him seriously. “We have been consistent that Canada is a country of the rule of law that respects the independence of the judiciary,” Trudeau said, “and always will.
The point is, there has been no direct intervention in SNC-Lavalin’s criminal prosecution. The AG’s office did not instruct the public prosecutor to suspend the criminal charges and proceed instead by way of the court-supervised remediation agreement that SNC-Lavalin had been wanting all along. The case is proceeding, despite Trudeau’s persistent complaints.
But the case of Meng Wanzhou provides the Trudeau government with an opportunity to redeem itself. So does the decision Canada must soon make, in light of the “Five Eyes” western intelligence agencies’ consensus that Huawei poses a national security threat, about whether to permit Huawei’s further entrenchment in 5G technologies development in Canada.
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