JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: CANADA'S CRACKERJACK FOREIGN AFFAIRS TEAM OF TRUDEAU AND FREELAND FINALLY GETS AROUND TO APPOINTING A NEW AMBASSADOR TO CHINA - ABOUT NINE MONTHS AFTER THE PREVIOUS ONE WAS FIRED - THIS ALL IN A PERIOD OF TERRIBLE RELATIONS WITH ONE OF THE WORLD'S MOST IMPORTANT COUNTRIES CREATED BY ONE BLUNDERING ACT AFTER ANOTHER FROM THE SAME TEAM

John Chuckman


COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN CBC NEWS


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Our crackerjack foreign affairs team of Trudeau and Freeland finally got around to putting a new ambassador to work in one of the world's most important countries, the able John McCallum having been fired from his post in China around the end of January, itself a very poor decision over a minor error.

China is a country with which Trudeau and Freeland have managed to create terrible relations, and a country we have literally insulted in several ways.

They arrested an important Chinese hi-tech executive, Ms. Meng of Huawei, at America's beckoning, an act that was completely avoidable with just a scrap of forethought and planning.

They sent a Canadian warship steaming through the South China Sea, something calculated to make China angry, again at America's beckoning.

Freeland has parroted much of the needlessly hostile rhetoric of Washington, doing so being one of her specialties, whether it concerns China or Russia or Iran or Venezuela.

And she very much stuck her nose where it does not belong, into Hong Kong. China told Canada to stop meddling in China's internal affairs. There was no good reason for Freeland to do so, again except to please Washington.

She didn't meddle in the far more violent demonstrations of France and of Israel in Gaza. Nor did she speak against the immense violence of the Crown Prince’s Saudi Arabia. But with Freeland and Trudeau, we do what pleases Washington in foreign affairs, and the Hong Kong shambles is welcomed there, almost certainly even covertly assisted. Shameful for a Liberal government.

Trudeau's big gesture for relations with China was the national embarrassment of his suddenly taking off one day for Washington to plead for help from the most disliked man in China, Donald Trump. Does judgment come any poorer? He got no "help” of course. Except the privilege of a brief return visit from the disagreeable and dishonest Mike Pompeo who used the opportunity to say more annoying things in Ottawa.