Tory leader justifiably withering in his criticism of the Trudeau government’s approach to the state-capitalist monstrosity in Beijing
It was sober, substantial and sensible, and strangely, on the stuff that counts, the foreign policy approach a Conservative government would take, as sketched out by party leader Andrew Scheer in a major speech in Montreal on Tuesday, was quite similar to the approach Liberal Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland laid out in a keystone speech to the House of Commons two years ago.
Like Freeland, with only a slightly varying degree of tact, Scheer touched on the abdication of the United States, under President Donald Trump, from its historic role as leader of the rules-based liberal international order. Like Freeland, Scheer sees Vladimir Putin’s Russia retreating into what he called “a Cold War mentality” and what Freeland called a folly of “military adventurism and expansionism.
But there is a big difference between Freeland’s address and Scheer’s speech, and it involves the issue that should be the primary foreign-policy battleground between the Conservatives and the Liberals in the coming election campaign. It’s the foreign-policy issue that exposes the Liberals as far and away the weakest and most vulnerable of the two parties: the incendiary question of China.
Fat chance of that. It was an absurd proposition in 2017, and it is only more painfully obtuse now that Beijing has decided that Canada needs to be thrown up against a wall and slapped around for having dared to merely honour the terms of the Canada-U.S. extradition treaty in last December’s apprehension of one of China’s ruling-class untouchables, Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd.
The approach Scheer proposes is to abandon Canada’s uniquely fawning and failed approach to China altogether and start all over again. China should be understood as one of the “three of the greatest foreign threats to Canadian security and prosperity in the 21st century,” along with Vladimir Putin’s Cold War belligerence and state sponsors of terrorism and extremism. Scheer singles out Iran, which went wholly unmentioned in Freeland’s 2017 address.
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