Politics Briefing: The two-year anniversary of the Michaels' arrest – The Globe and Mail

Hello,

Today is the two-year anniversary of the arrest of Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor by Chinese authorities, in an apparent reprisal of Canada’s arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou due to a U.S. extradition request. Here are a few stories on the condition of Mr. Kovrig and Mr. Spavor and other aspects of Canada-China relations.

• A glimpse into how the two Canadians are keeping their minds and bodies intact in jail cells where the lights are kept on at all hours. “They just want to demoralize you,” Kevin Garratt, a Canadian who spent 19 months in the facility in which Mr. Spavor is kept, said of Chinese authorities. “They’re in total control. They want to make you feel like everything is hopeless.”
• How to send holiday letters of encouragement to Mr. Kovrig and Mr. Spavor in their separate Chinese prisons.
• The Canadian government says early morning reports that Mr. Kovrig and Mr. Spavor were finally put on trial were an error due to a mistranslation of a Chinese spokesperson’s remarks.
• The Global Affairs deputy minister objected to the Canadian military cancelling a training exercise with China in the months following the two Michaels’ arrest.
• And The Globe’s Nathan Vanderklippe headed to manufacturing centre in western China, where advocates say minority Uyghur Muslims are providing forced labour to make products for international consumers.

This is the daily Politics Briefing newsletter, written by Chris Hannay. It is available exclusively to our digital subscribers. If you’re reading this on the web, subscribers can sign up for the Politics newsletter and more than 20 others on our newsletter signup page. Have any feedback? Let us know what you think.

TODAY’S HEADLINES

The first ministers are meeting today. Premiers are hoping for a major increase in the federal health transfer, which is a perennial ask, but one made more acute during the current COVID-19 public-health crisis. The premiers are also hoping to clarify details of the vaccine rollouts in the coming months.

How the pharmaceutical industry managed to throw all its resources at a single problem and develop a COVID-19 vaccine a lot faster than anyone expected.

The Liberal government has tabled a bill on how to conduct an election during the pandemic. The legislation, if passed, means voters could head to the polls on the Saturday and Sunday before the Monday election day, plus other changes to improve access to mail-in ballots.

U.S. regulators are trying to break up Facebook.

Brexit finally happens on Dec. 31, and Britain and the European Union have still not quite reached a deal on the new way forward.

And if you thought Brexit negotiations and talks between the first ministers were hard, can you imagine the U.S. signing an agreement with a “galactic federation,” as a former Israeli security official alleges?

Konrad Yakabuski (The Globe and Mail) on Canada-China relations: “The almost comical manner with which the Trudeau government has played for time on banning Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei from participating in the construction of Canada’s 5G networks speaks volumes about its inertia. It has often seemed as if Ottawa has hoped the problem would just go away – or that somebody else would spare it the inconvenience of having to ruffle feathers to solve it. That is indeed what appears to be happening, as Canada’s telecom companies have decided for themselves to build out their 5G networks sans Huawei.”

Mehmet Tohti (Montreal Gazette) on China’s persecution of Uyghurs: “Family abroad, meantime, have no means to communicate with anyone in the Uyghur regions. The stress on Canadian Uyghurs of not knowing if family members are alive is enormous, and they are subject to menacing threats by Chinese agents in Canada who intimidate them from speaking out on what’s going on. These threats sometimes precede the sudden death of family members in the camps. There was also extensive evidence given of sterilization of Uyghur women and forced marriage to Han Chinese men.”

Linden MacIntyre (The Globe and Mail) on CBC’s plan for advertorials: “It’s become a struggle for the soul of a venerable public institution. Hundreds of employees and ex-employees are at war with their former supervisors, bosses, their employer, even friends on an issue that, if unchecked, could compromise the corporation’s journalistic credibility – a priceless asset, nurtured and financed by many generations of Canadians.”

Matthew Yglesias (Slow Boring) on praise for how Canada’s civil service is set up: “Where the United States really stands out, however, is that Biden is nowhere near filling out the full roster of political appointees who run the agencies that he’s picked chiefs for. He’s nowhere near doing that because even given America’s long transition phase, there’s simply no way you can get all that done. Which in turn just reflects the reality that having political appointees penetrate so deeply down into these agencies is a dysfunctional process.”

Got a news tip that you’d like us to look into? E-mail us at [email protected]. Need to share documents securely? Reach out via SecureDrop

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Source link