My Take | ‘Nice guy’ Trudeau being kicked around by ruthless world leaders
- Apart from being unpopular among voters at home, the Canadian prime minister is also being humiliated abroad by China, India and Israel
Nice guys finish last. Canadians have a reputation of being nice. Whether that reputation is deserved or not, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is certainly finishing last lately in the international arena.
You have to wonder how much humiliation the leader of a nation can take with a straight face. One can only recall better days when Pierre, the father, commanded the world stage and led his country, like Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, to punch above its weight – a bygone era when giants still walked the Earth.
Justin’s latest? It seems his government, after milking the last ounce of feel-good publicity for getting the “two Michaels” out of Chinese detention, didn’t do the requisite aftercare; or at least making sure their stories add up.
Now, Michael Spavor is accusing former fellow prisoner Michael Kovrig of being a spy for the Canadian government, and suing Ottawa for compensation for getting him into trouble in China.
From start to finish, the Trudeau government has insisted neither men were spies – as Beijing had alleged – and that they were detained only as “hostages” because Canada had arrested Huawei’s No 2 Meng Wanzhou, who is also the daughter of the company’s founder, on a US extradition request. The three-year diplomatic crisis plunged relations between China and Canada to their lowest point in decades.
As a fluent Korean-speaking businessman, Spavor had enjoyed unusual personal access to Kim Jong-un, including jet-skiing and sharing cocktails with the North Korean leader on board one of his yachts. He also helped cement a friendship between Kim and former US basketball star Dennis Rodman. Such access would have made Spavor a person of immense interest to Western intelligence agencies.
Kovrig was a diplomat at the Canadian embassy in Beijing. Whether or not he was a spy, it’s now beyond dispute that he had passed on information he gleaned from Spavor to the Canadian Foreign Affairs Department’s global security reporting programme. Contents of the programme are made freely available to the intelligence services of the other so-called Five Eyes Anglo-American allies.