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China likely to escape scot-free in persecution of two Canadians

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From the MacDonald Laurier Institute

By Charles Burton

Beijing propagandists are already using recent claims to vindicate the appalling treatment of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor

There is a deep sadness to reports that Michael Spavor feels he was badly wronged by his fellow former political prisoner Michael Kovrig and, by extension, political officers at Canada’s embassy in Beijing and their masters in Ottawa.

Spavor reportedly wants millions in compensation from the Canadian government for its alleged complicity in his detention in his Chinese prison ordeal. If this ends up in court, Kovrig and his superiors would have an opportunity to defend themselves against these allegations, but Beijing propagandists are already using them to vindicate the appalling treatment of Kovrig and Spavor — a gross violation of international law — by a ruthless regime that arrested them to pressure Canada into releasing Chinese Communist Party figure Meng Wanzhou from house arrest in Vancouver.

While few specifics are known about Spavor’s claims, media reports depict a connection to Kovrig’s former job at Canada’s embassy in Beijing, and later with the International Crisis Group think tank, roles in which he would allegedly meet with people in China, engage them in his fluent Mandarin, and mine the conversations for nuggets of insight into China’s political or economic affairs.

Chinese authorities, of course, don’t like such activities. One expects that Kovrig and his superiors, both in government and the ICG, would have been well aware that this type of work would irritate Beijing, thus the danger of arbitrary detention on trumped-up charges was always there whenever he visited China without the protection of a diplomatic passport. And so it was.

One particularly troubling aspect of this sort of activity is the risk it presents to people who might unknowingly be sources for these information-gathering practices. Apparently Spavor and Kovrig routinely got together for drinks and sessions of good-humoured conversation. But friendships with diplomats imply that observations shared in a bar can end up the next morning in a report to Ottawa, and on to the Five Eyes. Was this possibility lost on Spavor? Was Kovrig perhaps not as forthcoming as he could have been about the full dimensions of their chats?

And there is always the possibility that China’s Ministry of State Security has access to Canadian diplomatic communications, which led them to open a file on the two.

Spavor ran a business, Paektu Cultural Exchange, that facilitated sports, cultural, tourism and business exchanges with North Korea. These pricey tours necessitated the transfer of badly-needed foreign currency into North Korea, arguably helping to enable the repressive Pyongyang regime. Perhaps more intriguing, in the course of his work Spavor developed an unlikely rapport with the third-generation Kim family dictator, Kim Jong Un, and was photographed jet-skiing and drinking cocktails with him on a private yacht. It is very plausible that China strongly disapproved of their junior proxy Korean communist dictator cavorting with non-Chinese foreign friends, hence his arrest.

Troublingly, Canadians — who were transfixed and infuriated by the two Michaels’ incarceration — have had little news about Kovrig and Spavor’s China nightmare since their sudden release in September 2021, just hours after Canada released Meng. One wonders if Ottawa really did enough to incentivize China’s Communist authorities to send them home sooner, or if there were other factors in Canada’s murky relationship with Beijing that took priority over what was perhaps downplayed behind closed doors as just another consular matter, one of many that are de facto subordinated to trade and political interests.

We may never see any Global Affairs Canada officials or former diplomats giving public evidence in a Canadian court to defend against Spavor’s accusation. To be sure, much of what goes on between Canada and China — indeed, within our own government internally — is kept from us by the secretive walls of the Security of Information Act.

Perhaps Spavor will be given a big whack of taxpayer money in an out-of-court settlement laced with ironclad nondisclosure provisions. One thing is for sure though. The Chinese authorities who so brutally persecuted him will, as usual, get off scot-free.

Charles Burton is a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, non-resident senior fellow of the European Values Center for Security Policy in Prague, and former diplomat at Canada’s embassy in Beijing.

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Former Trump Advisor Says US Must Stop UN ‘Net Zero’ Climate Tax On American Ships

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Stephen Moore

Later this week the United Nations will hold a vote on a multi-billion climate-change tax targeted squarely at American industry. Without quick and decisive action by the White House,  this U.N. tax on fossil fuels will become international law.

This resolution before the International Maritime Organization will impose a carbon tax on cargo and cruise ships that carry $20 trillion of merchandise over international waters. Roughly 80% of the bulkage of world trade is transported by ship.

The resolution is intended to advance the very “net zero” carbon emissions standard that has knee-capped the European economies for years and that American voters have rejected.

This tax is clearly an unnecessary restraint on world trade, thus making all citizens of the world poorer.

It is also an international tax that would be applied to American vessels and, as such, is a dangerous precedent-setting assault on U.S. sovereignty. Since when are American businesses subject to international taxes imposed by the United Nations?

The U.S maritime industry believes the global tax would cost American shippers more than $100 billion over the next seven years if enacted.

Worst of all, if the resolution passes, it will require the retirement of older ships and enable a multi-billion-dollar wealth transfer to China, which has come to dominate shipbuilding in recent years. China STRONGLY supports the tax scheme, even though, ironically, no nation has emitted more pollutants into the atmosphere than they have. Yet WE are getting socked with a tax that indirectly pays for THEIR pollution.

Despite the fact that we pay a disproportionate share of the tax, the U.S. has almost no say on how the revenues are spent. This is the ultimate form of taxation without representation.

Even if the United States chooses not to implement the tax on domestic shipping, it will still be enforced by foreign ports of origin or destination as well as by flag states. As a result, American importers and exporters will be required to pay the tax regardless of domestic policy decisions.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, and Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy have jointly stated that America “will not accept any international environmental agreement that unduly or unfairly burdens the United States or our businesses.” They call the financial impact on the U.S. of this global carbon tax “disastrous, with some estimates forecasting global shipping costs increasing as much as 10% or more.”

The U.S. maritime industry complains that although American vessels carry only about 12% of the globally shipped merchandise, U.S. flag vessels would bear almost 20% of this tax. No wonder China and Europe are for it. The EU nations get 17 yes votes to swamp the one no vote out of Washington.

Unfortunately, right now without White House pressure, we could lose this vote because of defections by our allies.

To prevent this tax, the White House should announce a set of retaliation measures. This could include a dollar-for-dollar reduction in U.S. payments to NATO, the U.N., IMF and World Bank.

At a time when financial markets are dealing with trade disputes, the last thing the world — least of all the United States — needs is a United Nations excise tax on trade.

Stephen Moore is co-founder of Unleash Prosperity and a former Trump senior economic advisor.

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“Nation Building,” Liberal Style: We’re Fixing a Sewer, You’re Welcome, Canada

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The Opposition with Dan Knight

Dan Knight's avatar Dan Knight

Ottawa held a full-blown press conference to announce they unclogged a pipe in Toronto and called it a generational housing strategy.

You probably didn’t hear much about it unless you were watching Canadian state media but this morning, the Liberal government held a press conference in Toronto. It was billed as a “generational investment” in housing. That’s the phrase they used. In reality, it was a sewer project.

Gregor Robertson, the former mayor of Vancouver and now the federal minister of housing and infrastructure, stood beside Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow and a cluster of Liberal MPs to announce that Ottawa is spending $283 million to upgrade the Black Creek trunk sewer line. That’s a pipe. A very old pipe. And according to Robertson, that investment will “unlock” the construction of up to 63,000 new homes in the Downsview area.

If that sounds suspiciously like taking credit for doing your job, maintaining the basic infrastructure cities rely on, that’s because it is. No one has ever accused the Liberals of missing an opportunity to repackage civic maintenance as a national moral crusade. The sewer line is 65 years old. It overflows during storms. It’s been a known problem for decades. Fixing it is not bold housing policy. It’s plumbing.

But the political optics are irresistible. The Trudeau Liberals, now under the leadership of Mark Carney are desperate for a win on housing. Their record is catastrophic. Home prices have doubled. Rents have soared. Entire generations of Canadians have been priced out of ownership and locked into permanent renter status. And the architects of that disaster are now flying around the country handing out ribbon-cutting ceremonies and calling it reform.

Today’s announcement also included the unveiling of the first project under a brand-new federal housing agency, Build Canada Homes. Never heard of it? That’s because it didn’t exist until a few weeks ago. And who’s running it? None other than Ana Bailão a Liberal operative and former Toronto city councillor who spent years helping make the city unaffordable in the first place. Now she’s being rewarded with a cushy federal appointment, tasked with building modular housing and handing out contracts on public land.

And what exactly is Build Canada Homes building? Today, they’re launching 540 homes. Not 63,000… 540. Factory-built units that will be delivered at some undefined point in the future. That’s the big federal breakthrough. A housing crisis affecting millions of Canadians, and Ottawa’s answer is five hundred and forty modular homes in Downsview.

This is the pattern every time. The government breaks something, calls it a crisis, and then demands credit for fixing a fraction of it with your money. The numbers are staggering. According to the Parliamentary Budget Office, Canada needs 3.1 million more homes by 2030 to restore affordability. That means building over 430,000 units per year. Right now, we’re building maybe half that. The backlog gets worse every year. But today, we’re supposed to celebrate because they’re unclogging a sewer and firing up a couple prefab builds on federal land.

No one in the press asked the obvious question: why aren’t private builders constructing the 300,000 units that Toronto has already zoned and approved? Because they can’t. The financing doesn’t work. The cost of materials is too high. Interest rates have crippled developers. And cities like Toronto still impose hundreds of millions of dollars in fees, development charges, and bureaucratic red tape. That’s the real bottleneck. Not the sewer. And here’s what they definitely won’t say out loud: Canada’s housing disaster is not just about supply. It’s about demand, turbocharged by one of the fastest immigration intakes in the Western world. The Bank of Canada has warned repeatedly that immigration targets, set without any link to housing capacity — have blown demand wide open and put relentless upward pressure on rents and home prices.

Mayor Chow admitted it herself, sort of. She said the city has thousands of units ready to build but no takers. And instead of confronting the root causes, monetary policy, taxes, regulatory insanity, the government announces a pilot project and tells you to be grateful. That’s how disconnected they are from reality. They’ve regulated housing out of reach and now they’re posing for photos on a construction site, pretending to be the solution.

And just in case there was any lingering doubt about how deep this failure runs, Statistics Canada released its latest building permit numbers this morning and the trend is exactly what you’d expect in a country where the government makes building homes all but impossible.

The total value of building permits dropped again in August down $139 million to $11.6 billion. Residential permits alone fell 2.4%, driven by steep declines in Ontario and Alberta, the very provinces with the most acute housing needs. Single-family permits fell off a cliff — down more than 10% year-over-year. That’s not a slowdown. That’s a stall.

Meanwhile, British Columbia and Quebec where government intervention is particularly heavy barely managed to offset the damage. The number of new dwellings authorized actually shrank month over month. And this is happening in the middle of a so-called national housing push.

StatsCan didn’t sugarcoat it. They didn’t blame foreign investors or greedy landlords or some phantom market force. They just showed the raw data: Permits are falling. Housing starts are lagging. Builders are retreating.

So let’s just pause here and appreciate the sheer absurdity of what we witnessed. A parade of officials, flanked by branded podiums and tax-funded media handlers, standing in front of a construction site to announce, with straight faces, that they are upgrading a sewer line. And for this, we are told we are “building Canada strong.” Really? That’s the pitch? Fixing basic municipal plumbing is now a nation-building moment?

No! Let’s be clear, you’re not building Canada strong. You’re doing your job. A sewer upgrade in Toronto is not some heroic act of visionary leadership. It’s literally maintenance. It’s what functioning governments are supposed to do, quietly, competently, without a six-camera press choreography and a round of applause from party MPs.

But in Liberal Carney Canada the bar has been lowered so dramatically that simply clearing a permit backlog and patching old infrastructure is treated like a moon landing. They break the system, congratulate themselves for patching one pipe, and expect gratitude.

If you want praise for fixing aging civic infrastructure, something cities used to handle without a national press event, then that tells us everything. It tells us the Liberal government has become so hollow, so addicted to performance politics, that maintenance is now treated as achievement. That’s how far we’ve fallen in just ten years.

They didn’t rebuild a nation. They didn’t launch a housing renaissance. They unclogged a sewer, and are now demanded a standing ovation. And that, in a single image, is modern Liberal Canada: the total collapse of standards, repackaged as progress and sold back to you at full price.

Canadians don’t need more press conferences. They need homes, dignity, and a government that works without constant applause. And if unclogging a pipe is what passes for leadership now — then God help the country.

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