9,000 SNC-Lavalin Jobs Versus 250,000 Canadians Who Make Their Income from Canola

Canola matters!

Watching CPAC the other day I was taken aback to read the caption that 250,000 Canadians, including 43,000  farmers, make their incomes from the sale of canola.  (See https://www.canolacouncil.org/markets-stats/industry-overview/ for more.) 40% of Canada's canola is sold to China.  China is currently blocking all imports of Canadian canola on the grounds that it contains contaminants.  (Remember when George W. Bush blocked the importation of Canadian beef for two years? I actually know some Canadian beef producers who went bankrupt as a result.)

An exercise in futility

In Canada, the common presumption is that the Chinese blockade is retaliation for the fact that we continue to hold Sabrina Meng Wanzhou, the Huawei CFO, under house arrest pending extradition.  This Chinese retaliation is outrageous, unfair, unjust; therefore, it's time for all of us Canadians to get together and scream and howl and whine and throw tantrums at one another.  Feel better?  I don't.

The obvious, legal, just solution:  release Meng Wanzhou

The solution is obvious, legal, just and appropriate: release Meng Wanzhou.  ( See A Dozen Reasons the Minister of Justice Should Release Sabrina Meng Wanzhou.)  Rather than doing what is obvious and justified our politicians have painted themselves (and us) into a corner with the false and hypocritical claims that in Canada extradition is a "non-political, judicial affair" and Canada is following "the rule of law." No matter how obviously false and how many ways these claims can be disproven, they continue to be repeated.  (Please consult the Canadian Extradition Act.)

In comparison to the consequences of Canada's arrest of Meng, the SNC-Lavalin scandal is minor--unless you are a politician

Despite the serious consequences for individual Canadians of the breakdown of our diplomatic and trade relations with China, Canadian politicians and the media remain relentlessly focused on the SNC-Lavalin soap opera.  It might seem a stretch to imagine that 250,000 Canadians are about to lose 40% of their income (or 100,000 Canadians are about to lose 100% of their income), but even if the numbers are inflated, they are the tip of the iceberg of consequences about to come our way.  By comparison, the loss of 9000 SNC-Lavalin jobs is the lesser disaster, but even this claim has been debunked.  The company has signed undertakings, agreements and leases requiring that it remain in Canada for years to come.  The only real consequence of the SNC-Lavalin scandal is that, come October, in the game of musical chairs that we call Canadian democracy, some politicians will lose their seats and others will get seats.  The ramifications for individual Canadians will be minuscule. In contrast, Canadian bungling of the Meng extradition request has (according to most commentators) led to the imprisonment of two Canadians, the death sentence of a third, and, potentially, massive job and financial losses for Canadians in both the short and long term.  An additional consequence is that, in the eyes of the world, Canada will appear, not just plain stupid, but ready and eager to kowtow to American dictates no matter how spurious and counter-to-Canadian interests the requests.  (See Why Does Everyone Care So Much about the Meng Issue?)

The US Grand Jury indictment is an invitation to release Meng

The US attorneys have unsealed the Grand Jury indictment of Meng Wanzhou and made it available online.  You can see the complete document here:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1125021/download

Rather than showing Meng's potential guilt, the indictment seems almost like an invitation to Canadian officials to dismiss the extradition request.  If you read the document carefully, you will discover how weak, insubstantial, unprecedented and lacking in evidence the accusations are.  It is pretty dry reading, so let me parse out a few key passages and observations.

Guilt by association

The indictment conflates four defendants.  This conflation has the rhetorical effect of making Meng guilty by association. Let me unpack the obvious point here, because it really matters, even though it's surprising that it needs to be said:  being the citizen of a country accused of spying or corruption does not make you a spy or a criminal.  Being the employee, even the CFO, of a company that is accused of a crime does not make you a criminal.  Being the daughter of a man accused of a crime does not make you a criminal.  Despite the obviousness of this logic, the indictment attempts to make Meng Wanzhou guilty of a crime, simply by associating her with Huawei, with her father, the founder of Huawei, and with Skycom, a German company doing business in Iran.  However, since the Canadian concern is only with the accusations against Meng, it should be a simple matter to separate her, as an individual, from the co-accused--all of them companies--she is being associated with.

Meng is the only individual ever charged for doing business in Iran

To reiterate, Meng Wanzhou is the only individual to be accused in the indictment, the other defendants are companies.  In fact, Meng is the only individual ever to be accused of a crime in this type of case even though there is a long list of companies and financial institutions which have been convicted of the crime she is accused of indirectly committing--moving money in Iran.

Here is a short, selected list of the companies which have already been convicted in the USA of financial dealings with Iran:

J.P. Morgan Chase:  the company paid a fine of $5.3 million

Deutsche Bank was caught making transactions in Iran worth $10.86 billion and was fined $258 million.

Societe Generale, the French bank, undertook $15.5 billion in transactions with Iran and was fined $1.3 billion

Hewlett-Packard sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of products to Iran  I haven't found evidence of any punishment having been enforced against HP.

Standard Charter Bank was convicted of doing 100s of billions of dollars of business with Iran and was fined $1.5 billion.

ING, Barclays, Credit Suisse, ABN Amro Bank, and the Australian and New Zealand Banking Group have all been convicted of contravening American sanctions and paid fines.

Canadian Extradition is political and the decision is up to David Lametti

In all of these cases not a single individual was convicted or even charged with a crime.  The  Minister of Justice, David Lametti, is tasked, according to the Extradition Act, with considering "all the relevant circumstances" and determining if the extradition request is "unfair" or would impose a penalty of less than two years imprisonment on the individual accused, or is based on politics, ethnicity or nationality.  How can the Minister look at this list of precedents and conclude that the extradition request is fair, that it is not political, not based on Meng's nationality or ethnicity, and will likely result in Meng serving more than two years in an American prison--as required by the Act?  Should reason prevail, the Minister according to the law can dismiss the extradition request "at any time,"  yet, I have seen no evidence that the possibility is even being considered or, based on the firing of Canada's ambassador to China, is even allowed to be considered.

What is the evidence that Meng committed a crime?

If Canadian law (the Extradition Act) does not convince you that Meng should be released, consider the evidence against her as spelt out in the indictment.

"Between approximately February 2008 and April 2009, MENG served on the SKYCOM Board of Directors."

She was on the board of Skycom for approximately a year.  None of the members of the board of any companies doing business with Iran which I have listed above has ever been charged with a crime.  The USA has an extradition treaty with Germany, but no other member of the Skycom board, past or present, has been accused of a crime.

The only evidence of a potential crime is a PowerPoint presentation and some "talking points" from 2014 which she had deleted from her laptop (and presumably the FBI or CIA or NSA of DoJ were able to recover--while they manage to make deleting an old file seem very suspicious).  I have read through those "talking points" which are in English, but I have to assume English is not the language in which she wrote them, and I can't see any way in which they are relevant.  I invite you to consider them and (if you can) please explain to me how they are evidence of a crime.

As for the PowerPoint presentation, which has been under discussion since the day Meng was arrested (and as her lawyer immediately pointed out, she did not prepare herself):

"During the meeting, which took place on or about August 22, 2013, MENG spoke in Chinese, relying in part on a PowerPoint presentation written in Chinese. Upon request by the Financial Institution 1 Executive, MENG arranged for an English-language version of the PowerPoint presentation to be delivered to Financial Institution 1 on or about September 3, 2013. 

19. In relevant part, the PowerPoint presentation included numerous misrepresentations regarding HUAWEI's ownership and control of SKYCOM and HUAWEI's compliance with applicable U.S. law, [. . . .]"

This very thin thread is, apparently, the only evidence that Meng, as an individual, committed a crime.  It is not pure pedantry to point out that "Chinese" is not a language, any more than Indian, African, Canadian or Brazilian are languages.  Presumably, she spoke in Mandarin to the executive of "Financial Institution 1" (as it is identified in the indictment) and the executive in question also spoke Mandarin.  We know from earlier published reports that "Financial Institution 1" is, in fact, HSBC (the Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation).  Anyone who understands translation would also understand that a translated document should never stand as absolute evidence unless it can be carefully compared to the original text.  It seems safe to assume that the Grand Jury could not read Mandarin.

The victims of Meng's crimes

Despite the seriousness of the issues, it is hard to read the expression "Victim Financial Institutions" in the indictment without a sour chuckle.  These "victims" are exactly the financial institutions which have been making billions in profits from sidestepping US sanctions against Iran and other countries (some of which I have just listed above).

As the New York Times pointed out

"In 2017 [ . . .] HSBC provided the prosecutors with Ms. Meng’s 2013 PowerPoint presentation. HSBC said this week that it was cooperating with the government and was not under investigation itself."

The same article details that prior to the Meng investigation

"federal prosecutors had accused it [HSBC] of willfully failing to stop money laundering by customers, including in countries like Iran. To settle that investigation, HSBC had paid a $1.9 billion fine, entered into a deferred prosecution agreement and agreed to have a court-supervised monitor installed inside the bank."

HSBC and the US Attorney make SNC-Lavalin and the Liberals look like lily-white, innocent lambs 

(Yes, HSBC got one of those precious "deferred prosecution agreements" that SNC-Lavalin has been begging Canadian prosecutors and politicians for.)  The point here is that HSBC has huge financial incentives for putting the blame for their most recent financial transactions in Iran onto Meng Wanzhou.   The US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, Richard Donoghue, the former Chief Litigator for CA Technologies, a Huawei competitor, who led the prosecution team in the Grand Jury hearing and issued the original warrant for Meng's arrest in Canada, also appears to have a vested interest in allowing HSBC to escape prosecution and making Meng responsible for HSBC doing business in Iran.

In a democratic country that prizes free speech, why has there been no discussion of the merits of Meng's defence?

Since December 1, 2018, when Meng was first arrested (actually since three days before, when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was informed of the pending arrest) the Canadian Minister of Justice (Jody Wilson-Raybould at the time, now David Lametti) has had the right and the obligation according to Canadian law (the Extradition Act) to "at any time" refuse the arrest and deny the extradition.  Despite the absurdity of the conflicts-of-interest situation, despite the law, despite the weakness of the case against Meng, no-one (with the exception of the now-fired John McCallum) has dared to say a word about the merits of Meng's defence in the public domain.

Meng's bail conditions compared to Bernie Madoff's

Despite the urgency of the situation and the potentially dire consequences of the Meng extradition,  Canadians remain mired in media coverage of the endless he-said-she-said melodrama of SNC-Lavalin.  The comment I hear most frequently from Canadians about the Meng extradition is "Oh look, she gets to stay in her Vancouver mansion!"  Just for the record, the Meng bail conditions, a 10-million-dollar bond and house arrest, are exactly the same bail conditions which US courts imposed on Bernie Madoff, the Wall Street titan who ran a 64-billion-dollar Ponzi scheme defrauding pension funds, charitable foundations and thousands of individuals.

Why Does Everyone Care So Much about This Huawei Issue?

The Huawei case matters to Canadians

I don’t know about “everyone,” but I can tell you why I, as a Canadian, “care so much about the Huawei issue.” In theory Canada and the USA are independent countries and trading partners. However, for most of my adult life, I have been aware of the argument that in practice the relationship is more like a colony and the empire which controls that colony. In this kind of colony-empire relationship the colony can benefit from the relationship and pursue its own interests, but when the interests of the colony and the interests of the empire are in conflict, the colony must always give priority to the interests of the empire. No case in my life time has more acutely demonstrated Canada acting against its own interests in order to serve the interests of the USA than the arrest and extradition of the Huawei CFO.

Diversifying our trading partners versus "the China clause"

As an independent country it is in Canada’s obvious interest to diversify its trading partners, to establish trading relations with other countries and most importantly with China, the second largest and fastest growing economy on the planet. It is in Canada’s interest to adopt Huawei’s 5G technology, and to benefit from the jobs and research that Huawei Canada has to offer. The Americans have made their opposition to Canada-China trade relations clear by insisting on what is known as “the China clause” in the recent US-Canada-Mexico trade agreement.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/...

Arresting Meng blocks Canada's trade with China:  who benefits?

Requiring Canada to arrest Meng (she could have been arrested in numerous other countries) had strategic value for US interests: by causing a rift between China and Canada. Thus the Americans doubly insured that trade negotiations between the two countries would be halted. However, it is not American behaviour which disturbs me and makes me “care so much about the Huawei case.” The behaviour of Canadian politicians and the Canadian media is what I find incredibly frustrating and disturbing—and makes me care about the Huawei case more than ever.

Are Canadians really honest, law abiding and open-minded?

Canadians tend to think of themselves as honest, law abiding, and open-minded. We admire politicians and media journalists who tell us repeatedly that we are honest, law-abiding and open-minded. As long as we keep hearing this message, we have no reason to question ourselves. We can focus our attention and outrage on “other people” who are not as honest as we are. However, in the Huawei case, our politicians have not been honest, the media has simply repeated the lies and mistakes of our politicians, and two thirds of Canadians have believed what they have been told. We have not followed the law, the Canadian Extradition Act, in the Meng extradition case. We have remained closed-minded, refusing—in the public domain—to even consider that the Meng extradition is not in keeping with Canadian law. The Canadian ambassador to China was fired by the Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, just for saying that Meng had a strong case—which experts agreed was obvious. The new Justice Minister, David Lametti (the former Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould was demoted in the middle of Meng case) has decided to proceed with the Meng extradition. What chance was there that he would decide against extradition when his boss, the Prime Minister, had fired the ambassador, just for saying that not extraditing Meng was a possible outcome? Despite this obvious political interference and the new Justice Minister saying publicly that extradition is “political,” you will still hear politicians, journalists and people in general in Canada insisting that the Meng extradition is a “non-political, judicial” affair.

Why are Canadians operating against their own best interests?

Why are Canadians behaving this way? This is where the case gets so sad and I find myself caring so much. The only reason I can see (other than a total lack of awareness) that our politicians, our media and people in general would behave this way is that they have automatically adopted the attitude of the victim, of the colony, and are convinced that if we don’t do what we think the USA wants, we will be severely punished. How pathetic! We had ample reason to reject the initial warrant: the US Attorney, Richard Donoghue, who issued the warrant, was in a conflict of interest. We had ample reason to deny extradition: it was obviously political, based on Meng’s nationality and ethnicity, and there was no precedent for arresting an executive in this type of case. The Americans (in general) would have accepted our legal arguments and might even have respected our independence, but instead we reverted to cowering acquiescence and the self-delusion that we Canadians are honest, law-abiding and open-minded.

A Comparison of Scandals: SNC-Lavalin Versus the Extradition of the Huawei CFO

The collapse of the Liberal Government

Months away from an election, with the resignations of Jody Wilson-Raybould (Veterans Affairs Minister), Gerry Butts (Prime Minister's Chief of Staff), and now Jane Philpott (President of Treasury Board), the Liberal Government is collapsing under the weight of the SNC-Lavalin scandal.  Is the Government being brought down by the "right" scandal?

Remediation legislation tailor-made for SNC-Lavalin

In September, 2018, the Liberal Government passed the "Remediations Agreement" legislation, tailor-made to allow SNC-Lavalin to escape prosecution for bribing public officials in Libya.  Although the legislation was an amendment to the Criminal Code, it was passed as a part of a Budget Implementation Act (Bill C-17).  No doubt to the surprise and consternation of the Liberal Government, the Public Prosecutors Office decided to proceed with the criminal prosecution of SNC-Lavalin rather than negotiate a "remediation agreement" as permitted by the newly-passed legislation.

The origin of the scandal

In most chronologies the scandal began when Jody Wilson-Raybould had a meeting September 17, 2018, with the Prime Minister and the Clerk of the Privy Council, Michael Wernick, and they raised the economic and political implications of the Public Prosecutor's decision to proceed with criminal charges against SNC Lavalin.  However, as law professors Jennifer Quaid and Emilie Taman point out an op-ed in the Financial Post, "Ottawa officials keep pushing myths about 'remediation agreements' amid the SNC-Lavalin scandal," the mess began with the original bill which was rushed through as a budget bill without sufficient consultation, reflection  or scrutiny.

"National economic interest" cannot be considered

Quad and Taman confirm that "In the specific context of prosecutions under the Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act (under which SNC is charged), the national economic interest is explicitly excluded as a relevant factor."  In addition, they explain that "The prohibition against taking it [national economic interest] into account is taken from the OECD Convention on Corruption and is designed to prevent countries from favouring local businesses in the enforcement of corruption offences. We would be at odds with our major trading partners if we did not abide by this rule." (The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development is made up of 36 member countries including Canada, the USA, the UK, etc.)

Paying bribes on foreign and on Canadian government contracts

I remain convinced that the Canadian extradition of the Huawei CFO is a more significant scandal.  However, Radio Canada's Enquete episode on SNC-Lavalin has caused me to waiver in my conviction that SNC-Lavalin's crimes are water under the bridge. (There is an intended pun here.) As the episode outlines, SNC-Lavalin established a pattern of paying brides in Libya and Tunisia, then continued the practice in Canada paying bribes, most notably to Dr. Arthur Porter, Director General and CEO of the McGill University Health Center, and Michel Fournier, the Director of the Federal Bridge Corporations responsible for construction on the Jacques Cartiers and Champlain bridges in Montreal.

SNC-Lavalin crimes and punishments

Fourrnier, who had extensive and close ties to the Liberal Party and was appointed to the Federal Bridge Corporation by the Liberal Government, was convicted of accepting 2.3 million dollars in bribes from SNC-Lavalin and sentenced to five and half years in prison--the longest prison sentence yet imposed.  However, Fournier is now out of prison having served less than a year of his sentence.  Arthur Porter and Yanai Elbaz were charged with receiving 22 million in bribes from SNC-Lavalin.  Elbaz pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 39 months; Porter died in Panama before he could be brought to trial.  The former CEO of SNC-Lavalin, Pierre Duhaime, pleaded guilty to  "helping a public servant commit breach of trust" and was sentenced to 20 months of house arrest. Riadh Ben Aissa, an SNC-Lavalin Executive responsible for construction, pleaded guilty to forgery and money laundering in Switzerland and has been sentenced to 51 months.

There has never been an SNC-Lavalin trial

The culprits have been caught and convicted; why pursue further investigations and another trial?  As the investigative journalists of Enquete point out, a number of people have been convicted of receiving bribes from SNC-Lavalin, but no-one from Lavalin has ever been convicted (or charged) with paying a bribe.  Where did the money come from?  And where has it gone?  There has never been an SNC-Lavalin trial.  All the felons have negotiated their convictions and sentences, which implies that all the the details, strategies and mechanisms of their crimes remain undisclosed.

Remediation requires that the company comes clean

In this context we can better understand the Public Prosecutor's determination to go to trial.  As Quaid and Taman point out, the protection of employees and stockholders "is not sufficient to justify a RA. There is a good reason for this: In order for RAs to work, they have to focus on promoting compliance, which presupposes that the company is willing and able to admit it acted badly and to change its ways."

How can the prosecutors confirm compliance if they remain in the dark about how the company's illegal activities have operated in the past?  As the investigators of Enquete underlined, remediation agreements can easily become "corruption tax" [my translation]:  companies pay bribes or commit fraud and when they get caught, under remediation, they pay a fine, which they can easily afford, and this process becomes business as usual.

Is the scandal political, ethical or criminal?

How big a scandal is the Liberal Government's attempt to pressure the Ministry of Justice into arranging a remediation agreement for SNC-Lavalin?  The political fallout is now obvious.  We can easily imagine the scandal costing the Liberals the upcoming election.  The Liberals would be more than happy to contain the scandal as an "ethical violation" and accept a slap on the wrist from the Ethics Commissioner.  Were the Liberal Government's actions criminal?

The Relationship between the Attorney General and the Director of Public Prosecutions is governed by precise and measured legislation.  The purpose of the Public Prosecutor's Office is to ensure the "independence of the prosecution decision-making function from inappropriate political control, direction and influence."  On the other hand, the act also gives the Attorney General the power to "issue directives in respect of specific prosecutions" and even "to intervene in proceedings or to assume conduct of prosecutions."  Jody Wilson-Raybould had the power to intervene in the SNC-Lavalin case.  Her intervention, in itself, would have been "extraordinary" (a first, in fact, as pointed out in the Justice Committee hearings) but it would not have been criminal.  However, had she intervened, the reasons being suggested for her intervention would have made her actions illegal and criminal.

If she had intervened for economic reasons she would have been acting in contradiction to the law governing Remediation Agreements which clearly states that "national economic interests" cannot be considered.  If she intervened for political reasons, to save votes in Quebec, she would have been contravening the act which established the Public Prosecutors Office.  In other words, if she had succumbed to the pressure, she and the Liberal Government would have been guilty of criminal acts--contraventions of both the Remediations Agreements act and Public Prosecutions act.  The Liberal Government should be grateful for her stalwart defense of the law and preventing them from committing criminal acts.

How Gerry Butts avoided answering Justice Committee questions

Listening to Gerry Butts before the Justice Committee, I was struck by how he invoked "not wanting to caste aspersions," "not going to answer hypotheticals," and "not being a lawyer" with such frequency that his two and a half hours of testimony resulted in very little substance.  His rebuttal of Wilson-Raybould's detailed testimony was largely about character; in the vein of "I'm a good person, so I wouldn't say or do that;"  "they are good people, so trust me, they wouldn't say that"--which he used to dodge every single question about whether a Wilson-Raybould claim was true or false.

"National economic interests":  finally the question gets asked!

As I predicted in my previous post, his reiterated and often emotional justification for the government actions (meaning the pressure they put on Wilson-Raybould, but didn't really put on her) was 9,000 jobs--exactly the argument which the Public Prosecutor was not allowed to consider according to the Remediations Agreement law.  Surprisingly no-one on the Justice Committee raised the problem of this contradiction, even though Conservative MP Michel Rempel raised exactly this point in the House of Commons.  Does this absence of Conservative comment in the Justice Committee mean that a Conservative Government might be planning to offer SNC-Lavalin a Remediation Agreement if elected in six months?

Only Erin Weir, the Saskatchewan MP from the  Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), asked a question which came close to exposing the contradiction between Butt's liberal mantra of 9000 jobs and the letter of the Remediations Agreement law.  Unfortunately, Weir misidentified the law as a DPA (deferred prosecution agreement) and was himself misidentified by CBC as an NDP MP.  Gerald Butts was able to sidestep the question.

It took another two and a half hours in the afternoon of the committee hearings before Charlie Angus of the NDP and Elizabeth May,  Leader of the Green Party, raised the question, one after the other, of the provision within the Remediation Agreement legislation that "national economic interests" were not to be considered.  (I am delighted to report that within two hours of the hearings the National Post picked up on exactly the argument I would make.)  In response, Michael Wernick showed that he was very familiar with the expression "national economic interest,"  mumbling that "if you consult a lawyer they might have a different interpretation" then offered that the "public interest" of 9000 jobs was somehow different from "national economic interest."  The second time the question was asked, Wernick brusquely replied that this paragraph was "cut-and-paste from OECD regulations," conceding how haphazardly the Canadian legislation was put together, that he himself wasn't certain how the law should be  interpreted even though he was adamant the "9000 Canadian jobs argument" was acceptable, and since we just copied it into our Criminal Code, it really doesn't count, right?

Fallout from the Meng extradition?

In the meantime, while Canada and Canadians spent the day focused on the arrangement of the deck chairs, little attention has been paid to the fact that the ship may be sinking.  Meng spent 17 minutes in court today and her next hearing is set for May 7.  Mission accomplished for corporate America with collusion from the Canadian government.  Huawei's CFO and top global sales person remains under house arrest,  while exactly what she (as an individual) is accused of and what the evidence against her is remains under cover of darkness.  China refused a 5-million-dollar shipment of canola from Canada and "Canada’s economy practically grinds to a halt — and nobody saw it coming." Canadian exports to China were valued at $21.5 billion last year but that trade is shrinking fast.  Two Canadians are in prison and a third awaits execution.  No expression of sympathy or outrage from Canadian politicians will have any effect on their fates.

Laws that permit Government intervention and those that don't:  We got it backwards!

In the meantime the Liberal Government has clearly attempted to interfere in a judicial process which Canadian law clearly prevents them from interfering with--the prosecution of SNC-Lavalin.  And in the legal case (the Meng extradition) where the law clearly spells out that political (Minister of Justice) action is not just accepted but expected and required, the government seems paralyzed.  Listening to Robert Fife, Globe and Mail Bureau Chief, describing the new Minister of Justice, David Lametti, as "becoming a joke," and "every time they let him out he says something stupid" fills me with trepidation.  This "joke" is tasked with determining the outcome of the Meng extradition and our future relations with China.

Addendum

SNC-Lavalin VP convicted in Montreal, Dec. 15, 2019

Comparing "Remediation Agreements" and the Canadian Extradition Act, or Did the Liberal Obsession with SNC-Lavalin Prevent Jody Wilson-Raybould from Dealing with the Meng Extradition?

Asking you to compare the amendments to the Criminal Code entitled "Remediation Agreements" with the Canadian Extradition Act is probably way too nerdy a request.  Nonetheless, if you are as nerdily inclined as I am, and you have given up on getting any factual information through the Canadian media, as I have, you now have links to both documents online.

The first thing you will notice if you browse these documents (okay, I'm guessing you won't) is that the "Remediation Agreements" legislation, even though it is an amendment to the Criminal Code was passed as part a Budget Implementation Act (Bill C-17) under the purview of the Department of Finance.  In her explosive testimony to the Justice Committee yesterday, Jody Wilson-Raybould was goaded a number of times into saying she didn't like Remediation Agreements.  She wisely and judiciously declined to comment, but we can imagine she accepted but was not thrilled by this legislation which was clearly designed by the Liberal Government to get SNC-Lavalin off the hook.  Listening to her testifying yesterday, it became apparent to me that rewriting the criminal code to accommodate one particularly powerful company was not how Jody Wilson-Raybould thought the law should operate.

It is an understatement that we will hear ad infinitum in the days ahead that there was a failure of communication between the Prime Minister's Office and the Ministry of Justice, but the ultimate take-away is that Justin Trudeau was out of his depth dealing with the SNC-Lavalin case and out of his depth dealing with Jody Wilson-Raybould.   The fact that so many of his underlings and a civil servant like Michael Wernick took it upon themselves to pressure the Ministry of Justice tells me they felt Trudeau couldn't do what needed to be done and he, in turn, naively thought if the pressure was applied by his minions, he could maintain what President John Kennedy once infamously called "plausible deniability."

The absurdity of the situation is that it appears that no-one in the PMO actually read the Remediations Agreement act which they had passed.   If you compare the Extradition Act and Remediations Agreement legislation, you will notice that the Minister of Justice and Attorney General (they are one person) is mentioned repeatedly (more than 100 times) in the Extradition Act.  The Minister is called upon to act and guided as how to act in extradition cases.  In contrast, the Remediations Agreement regime mentions the Attorney General exactly twice:

The "remediation agreement" requires the AG's consent.  The process can only proceed if "the Attorney General has consented to the negotiation of the agreement."  Once the agreement is in place, profits from the company's crimes are "to be disposed of as the Attorney General directs."

The law is framed in such a way as to assume that everyone will go along with a remediation agreement.  No consideration was given to the idea that a prosecutor might refuse to use the Remediation Agreement legislation.  There is no provision in the legislation for the AG to recommend, advise, council or in any way interfere with the prosecutor's decision if the prosecutor chose a criminal trail over remediation.  The PMO, the Finance Minister and the Clerk of the Privy Council weren't just asking Jody Wilson-Raybould to use the influence of her office, they were asking her to break the laws which they themselves had written.

While the "powers that be" seemed to have forgotten that they gave Jody Wilson-Raybould no power over remediation agreements (other than to approve them), they did continue to hound her to do what she had no power to do: impose a remediation agreement.  No doubt as a crumb of respect, since the legislation apparently came from Finance and not Justice, the legislation twice mentions the Minister of Justice, giving her the power to make "recommendations" on future changes to the legislation.

At yesterdays's hearing, the NDP Member of the Justice Committee, Nathan Cullen, spoke of "the incredible hypocrisy" of the Trudeau Liberals talking of "judicial independence from political influence in the Huawei CFO extradition case" at the same time they were actively interfering in the SNC-Lavalin criminal case.  Cullen's point is well taken, but it is also important to understand the difference in the two legislations.  Unlike the Remediation Agreement legislation, the Extradition Act  specifically gives the Minister of Justice the power to act and gives multiple grounds on which she must act (see A Dozen Reasons to Release Meng).

Listening to Jody Wilson-Raybould's testimony yesterday, and realizing for the first time that she is an astute lawyer with an impressive command of the facts and the law, I was more surprised than ever that she had not dealt with the Meng extradition case.  Could the chaos of the SNC-Lavalin case have undermined what needed to be done when Richard Donoghue, the US Attorney, requested Meng's arrest?  Was Jody Wilson-Raybould left out of the loop when Justin Trudeau was informed three days in advance of the Meng arrest because Trudeau was already gun shy from having pressured Wilson-Raybould over SNC-Lavalin?  Was Wilson-Raybould hamstrung from dealing with the Meng extradition because she was on her way out as Minister of Justice?  Six weeks after the Meng arrest and two weeks before the Americans presented the indictment against Huawei Wilson-Raybould was demoted out of Justice.

Last night's and today's press conferences make it clear that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's new mantra is "jobs, jobs, jobs" to excuse political interference in the SNC-Lavalin case.  However, our trade relations with China and the future of Huawei in Canada will also affect "jobs, jobs, jobs," not to mention technological advancement in Canada and the fact that two Canadians remain in a Chinese prison and a third is facing the death penalty.  The law, the Canadian Extradition Act, allowed him to solve the problem in concert with the Minister of Justice, but it appears that his mind was elsewhere.

Despite all the brouhaha, all the smoke, we should ask the question at the centre of the Liberal Government-SNC-Lavalin scandal.  Why didn't the prosecutor use the Remediation Agreement legislation with SNC-Lavalin?  In light of everything that has been said and is being said about the case, this paragraph from the Remediation Agreement legislation took my breath away.

Factors not to consider
(3) Despite paragraph (2)‍(i), if the organization is alleged to have committed an offence under section 3 or 4 of the Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act, the prosecutor must not consider the national economic interest, the potential effect on relations with a state other than Canada or the identity of the organization or individual involved. 

The Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act is Canadian legislation which says that it is a crime in Canada if a company paid bribes to public officials in another country.  This is exactly what SNC-Lavalin is accused of doing:  paying bribes in Libya from 2001 to 2012.    The law specifically instructs the prosecutor that she must not consider "national economic interest" in deciding whether or not to offer SNC-Lavalin a Remediation Agreement.  Obviously this is what the prosecutor has done.  She has followed the law and not taken into consideration the effects on the national economy--job losses, decline in stock prices and the risk of SNC-Lavalin moving their head office--in making her decision.  Ironically, or maybe it is just plain absurdity, the PMO and Department of Finance were pressuring the Minister of Justice to, in turn, pressure the prosecutor, to make a deal with SNC-Lavalin, using exactly the argument--"national economic interest"--which they specified in the legislation they themselves drafted should not be considered.

Absurdity will be piled upon absurdity in the days ahead, as the Liberals will have to argue that a remediation deal with SNC-Lavalin was in "the national economic interest"--exactly what they said should not be considered when they drafted the legislation in the first place.  Will any paid, professional journalist in Canada have a look at the Remediation Agreement legislation and point out this contradiction?   Hmmmm  . . . . probably not.

Addendum

A good friend just (3 March 2019) brought to my attention an article in the Globe and Mail (21 February 2019) by Robert Fife and Steven Chase ("Wilson-Raybould told cabinet SNC-Lavalin pressure was inappropriate") in which they note that "Under Canada’s new deferred-prosecution agreement law, prosecutors are not allowed to consider national economic interests when deciding whether to settle with a company."  I must humbly acknowledge that this is exactly the legal fact that I was trying to goad the mainstream media into promulgating.

The article also mentions that "Mr. Trudeau has acknowledged he raised concerns about the economic impact that a conviction could have on SNC-Lavalin when he met privately with the then-justice minister and attorney-general on Sept. 17 [ . . . .]" and additionally, "time and time again in Question Period he said anything he did was in the service of sustaining jobs in Canada."  Much as I congratulate Fife and Chase for mentioning the law in this article; rhetorically speaking, they did very little to highlight and draw attention to the fact that what the Liberal Prime Minister has admitted doing and done publicly in the House of Commons was in direct contradiction to the legislation on Remediation Agreements which the Liberal Government framed, drafted and passed into law.

Addendum 2

More comeuppance for me in my strident claims that the mainstream media was not informing Canadians of the law regarding Remediation Agreements.  I just (4 March 2019) read a really excellent answer to an SNC-Lavalin question on Quora which included a link to this article in the Financial Post (28 February 2019) by Jennifer Quaid and Emilie Taman entitled "Ottawa officials keep pushing myths about 'remediation agreements' amid the SNC-Lavalin scandal."  The authors note that:  

In the specific context of prosecutions under the Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act (under which SNC is charged), the national economic interest is explicitly excluded as a relevant factor.
Remediation agreements may often turn out to be in the national economic interest, but the decision as to whether to negotiate them cannot be driven by that consideration.

Quaid and Taman go on to explain why the legislation is such a mess and may indirectly explain why the Prime Minister doesn't seem to know the details of the legislation his government passed.

Addendum 3

Correction:  In this post I claimed that Jody Wilson-Raybould had "no power" to impose a Remediation Agreement.  My claim was an exaggeration.  The new Remediation Agreement legislation did not specify that she could interfere in the case.  However, the Act governing the Relationship between the Attorney General and the Director of Public Prosecutions did give Jody Wilson-Raybould the power to interfere in a Public Prosecution but this power has never been used and if ever it is used a written justification must be published and made public.  For more, see: A Comparison of Scandals: SNC-Lavalin Versus the Extradition of the Huawei CFO

Liberal Entropy: The Challenge of Doing Nothing

Conservative, Liberal, Socialist:  The Basics

I used to baseline the three dominant political positions this way:  a conservative wants the country to stay more or less the way it is or has been, a socialist wants society to change and a liberal believes that everything will turn out fine if we do nothing.  Logically, the Conservative Party tends to attract the well-to-do who are enjoying the status quo.   A left-leaning party like the NDP (the only party I've ever been a member of) will find its numbers in the working and lower middle class.  The Liberal Party enjoys the advantage of the middle-class, middle ground while appearing socialist in public and being conservative in private.  The problem of the Liberal Party isn't so much hypocrisy (though some might rightly call it such) as coherence.  (See Truth and Coherence.)

Me a Liberal?!!  Okay, Maybe Sometimes.

My lefty friends have occasionally accused me of being a liberal.  My conservative friends think I'm a lefty liberal.  I have to admit that, in politics, I often think "nothing" is the right thing to do.  I'm rarely disturbed by what goes on (or doesn't go on) in Parliament, because I understand that "doing something" in politics means forming a committee, or writing a letter, making a phone call, or, in most cases, publicly expressing disagreement, disappointment, and even outrage to the point that a phone call, or a letter or a new committee might be required.  It is easy to forget that the principal reason we elect our parliamentarians is for them to vote, and most of the time their votes have absolutely no effect on outcomes because the issues are always decided in advance of a parliamentary vote.

Doing Nothing Isn't Easy

When the Liberal Party wins 39.5% of the popular vote and therefore 100% of the power in our lopsided democracy (see Are Canadian Elections Democratic?), as they did in our last election, we might imagine we can all relax because nothing is going to happen for the next four years.  However, "nothing" isn't as easy to do as you might imagine.  To begin with, there are those nagging little promises made during the election campaign in 2015.

The Liberal Waltz:  One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

Having promised "that 2015 will be the last federal election conducted under the first-past-the-post voting system," the Liberals had the challenge of pretending they were interested in reforming the electoral process while insuring that nothing actually changed.  The Liberals quite rightly and righteously expressed outraged at the imprisonment and torture of Raif Badawi  in Saudi Arabia, then ratified the contract to sell that same Saudi government 15 billion in armoured military vehicles. Liberals never quite being able to pass on a photo op, Chrystia Freeland was there at the airport to welcome a young Saudi woman claiming refugee status.  (Who knew that there was only one young woman in Saudi Arabia who wanted to claim refugee status? Or was this photo op about distracting us from the Meng house arrest?)  On another front, after pledging to "phase out subsidies for the fossil fuel industry over the medium-term," it appears that the plan is to hope that no one notices that we are in the end-term and the subsidies are still in place.  Additionally, there is a semantic argument that buying the Trans Mountain pipeline from Kinder Morgan, the Texas oil and gas infrastructure company, for five billion dollars isn't really subsidizing "the fossil fuel industry"--it's more like a gift.

Here I Go Again

Yet, when the perfect opportunity arose to do nothing and doing nothing would serve the interests of Canada and Canadians, the Liberal Government failed to follow through with its own most basic tenant and mantra.  Imagine the scene when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was informed, three days in advance, that  Sabrina Meng Wanzhou, Huawei CFO, was going to be arrested on a warrant from the US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York.

Minion:  Mr. Prime Minister the Americans have issued a warrant for the arrest of the Huawei CFO in Vancouver.

PMJT:  Uhhh. Wow.  Uhhh. Holy cow. Uhhh.

Minion:  Don't worry, Mr. Prime Minister, this extradition request is not political.  [Wink, wink].  If it was political we would have to refuse the request.  It's definitely not political so you don't have to worry about it.

PMJT:  If it's uhhh not political, why uhhh are you uhhh telling me about it?

Minion:  Well, we like to notify the PM about these things that are non-political.  When it's political we just call the cops . . . ha, ha, ha!

PMJT:  So Trump wants this Huawei executive arrested.

Minion:  God no.  Trump doesn't want her arrested, or maybe he does.  Actually we don't know what Trump wants, but the extradition request was from Richard Donoghue.

PMJT:  Who's Richard Donoghue?

Minion:  He was the Chief Litigator for CA Technologies.

PMJT:  You mean we are going to uhhh arrest one uhhh tech company exec on a warrant from another tech company exec?

Minion: Donoghue just became a US Attorney, so the warrant should be legit.

PMJT:  So uhh what did this Huawei executive do?

Minion:  That's a bit complicated, but basically she is accused of moving money in Iran.

PMJT:  Is that against the law?

Minion:  Not any more, but it was against the law in 2014 when she is accused of doing it.  The Americans are calling it "bank fraud."

PMJT:  "Bank fraud!"  Shit, Minion, why didn't you say so?  Sort of like that uhh Bernie Madoff guy, eh?

Minion:  The Americans are talking about similar sentencing guidelines.  Thirty years in prison for each count.

PMJT:  Wow wee!  Have a lot of people been doing this uhh illegal money thing in Iran?

Minion:  A ton.  A half dozen major banks have already been convicted.

PMJT:  Geez.  So all these bank execs have been sentenced to multiple thirty-year prison terms.

Minion:  Oh no, Prime Minister. [Stiffing a laugh.]  No one has ever been sent to jail for this.  The banks pay a fine.

PMJT:  So we'll extradite her to pay a fine?

Minion:  No, the Extradition Act requires that it be for at least a two-year prison sentence.

PMJT:  If uhh no-one has gone to prison for this before, why are they talking uhh about prison this time?

Minion:  Uhh, Prime Minister [wink, wink], she's Chinese.  Huawei is a Chinese company.

PMJT:  Can we arrest and extradite someone for being Chinese?

Minion:  Not since the Head Tax.  Today it would be against the law, against the Canadian Extradition Act, to extradite someone because of her ethnicity or nationality or for political or purely commercial reasons or if we thought she was going to spend less than two years in prison.

PMJT:  But we are going to arrest her because she is Chinese, from China, a Communist country, and because Huawei is stealing business from the big tech companies, and even though we know she is never going to spend two years in jail.

Minion:  Yes, but you know, the Chinese, the whole "dangerous" and "national security" thing.  Need to worry about "censorship," "backdoors" and that sort of stuff.

PMJT:  So who's in charge of extradition?

Minion:  Jody.

PMJT:  Our Jody?  Why?

Minion:  Because she's the Minister of Justice.

PMJT:  Still?

Minion:  What do you want her to do, Sir?

PMJT:  Nothing.

Minion:  That sounds like a sound policy, Mr. Prime Minister.

Epilogue

"Doing nothing" would have been the perfect policy in this instance if the message had been passed on to the Minister of Justice and the Minister of Public Safety and the RCMP.  The warrant would not have been served with ample justification for not serving the warrant in the overall circumstances and the Canadian Extradition Act.  Sabrina Meng Wanzhou would have continued her itinerary to Mexico and France.  Neither country, I'm willing to bet, would have served her with the American warrant and, most importantly, Canada would not be in the mess our Liberal government's actions have put us in, when we specifically elected them to do nothing.

A Dozen Reasons Why the Canadian Minister of Justice Should Release the Huawei CFO, Sabrina Meng Wanzhou

The "Canadian Extradition Act" Gives the Minister of Justice the Right and Obligation to Release Meng

It's becoming more and more obvious in the media (social, anti-social and other) that the  request for Sabrina Meng Wanzhou's extradition is bogus. Contrary to what you may have read or heard from Canadian politicians about extradition proceedings being out of the hands of the political leadership, the Canadian Extradition Act clearly states that:  "The Minister [of Justice] is responsible for the implementation of extradition agreements, the administration of this Act and dealing with requests for extradition made under them." (For more see Was Freeland Lying?  and How Canada Arrested a Chinese Exec.)

According to The Act, the Canadian Minister of Justice, Jody Wilson-Raybould, can and should intervene in an extradition if she considers it "unjust" after reviewing "all the relevant circumstances."  She can "at any time withdraw the authority to proceed and, if the Minister does so, the court shall discharge the person." The "circumstances" provide ample reasons and The Act provides specific injunctions requiring the Minister to intervene in the case of Sabrina Meng Wanzhou; including the "political" nature of the extradition request, that the request is based on Meng's "nationality and ethnicity," that her alleged crimes would not be prosecuted in Canada, that her alleged white-collar crimes would not warrant two years of imprisonment as required by The Act, that the character and legitimacy of the warrant for Meng's arrest, detention and extradition are highly questionable, and that while the legitimacy of Meng's detention and the extradition proceedings are in serious doubt, they pose a threat to public safety and are counter to Canadian interests.

1. The charges against Meng are not substantive enough to warrant extradition.  

Various media outlets have repeated the claim that each of the charges against Meng is punishable by 30 years of imprisonment.  Stop and consider:  why are we being fed this piece of information?  The exact details of her alleged crimes have remained sketchy, so why has this precise detail of 30 years of imprisonment been so widely and precisely promulgated?  Who is spreading this claim?  For what purpose?  More to the point, even based on the most exaggerated rumours of the seriousness of Meng's alleged crimes, does anybody really believe that an American court is going to throw her in jail for the next 30 or 60 or 90 or 120 years?  So why this emphasis on the maximum sentence?  Because, according to the Extradition Act, in order for the extradition process to proceed, it must be clear that Meng's crimes would be punishable by at least two years of imprisonment.  We don't extradite people for minor crimes; we don't extradite people to pay fines, or be put on probation or be imprisoned for less than two years.  In the aftermath of the financial collapse of 2008 and extensive evidence of wrongdoing, no American was convicted of a crime, but the punishment for white-collar crime in the USA has become a much debated topic.  Based on the information leaked to the public so far, Meng's alleged white-collar crimes fall well below the two-years-of-imprisonment threshold required for extradition.

2.  The accusations against Meng would not constitute a criminal offence in Canada.   

According to media reports, Meng is accused of contravening trade sanctions against Iran; Huawei, of which she is CFO, is accused of selling technology in Iran which contained US components and/or patents, and Meng is accused of bank fraud.  Of these three accusations only "bank fraud" would be a criminal offence in Canada.  To keep it simple, "bank fraud" is stealing money from a bank--but without pointing a gun at anyone.  (You might want to have a look at Should Bank Robbery Be Deregulated?) However, the "bank fraud" in this case is related to sanctions against Iran in that she is accused of failing to inform or hiding from bankers that Huawei owned a shell company which owned a company called Skycom which was doing business with Iran.  (For more detail see:  The Chaos Theory of International Trade.) How much money did she steal?  There is no hint of an answer to this question in the media.  I suspect the answer will be zero.  How much the banks lost determines how long the prison sentence could possibly be.  The claims of a 30-year prison sentence imply that the banks (or a bank) lost billions.  I have seen no claims concerning the amounts that the banks lost despite the repeated claims of multiple 30-year prison sentences. As reporters for the New York Times point out:  HSBC (the bank Meng is accused of defrauding) has repeatedly been convicted of money laundering.  In order to avoid another conviction in the USA for moving money in Iran, they threw Huawei CFO Meng under the bus, claiming that she tricked them into doing it.

Patent Infringement would be a civil and not a criminal case, therefore not grounds for extradition.  Moreover, patent infringement is such a common occurrence in large American companies that the practice has spawned a new expression: infringement efficiency, which means, in short, that stealing patents is good business as long as the amount of money you end up paying if you are found guilty in court is less than the profit made from the stolen patents.

3.  Contravening trade sanctions against Iran is not a crime in Canada.  

(See the Canadian Government's Guide for Doing Business in Iran.) In order to continue to push for extradition, the US Attorney will have to keep pushing the idea of "bank fraud," despite the shadowy, sketchy chain of events which will need to be proven.  The necessary sequence of accusations depends on trade sanctions against Iran.  Canada does restrict trade with Iran, but those restrictions only apply to materials for the construction of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.  The accusations against Meng refer to statements she made (or failed to make) in 2013 or 2014 (depending on which news report you believe).  The year or years are crucial because in 2016 the Obama administration negotiated an anti-nuclear deal with Iran and trade sanctions were lifted.  In 2018 the Trump administration reneged on and cancelled that agreement and unilaterally imposed new sanctions.  Here's a legal question:  Would we prosecute someone for committing a crime which is no longer a crime in Canada?  Need some context?  We just legalized possession of marijuana.  Will we prosecute people if we find proof that they possessed pot before it was legalized?  Still not convinced?  In 1968, homosexuality and various forms of recreational sex were legalized in Canada.  Do you imagine that we might have continued to convict people for acts of homosexuality and oral sex in the 1970s?  We would not prosecute Meng in Canada because the underlying basis of her alleged crimes is currently not criminal in Canada.

4.  There is an underlying conflict of interest in the request for Meng's extradition.  

As I outlined in an earlier post (The Chaos Theory of International Trade), Richard Donoghue is the US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York.  In a matter of months, Donoghue went from being an employee of CA Technologies (their Chief Litigator, in fact) to spearheading the request for Meng's arrest, detention and extradition.  The mere fact that he was so recently employed by a Huawei competitor strongly suggests that he might still be acting as an agent for the benefit of CA Technologies, which puts him in an apparent, if not actual, conflict of interest.

5.  The extradition request is based on Meng's nationality and ethnicity.  

The Canadian Extradition Act explicitly instructs that the Minister of Justice "shall refuse to make a surrender order if the Minister is satisfied that  . . . .  the request for extradition is made for the purpose of prosecuting or punishing the person by reason of their race, religion, nationality, ethnic origin language, colour, political opinion, sex, sexual orientation, age, mental or physical disability or status or that the person’s position may be prejudiced for any of those reasons.  German banks continue to do business in Iran.  The USA has an extradition treaty with Germany, but there have been no reported moves to extradite executives of German banks.  Skycom, the German company at the centre of the accusations against Meng, continues to operate, and there have been no moves to extradite German executives.  When the Standard Chartered Bank of Britain was convicted, in 2012, of doing hundreds of billions of dollars of business with Iran through its New York office, they were required to pay a fine.  No criminal charges have been laid.  Banks found to be in noncompliance and fined with operations in the United States include Barclays, ING, Credit Suisse, Lloyds, and ABN Amro.  No bank executive has faced criminal charges for doing business in Iran.  There is little doubt that the only reason Meng is being singled out for criminal prosecution is because she is Chinese and her company is Chinese.

6.  The extradition request is political.  

The Act specifies that the extradition will be refused if "the conduct in respect of which extradition is sought is a political offence or an offence of a political character."  The political nature of the request is so obvious, it seems redundant to comment.  However, the moment that President Donald Trump tweeted that he was prepared to intervene in the case, he made the case political (if there was any doubt that it already was).  If this case is about "national security" as is being constantly and slyly implied by US politicians and others, then the extradition request is by definition political.  To date, no one has claimed that Meng, as an individual, has done something to jeopardize American or, more importantly in this case, Canadian national security.  [By firing the Canadian Ambassador to China, John McCallum, for stating the obvious--that Meng had a strong case against being extradited--PM Justin Trudeau reinforced the "political" nature of the case.  Worse still, the PM has prejudiced the case against Meng.  The new Justice Minister, David Lametti, will be hard pressed to refuse the extradition after his boss, the PM, fired the Ambassador just for saying Meng had a case.]

7.  Canada is being played.  

For all intents and purposes the extradition request looks like a move by American tech giants to undermine a Chinese technology company which has been taking over a huge swath of the global market share.  Far from attempting to further justice and punish the crimes of an individual, what we are witnessing is one group of business interests blocking the development of a competitor by arranging the arrest of the company's CFO.  My prognosis is that Meng will never be convicted of a crime worthy of imprisonment.  It is unlikely that she will ever stand trial.  However, if the naivety and Dudly-Do-Rightism of Canadian leadership allow the extradition hearings and detainment of Meng to continue for years, then the corporate objective of slowing down the competition will have been achieved--and the Government of Canada will have colluded in that corrupt undertaking.

8.  Public safety.  

The arrests of two Canadians by Chinese authorities, ostensibly in retaliation for the Meng detention, have made the optics of releasing Meng more difficult.  Nonetheless, the Minister of Justice, the Minister of Public Safety (Ralph Goodale) and the Minister of External Affairs (Chrystia Freeland) have the obligation to confer with one another and recognize that they have to prioritize the safety of Canadians over dubious demands for the extradition of one Chinese citizen.

9.  Canadian self-interest.  

Every kid in the schoolyard knows that if some bigger kid asks you to punch yourself in the head, you are being bullied--and if you submit to this bullying, you are encouraging more bullying in the future.  It is in Canada's interests to diversify its trading partners.  It is, in particular, in Canada's interests to increase trade and friendly relations with China.  Canada will greatly benefit from Huawei's 5G technology, and the research funding and business development which Huawei Canada offers.  Of course, we need to maintain our trading partnership, friendly relations and military alliances with the USA, but the occasional demonstration that we are willing to act in our own best interests should strengthen the mutual respect that makes these relationships work.

10.  Canadian sovereignty.  

Historically, when Canada has asserted its independence from American military and foreign policies, our independence has served us well.  Prime Minister Jean Chretien's refusal to enter George W. Bush's Iraq war in 2003 is a good example.  Similarly, PM Lester B. Pearson kept Canada out of the Vietnam War in the 60s.  On June 1, 2018, the Trump administration's imposition of a 25% tariff on Canadian steel on the grounds of "US national security" together with Trump's alienated nationalism has provided a conspicuous opportunity for Canadians to recognize the importance of Canadian independence from American hegemony.  Unfortunately, Canada accepted the inclusion of the "China clause" in the recent US-Canada-Mexico trade agreement which, according to some analysts, has given the USA rights of veto over future Canadian trade deals--in particular, over our trade with China.  The American warrant for the extradition of Sabrina Meng Wanzhou trapped us into the embarrassing situation of arresting Huawei's CFO at the same time that we are courting and receiving Huawei investment in Canada.  Worse still, the arrest of Meng puts a halt to our developing relationship and plans for increased trade with China--once again surrendering our sovereignty to American interests.  Pathetically, in the arrest of Meng we are not even serving explicit American national or security interests, just the corporate interests of American technology companies.

11. Canadian "peace, order and good government."  

Clearly, Canada and China have ideological differences, although I suspect those differences are not well understood in either country.  Canada's ideological tendencies are quite different from those of the USA, and the difference has become pronounced in recent years.  In contrast to the American Declaration of Independence's valourization of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," the Canadian constitution sets out the objectives of the Federal Government as "peace, order and good government."    The American pursuit of life, liberty and happiness has resulted in a state of near-constant warfare throughout the USA's history. The question which our Minister of Justice needs to ask in the Meng extradition case is:  "what decision will best promote and exemplify 'peace, order and good government' in Canada?"  As sparsely and sporadically as I have been informed of the details of the case through the media--and I trust the Minister has been more thoroughly informed--I have become convinced that Canada would be best served by Meng's immediate release.

12.  Canadian respect for the Chinese.  

The Chinese response to the Meng arrest has been to describe it as a gesture of disrespect toward China and the Chinese people.  Canadian apathy toward the Meng arrest has led me to fear that Canadians have been conditioned to accept the melodramatic myth of "The American 'good guys' versus the Chinese [and Asian in general] 'bad guys'."  Distance makes it easy for Canadians to ignore the empirical facts that while the Americans have been spending trillions of dollars on wars in Iraq and elsewhere, resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths, the Chinese have raised 800 million of their fellow citizens out of poverty, and China has not been engaged in a war since the 1970s.  Canada must also respect the Chinese because they have been part of its history since Canada's earliest development in the 18th century.  There are 1.78 million Canadians of Chinese ancestry currently living here.  They have contributed to every aspect of life and culture in Canada, perhaps most iconically represented by our former Governor General Adrienne Clarkson.  Sabrina Meng Wanzhou has herself been a long-term resident of Canada. Attitudes of mistrust and suspicion are unwarranted and insulting to the Chinese of China and to our fellow citizens.  No doubt, apologies will be forthcoming--because we're good at that--but the Government of Canada should act quickly and not allow this insult to linger.

PS Since I first published this post on January 5, 2019, Jody Wilson-Raybould was demoted from Justice to Veterans Affairs.  The middle of a crisis requiring action from the Minister of Justice seems a very strange time (or was it deliberate obfuscation?) to be changing the Minister, but that is what the Government of Canada has chosen to do. David Lametti became the new Minister of Justice. On Feb. 7, 2019, despite denials from the PM and the Minister of External Affairs, the new Justice Minister, David Lametti, finally admitted that the extradition of Sabrina Meng Wanzhou is "political." https://www.thestar.com/…/decision-whether-to-extradite-hua…

PS2 On February 12, 2019, Jody Wilson-Raybould resigned her position as Minister of Veterans Affairs in the Trudeau cabinet. The prevailing assumption is that Wilson-Raybould resigned because of reports she was under pressure from the PM's office to allow the engineering firm, SNC-Lavalin, to pay a remediation agreement rather than face further criminal proceedings for bribes they were alleged to have paid in Libya in 2002 to 2011.  In the wake of the Meng arrest, two Canadians remain in jail and a third is facing the death penalty.  In terms of significance and potential consequences, the SNC-Lavalin affair doesn't even compare to the Meng extradition, but SNC-Lavalin has disappeared the Meng extradition from media coverage.

PS3 In a feature article in the February edition, Maclean's magazine reported that "29 percent of Canadians align with Beijing’s views, believing the arrest [of Meng] was politically and economically motivated."  In other words, almost 1 in 3 Canadians believe that the Meng arrest was contrary to Canadian law--the Canadian Extradition Act.  Imagine what the numbers would be if the Canadian media told the whole story, instead of the fable they think Canadians want to hear about our being law-abiding, transparent and honest in this case.  Imagine what the numbers would be if our Canadian representatives, like John McCallum, were allowed to tell the obvious truth--that Meng has a strong case against extradition--without being fired.

PS4 On January 28, 2019, the US Justice Department released its 13-count indictment against Huawei.  If you read the Justice Department announcement carefully, you will note that there is nothing new in the accusations against Meng.   The only direct accusation against Meng is that she misinformed executives of HSBC, as described above.  There are four (4) defendants named in the indictment.  It is worth noting that Meng is the only individual, the only executive, named as a defendant.  The other three defendants are companies, reinforcing the fact as noted above, that there is no precedent for criminal charges against an individual executive in this type of case.

When Chrystia Freeland Said that the Extradition of Huawei CFO, Sabrina Meng Wanzhou, Was Strictly a Judicial Affair, Was She Lying? Or Just Avoiding the Truth?

Generally, I have been a Freeland admirer (see Saint Mathew Pray for Us).  I sympathized as she stood beside Mike Pompeo at a Washington press conference and had to come up with six different ways of saying that the arrest, detention and possible extradition of Huawei CFO, Sabrina Meng Wanzhou, was strictly a judicial affair--and in a "rule of law" country like Canada, the process was immune from political interference.

I believed her. I had already read the same claim in half a dozen news reports.  I repeated the claim myself. When a claim gets repeated that often, it's hard to resist the idea that it must be true.  Then, I had a look at the Canadian Extradition Act.  Here is what the Extradition Act actually says:

Withdrawal of the authority to proceed 

(3) The Minister may at any time withdraw the authority to proceed and, if the Minister does so, the court shall discharge the person and set aside any order made respecting their judicial interim release or detention.

"The Minister" in this instance is the Minister of Justice: Jody Wilson-Raybould.  Far from restricting elected officials from interfering in the case, the Act specifically empowers the Minister of Justice to refuse the extradition:

Reasons for Refusal

Marginal note:When order not to be made 

44 (1) The Minister shall refuse to make a surrender order if the Minister is satisfied that 

(a) the surrender would be unjust or oppressive having regard to all the relevant circumstances; or

 (b) the request for extradition is made for the purpose of prosecuting or punishing the person by reason of their race, religion, nationality, ethnic origin, language, colour, political opinion, sex, sexual orientation, age, mental or physical disability or status or that the person’s position may be prejudiced for any of those reasons.Marginal note:

The Act clearly and repeatedly specifies that the Minister has the power and even the obligation to take action.  She has the power to consider "all the relevant circumstances" and "may at any time withdraw" the judiciary's authority to proceed with the extradition.  She has the power to set aside the order for Meng's detention.  Perhaps it's time for our political leadership to end the pretence of powerlessness and begin acting as if Canada were a sovereign nation.  Let's stop acting like a branch plant of corporate America.  Let's resolve this messy situation in the best interests of Canada and Canadians before it gets even worse.

Addendum

On January 14, 2019, (11 days after I first published this post), Jody Wilson-Raybould was replaced as Minister of Justice by Dave Lametti.

https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/8493858/appointment-canada-new-minister-justice-copyright-reform-concerns

Addendum 2

On Feb. 7, 2019, after 9 weeks of denial from the PM and the Minister of External Affairs , the new Justice Minister, David Lametti, finally admitted that the extradition of Sabrina Meng Wanzhou is "political."  https://www.thestar.com/politics/federal/2019/02/07/decision-whether-to-extradite-huaweis-meng-wanzhou-will-ultimately-take-political-factors-into-account-new-justice-minister.html

However, this admission has passed virtually without comment in the Canadian media.