Common sense tells us that conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has gone much too far. To accuse the prime minister of colluding with a foreign government, to win the 2019 election is not only crazy but obviously did not work. The 2019 election could not be called a win for anybody. Canada’s federal government is currently held together by sticky tape and Jagmeet Singh’s new democrats.
And that fool Pierre Poilievre is way out of bounds. He has been reading too many of those Ian Fleming novels. I can just see Chinese leader Xi Jinping, sitting in his office in Beijing, saying to his minions, “They think we did what?”
The world, of necessity, has developed a code of conduct for international relations. It does not include a handbook on interfering in other countries elections. If anyone does have a handbook, where were they when we needed to save the Americans from themselves in 2016? To suggest that we could have stopped Donald Trump and didn’t, is just plain cruel.
I still remember joining a trade mission from the Peoples’ Republic of China for a meeting in the board room of the Royal Bank of Canada, in Toronto, almost 40 years ago. It was a beautiful summer day and the meeting was dreadfully boring. I was standing by a window, during a break, looking east from high up in the Royal Bank building. It was more interesting when the leader of the trade delegation joined me. I found out that he really did speak English and I would swear he was a young doppelgänger for the later leader of the Republic, Xi Jinping.
What had provoked his interest was the crystal clear Hearn Generating Station smoke stack we could see down by the lake. I think it might have still have been burning some gas back then, but not on that beautiful day. I explained to him that before cutting out the role of coal in electrical generation, Toronto had many bad smog days. We also both agreed that the meeting was boring and the coffee wasn’t too bad.
What that little anecdote was to clarify was that you should always start with what you agree on in foreign affairs. It is a very simple approach but it works.
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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry
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