National Business
McMaster: China’s treatment of detained Canadians telling
By ROB GILLIES Associated Press
May 09, 2019 07:46 PM
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Huawei Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou, right, who is out on bail and remains under partial house arrest after she was detained Dec. 1 at the behest of American authorities, waves as she returns home after attending a court appearance in Vancouver, British Columbia, Wednesday May 8, 2019. The lawyer for a senior executive of Chinese tech giant Huawei who was arrested in Canada on a U.S. extradition warrant said Wednesday he’ll try to prevent the case from going ahead by arguing that comments by President Donald Trump suggest the case against her is politically motivated.
The Canadian Press via AP
Darryl Dyck
TORONTO
Former U.S. national security adviser H.R. McMaster said Thursday China’s treatment of two detained Canadians is a telling example of how China is a threat to the liberal international order.
The retired lieutenant general who served as President Donald Trump’s national security adviser said at the Munk debate in Toronto Thursday that China’s communist party exposes the nature of their system every day and it’s time for people to wake up.
“Our free and open societies are under attack by an authoritarian closed model. A model that not only is affecting the Chinese people by extinguishing their rights, their rights to free speech, their rights to privacy but it is also affecting other nations of the world,” McMaster said.
“Ask your two Canadian citizens who were essentially taken hostage and are still in captivity, one of them a former diplomat whose child was born a few weeks ago,” he said.
China detained former diplomat Michael Kovrig and entrepreneur Michael Spavor on Dec. 10 in an apparent attempt to pressure Canada to release a top Chinese tech chief executive who is facing fraud charges in the U.S.
Canada arrested Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou Dec 1.
Spavor and Kovrig haven’t been given access to lawyers.
Meng is out on bail awaiting extradition hearings and living in her Vancouver mansion.