OTTAWA—Canada’s Liberal government is jammed in the midst of two belligerent superpowers — China and the United States — as it ponders the extraordinary extradition case of Meng Wanzhou.Prime Minister Justin Trudeau might be wishing he was in the same position a Liberal predecessor of his, Paul Martin, once was.Martin’s Justice Minister Irwin Cotler swiftly extradited a group of Basque separatists to Spain after getting assurances the wanted men would not be mistreated, and announced their abrupt departure to the surprise of the Commons.Martin rang up Cotler to ask why he was not informed and why he’d had no say.Canadian law says any extradition decision belongs to the justice minister alone, Cotler says he told the prime minister.“If you get any questions, you can direct them to me, and you can thank me later,” Cotler recalled in an interview.“Neither the prime minister nor the cabinet need be consulted,” said Cotler. “In fact, it protects all that they are not consulted so that a decision is made anchored on the legal merits of the request.”However, Justin Trudeau doesn’t have the same luxury of being in the dark.He knew of the pending Dec. 1 arrest of the Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou days beforehand because his officials gave him a heads-up. And, although he was in Argentina at the G20 with both U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, he says he told neither leader. Meng is deputy chair and chief financial officer of Huawei Technologies Inc., China’s telecommunications giant and corporate gem. The arrest of the daughter of Ren Zhengfei, Huawei’s CEO who retired from the Chinese army’s engineering corps and founded the telecom company that is seeking to become a primary player in the next generation of global wireless networks, has outraged the Chinese government.As high-profile corporate targets go, it doesn’t get much higher than that. ...
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