VANCOUVER—The crisis in Canada-China relations deepened Thursday as Beijing ordered the formal arrest of two detained Canadians on still-unspecified national-security violations and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau warned China is a growing threat.Trudeau told reporters in Paris that China is defying international norms around the world and vowed to keep enlisting international allies to protest China’s actions, in spite of Beijing’s caution against making “irresponsible” remarks.“We continue to take the safety of the Canadians detained arbitrarily in China with the utmost priority,” Trudeau said.“One of the things we see increasingly around the world is that the Chinese government is not following the same kinds of rules and principles that the large majority of democracies follow in regards to rules-based order, in regards to international relations,” the prime minister said.In its latest move, the Chinese government confirmed Thursday that former Canadian diplomat Michael Kovrig and businessman Michael Spavor have been formally arrested and transferred from a shadowy “residential surveillance” centre to separate state prisons on pending charges of “secretly gathering” or “illegally providing” state secrets for “foreign forces.”Kovrig and Spavor “are in the hands of powers far above the prosecutors who are officially assigned to their cases,” said Margaret K. Lewis, professor of law at Seton Hall University School of Law, who specializes in criminal justice in mainland China.“On the surface, the process is following the criminal procedure law. But there is no doubt that people much higher up are really calling the shots.” Given the formal, constitutional alignment between the Chinese judiciary and state interests, it’s clear Beijing will continue to use Kovrig and Spavor as a “bargaining chip,” agreed Charles Burton, a se ...
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