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Terry Glavin: The muddled and murky world of Michael Ma

The Liberal MP has repeatedly associated with groups affiliated with or linked to China's United Front

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You might have thought that the floor-crossing Liberal MP Michael Ma would have been political kryptonite after his March 26 performance at a parliamentary committee looking into the implications of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s January invitation to China to annually export 49,000 electrical vehicles into Canada.

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Ma had badgered the expert witness Margaret McCuaig-Johnston, impugned the credibility of the China Strategic Risk Institute where she serves as a senior advisor, demanded to know whether she had personally witnessed acts of forced labour in China and appeared to suggest that Beijing’s persecution of the Uyghur minority in Xinjiang was merely “hearsay.”

Terry Glavin: The muddled and murky world of Michael Ma Back to video

After days of dodging direct questions about his own views on the subject, Carney eventually responded by saying Ma had apologized, but Carney himself would only go so far as to claim that his government “takes issues of forced labor and child labour incredibly seriously,” and as for Xinjiang, “there are parts of China that are higher risk.”

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Ma’s apology consisted of a statement of regret that he “inadvertently came across as dismissive” about forced-labour practices and that in his exchange with McCuaig-Johnston, Xinjiang had gotten mixed up with the coastal manufacturing hub of Shenzhen.

Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson tried to smooth everything over by asserting that it was all simply a matter of Carney having promised Chinese supreme leader Xi Jinping that public criticism was a red line he wouldn’t cross. “We don’t need to have public discussions about where we disagree,” Hodgson said. “We make that clear to our friends in China.”

But what this commitment also means is that Carney, his cabinet and his caucus shouldn’t be expected to come clean with Canadians about the Liberal party’s ongoing collusions with Beijing’s big-money operatives in Canada, either.

With the multifaceted “strategic partnership” Carney entered into with China in January, those intimacies are already becoming more deeply entrenched, even after several years of........

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