COMMENTARY: Health minister’s credulity plays right into China’s hands

March 4 2020 GLOBAL NEWS

Posted April 4, 2020 8:00 am

WATCH: (April 2) Speaking to reporters on Ottawa on Thursday, Federal health Minister Patty Hadju said that here is "no indication" that the reported numbers as far as COVID-19 infection rates out of China were falsified. Hadju added that Canada does not rely on any one country or NGO for their COVID-19 data.

"Work Globally/Collectively", code for UN/Communism?

It is quite likely the case that China has not been completely open and transparent about the extent of its COVID-19 outbreak. It’s also the case that such matters are not necessarily relevant in the immediacy of Canada’s efforts to contain its own outbreak.

So while Canada doesn’t need to go out of its way to pick a fight with China at the moment, it’s also reasonable to expect our political leaders to avoid parroting the official Chinese line. The Chinese government is certainly trying to shape a narrative around the origins of this outbreak and Canada needs to avoid being a party to that in any way.

READ MORE: Trudeau sidesteps questions on whether China’s oronavirus data is trustworthy

Separate reports from this past week suggest that U.S. intelligence has come to the conclusion that China has significantly understated the size of the outbreak, in terms of both the total number of cases and the number of deaths. This is on top of what we already know about how the Chinese government punished and silenced whistleblowers and suppressed news and social media posts about the virus in the early days of the outbreak.

In other words, the conclusions of U.S. intelligence probably shouldn’t come as a surprise.

The question now, though, is what to do with that information. I happen to subscribe to the view that China bears much responsibility for this pandemic and at some point there’s going to have to be some reckoning about that.

China’s attempts to portray itself as the heroes of the COVID-19 response and its attempts to raise doubts about the origins of the outbreak are clearly part of a broader effort to avoid any sort of accountability.

We shouldn’t let them get away with it. Unfortunately, while the prime minister managed to avoid giving China’s propaganda efforts a boost, the same cannot be said of Canada’s health minister.

When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was asked about the U.S. intelligence report, he responded by saying, “Obviously, there will be many questions as this is worked through in the coming months — what country did what, how they managed (the COVID-19 pandemic) and if some countries were not honest with the global community.”

All things considered, it was a reasonable answer. Again, the main focus right now is on ensuring that Canada does everything it can to keep this pandemic under control.

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