Ottawa faces challenges at home and with China as coronavirus spreads

As a deadly new coronavirus penetrates Tibet and the Manchurian Steppes and continues its march around the globe, the World Health Organization declared a global emergency on Wednesday.

These have become the worst of days for Chinese President Xi Jinping. Only two years ago, Xi seemed almost invincible. His rubber-stamp cabinet declared the Communist Party leader emperor for life and he announced great plans for China everywhere, including the High Arctic.

Recalling some of the hagiographic excesses of dictators such as Mao, Stalin, Lenin, Evita Peron and Saddam Hussein, Xi’s minions crafted a personality cult that had him at its centre, looking down benevolently from millions of photographs placed at the front of classrooms, in executive suites and on shop floors.

It is now apparent to those tracking the mysterious respiratory disease that, perhaps out of fear at having its good name tarnished or worry about potential internal dissent, Xi’s dictatorship was nearly two months late in informing the world of the coronavirus’ emergence. It was also many weeks late in sealing off the area around the mega-city of Wuhan, where the virus first appeared.

We will never know whether being more forthcoming sooner might have produced better outcomes for the more than 200 people in China now said to have been killed by the virus, the thousands of others who have been infected by it or those who may yet be affected. But it’s an obvious question.

READ MORE: What we know about whether China misrepresented the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak

Even as it finally began to reveal a few details regarding the scope of its deceit to the world this week, Beijing couldn’t resist bullying the Montreal-based ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization) into not sharing information about the disease with aviation officials in democratically-elected Taiwan.

China’s years of brinkmanship produced the exact opposite of what Xi hoped for. With the riots in Hong Kong etched into every mind, Taiwan re-elected a president a few weeks ago who is ferociously opposed to Mainland China eating any more of the island state in the name of Chinese unity.

Canada bears no responsibility for any of this, of course. However, while not deceitful, Ottawa’s response to the potentially terrible consequences of the virus has been slow and haphazard.

As is the case when there’s a global flashpoint, Ottawa’s default position is often to put its finger in the air and wait until allies create a little wind that might allow us to get a free ride on a friendly nation’s coattails, or, if such help is not available, to follow their lead and copy what they’re doing.

Canada started out with laughably feeble, cursory checks on passengers arriving on flights from China. While Asian and European countries organized charters to evacuate their citizens who were stuck at ground zero of the medical emergency in Wuhan, Canada has been unconscionably slow in organizing charter flights for its nationals, though it was reported late Thursday that arrangements had been made for “the limited departure” of some diplomats, other embassy employees and their dependents.

None of those people are based in Wuhan, where Canadians are obviously at far greater risk.

2:21 Ottawa working out logistics to bring Canadians home from China

It’s shocking that Canada has not already arranged a charter flight from Wuhan, like so many of its allies have done. Nor has it said where anyone eventually evacuated would be quarantined, or even whether this would happen.

Canada has, for example, airbases such as CFB Trenton, which lies between Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal, that have immigration and customs facilities. This base could easily — and relatively comfortably — temporarily quarantine several hundred distressed travellers from Wuhan, with good medical care set up for anyone who is afflicted with the virus.

Japan, France and the U.S. are already way ahead of Canada. Since Wednesday, for example, the Trump White House has kept a charter flight full of its citizens sequestered at a military base in California.

Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Singapore, Japan and South Korea have announced similar strict isolation procedures for those arriving on charter flights from Wuhan to safeguard their health and the rest of their citizens. In the case of Australia, that safe haven is about 2,000 kilometres from its shores.

My only exposure to a similar medical panic was in 1994 in Rwanda, several months after the genocide came to an end there. A cholera epidemic swept the country, leaving many thousands dead. I literally saw scores of people die before my eyes, for want of clean drinking water and salts.

Moments later, I watched as bulldozers pushed piles of corpses into pits filled with limestone.

Cholera kills quickly and it is an awful death for those who contract it, but it doesn’t travel far. The consequences, as terrible as they were, didn’t bother outsiders so it got relatively little attention. It was left to a brave band of UN and humanitarian workers and a few hundred peacekeepers under Canadian command to do what they could to ease the suffering and get potable water flowing.

Perhaps the coronavirus chaos will finally give Ottawa a pretext to pause its embarrassing pell-mell dash to establish closer relations and do more trade with Beijing, which gets more awkward by the day as there is no indication whatsoever that China wishes to return that love.

There are probably votes in doing an about-face for the Trudeau government. Many Canadians, having grown leery of China, especially since its brazen kidnapping of Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, and the agricultural sanctions it slapped on Canada to try to force the government to interfere in the extradition process of Meng Wangzhou. An executive with the state-controlled Huawei telecommunications colossus, Meng faces more than a dozen serious fraud charges in the U.S.

Whatever China’s grand ambitions for Huawei, the country now faces a public relations disaster of the first order overseas and probably at home, too, though finding that out may be hard as police states are not inclined to let their citizens complain. To try to control its image problem, China had better start showing the world that it is more of a team player in stopping the spread of this pernicious virus or it may find itself a global pariah.

In the past day, Russia has decided to close its long eastern border with China. So has North Korea, which has almost no other reliable way to reach the rest of the world by land.

This calamity may only be in its first stages. The BBC reports that researchers may not be able to find a vaccine against this unpredictable new killer for at least four or five months.

China had better start getting this right long before then.

Matthew Fisher is an international affairs columnist and foreign correspondent who has worked abroad for 35 years. You can follow him on Twitter at @mfisheroverseas.