http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=94ebdddd-edd7-4433-a501-8e74ec674998
PM takes heat over Olympic decision
Harper has said he won't attend the Beijing Games' opening ceremonies
Miro Cernetig, Vancouver Sun
Published: Monday, May 05, 2008
It's generally gone unnoticed in Vancouver's mainstream English-
language press. But for years, Stephen Harper has been trying hard to
court our Chinese community, seeing it as an im****tant vote to help
him win a majority government in the next election.
He's dispatched Jason Kenney, secretary of state for multiculturalism,
to the West Coast to provide words of comfort about the ***ual abuse
of Chinese women during the Japanese invasion of China, when many
Chinese were forced to work as "comfort women."
Before that, the Conservative government outmanoeuvred the Liberals by
becoming first to apologize for the head tax, the racist attempt to
keep Chinese out of Canada. A few months ago, Harper even showed up on
the West Coast to sup****t the Chinese community's fundraising efforts
to send assistance to those suffering in the deadly snow storms that
paralysed southern China this winter.
But despite all the overtures, the prime minister's suddenly in, as
they say in China, a spot of mafan. Trouble.
It's the Olympics. Canada's leader doesn't want to go to Beijing for
the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games, a tone-deaf decision he
said he made long ago. Unfortunately, he reiterated it just as the
protests around the Olympic torch relay hit the international media.
The prime minister's decision hasn't gone over well with the Chinese
government, which has all but frozen out high-end access for Canadian
officials. And it's been even more of a diplomatic clunker within
Canada's Chinese immigrant community, where many also see the
Conservatives as hostile toward their birth country.
It's not hard to see why if you look at what's happening in Vancouver.
Aside from Harper's perceived Olympic snub, many recently arrived
Chinese-Canadians are angry about public statements from the
government that Chinese spies operate in Canada. (Yes, it's true. But
it's also not new and we're primarily talking low-level industrial
espionage, which other countries also practise here.)
Probably most damaging, though, is the bizarrely undiplomatic gaffe of
Conservative MP Rob Anders, who says today's China is our modern-day
Nazi Germany. He even linked Beijing's Olympics to the infamous 1936
Olympics in Berlin, Adolf Hitler's coming-out party on the world
scene.
It's hard to believe a responsible MP still looks at China in the
manner Time magazine's Henry Luce did 50 years ago, but apparently
Anders does and the PMO isn't gagging him. Count on Beijing's leaders
taking note of this incendiary statement, which they suspect is part
of Ottawa's moralistic attitude to China: "I absolutely 100 per cent
think it compares to the Berlin Olympics in 1936. You've got Falun
Gong practitioners, which are not allowed to participate in the
Olympics. Adolf Hitler had issues with Jews being able to participate
in the Olympics in 1936."
Not surprisingly, recent Chinese immigrants, who, like many new
citizens, retain an emotional tie to their homeland, are incensed.
Consider some of the backlash from commentators, rarely heard by non-
Chinese Canadians:
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