When in office, the era of Jean Chretien was marked with hypocrisy.
Now the former prime minister’s sanctimonious duplicity has reached a new low.
We don’t know what the Queen has been smoking, but she apparently thinks that this guy from Shawinigan Lake belongs with the likes of Margaret Thatcher, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Albert Schweitzer, Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa.
So she has bestowed on him the Queen’s Order of Merit – a place reserved for 24 of her friends who meet once every four years for lunch while wearing an eight-pointed cross made of red-and-blue enamel with the imperial crown in the centre.
Now isn’t Chretien the same chap who told the Queen that she could not make disgraced media tycoon Conrad Black a British lord. Back then, if you remember Chretien reached into the bowels of Parliament to resurrect the Nickle resolution of 1919 and loudly proclaimed that the Queen should “refrain hereafter from conferring any title of honour or titular distinction upon any of your subjects domiciled or ordinarily resident in Canada.”
Black, who was later convicted of fraud and is now serving time in an American jail, was forced to renounce his citizenship in 2001 to become Lord Black of Crossharbour.
Chretien of course doesn’t think there is any pecksniffery in accepting the award because Black’s lordship is a full-blown British title while the Order of Merit is just an award given by the Queen of Canada and is part of the Canada honour system.
Did we just hear someone splitting hairs?
About the same time Chretien was being rewarded by his friends in high places, he was also being courted to work with one of the world’s shadiest regimes.
Chretien has been hired on as a “senior international adviser” to Vancouver-based Ivanhoe Mines, which through a blind trust is a partner in the Myanmar Ivanhoe Copper Company Limited (MICCL). Wait for it….the other partner is the ruthless Burmese military regime whose generals use child and slave labor for megaprojects, who hijack democracy with violent crackdowns and whose economy only benefits the military elite.
The Canadian Friends of Burma believes that Chretien was bought to boost Ivanhoe’s efforts to remove the joint mining venture with Burma’s murderous generals from the American sanctions list.
This is not the first time that Chretien has been linked with shady military types in Asia. Less than two months after stepping down, Chrétien was hosted by the state-owned China International Trust and Investment Corp or CITIC, which is the communist regimes most politically connected financial and industrial conglomerate.
CITIC’s top dog then was Wang Jun, a Chinese princeling who has been linked to everything from illegal arms shipments to illegal campaign donations in the United States.
With an estimated asset base of C$48 billion, CITIC is among the world’s largest corporations.
The respected U.S. based Rand Corporation, a non-profit research and analytical think-tank states that CITIC acts as a shell or front operation on behalf of China’s Peoples Liberation Army.
CITIC acted as a front for Poly Technologies Inc., an arms manufacturer owned directly by the Chinese army, which throughout the 1980s sold hundreds of millions of dollars of largely surplus arms around the world, exporting to customers in Thailand, Burma, Iran, Pakistan, and the United States.
Poly’s U.S. subsidiaries were abruptly closed in August 1996, after federal US authorities in California concluded a lengthy sting operation by arresting seven people linked to Poly and another state-run Chinese arms firm for allegedly smuggling 2,000 AK-47 Kalashnikov rifles into the country.
A U.S. Congressional inquiry also found CITIC officials were linked to thousands of dollars which came from Asian tycoons, ostensibly seeking to be friendly with the Bill Clinton administration.
Chretien is getting the Order of Merit because of a close personal friendship with the Queen.
One can only wonder what kind of awards await him in China and Burma.
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