Canada lacks a plan to deal with arbitrary arrests of Canadians abroad, Kovrig says [Video]

Former diplomat Michael Kovrig says his government was caught flatfooted by China’s decision to arrest and detain him in 2018 — and could have secured his release earlier if it had a plan in place.

Three years after his return to Canada, he’s now calling on the federal government to publicly release a formal policy on Canadians being arbitrarily detained by other countries.

“You need to have plans and procedures and strategies in place to deal with it,” Kovrig told CBC News chief correspondent Adrienne Arsenault in a recent interview.

“For a number of reasons, the Canadian government was not prepared. The U.S. government wasn’t prepared for the blowback from arresting Meng Wanzhou. And so it took them a long time to figure out what to do.”

Canada has accused China of arresting Kovrig and his fellow Canadian Michael Spavor in a tit-for-tat response to the RCMP’s arrest of Huawei …