This week, a bipartisan bill dealing with the Hong Kong crisis made its way from the U.S. Congress to the White House where President Donald Trump signed it into law. The Hong Kong Autonomy Act imposes sanctions on Chinese officials involved in the crackdown on Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement. The repression has become so severe, so quickly, that Hong Kong’s opposition parties have been put on notice that this past weekend’s democratic coalition primaries, which drew 600,000 voters in advance of this coming September’s legislative council elections, may themselves have violated Beijing’s national security law. The White House also issued an executive order revoking Hong Kong’s special trading status, a move aimed at blocking China from continuing to use Hong Kong as a back door to trading in the United States.

Canada will prohibit the sale of pepper spray and truncheons to the Hong Kong Police Force, and has also suspended an extradition agreement with Hong Kong. But now that Beijing has unilaterally reneged on its “one country, two systems” treaty commitments, it is unlikely in the extreme that any Canadian court would authorize the extradition of anyone to the custody of Beijing’s ministry of public security anyway.

In the first major foreign policy move of its kind outside the ambit of the European Union, the UK last week named 47 individuals – mostly Russians, Saudis, a couple of generals from Myanmar and two prison institutions in North Korea – under the UK’s own new Magnitsky Act. Magnitsky laws are named after Sergei Magnitsky, the Russian whistleblower and anti-corruption lawyer who was murdered in a Russian prison in 2008. The laws target human rights abusers by freezing their assets and restricting their international travel. Dominic Raab, Britain’s foreign secretary, said he now expects to review proposals to list Chinese officials for sanctions under the law.

Also last week, the U.S. State Department announced that several senior Chinese Communist Party officials would be targeted under the U.S. Magnitsky laws. They include Chen Quanguo, Zhu Hailun, Wang Mingshan an Huo Liujun, all of whom are implicated in the persecution of Xinjiang’s Muslim Uighurs, Kazakhs and other ethnic groups. At least one million Turkic Muslims have been confined in concentration camps in Xinjiang.The Alliance Canada Hong Kong wants Canada to sanction these same officials, especially Chen and Zhu, the architects of Xinjiang’s system of concentration camps, along with Zhao Kezhi, China’s minister of public security, the senior Hong Kong police officials Stephen Lo and Chris Tang, and senior Communist Party functionary Han Zheng. Han has played a leading role in the degeneration of Hong Kong from a semi-autonomous region and fledgling democracy to a police-state city as unfree as any city in mainland China.

“But Canada is stuck,” the Alliance’s Cherie Wong told me. “Canada is stuck behind the U.S., behind other western countries.” It’s only partly because of the hostage diplomacy the federal government is engaging in, related to Beijing’s imprisonment of Kovrig and Spavor in retaliation for Canada’s detention of Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou on a U.S extradition warrant arising from several bank fraud charges related to sanctions evasion.

“Some of our politicians are just very, very naïve,” Wong said. “Canadians are on our side, but most people don’t see just how much infiltration China is involved with in Canada.”

Still, Wong said she was encouraged that the Alliance letter won the support of so many MPs, and while most are Conservatives, the three Green MPs signed the letter, two Bloc Québecois MPs signed on behalf of the Bloc caucus, and NDP MP Jenny Kwan signed. So did the Liberals’ Judy Sgro and importantly, John McKay, chair of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security.

“For the government, though, it’s like they’re still expecting the Chinese government is going to somehow do the right thing. It’s like they’re just waiting, waiting and waiting, and thinking that China will do the right thing. But China is not going to do the right thing.”