In his job at the embassy, Mr. Kovrig engaged in “political reporting that I would qualify as sensitive, and he was travelling around China,” said Guy Saint-Jacques, a former Canadian ambassador to China, who worked with Mr. Kovrig for three years. “Of course, all this was just good political reporting. It had nothing to do with spying.”
However, he said the GSRP program is “a bit controversial, because in some countries they don’t make the distinction between spying and doing legitimate political reporting. And of course if you ask some Chinese officials, in their view this constituted spying that he was doing.”