OTTAWA — Politicians from all major Canadian parties are joining the family of a jailed Chinese dissident in making a desperate plea to Prime Minister Stephen Harper to press for his release.
The plea comes just hours before Harper was to depart for China, where he is to advance an economic agenda.
Dr. Wang Bingzhang, the founder of an overseas, pro-democracy movement in China, has been in a Beijing prison since 2002, serving a life sentence in solitary confinement for trying to foster democracy in China from abroad.
He received his doctorate at Montreal's McGill University and many of his relatives are Canadian.
They include his brother, Wang Binjgwu, who has maintained a seven-day vigil on and around Parliament Hill, and his daughter, Ti-Anna Wang.
Ti-Anna Wang says it up to Harper intervene to help her father because his time in Canada instilled the democratic values that ultimately led China to kidnap, arrest and imprison him.
