I like to believe that they flipped a coin to decide between "Five Eyes" and "Anglo Club (No Euros or Minorities Allowed)".

He got pretty close to the drip king of dpkr by bringing westerner visitors into the country. I forgot his company's name but he definitely did get close Kim himself. IIRC the supreme leader was even calling Micheal a close friend and they posed a good number of pictures together.

By the time China arrested him it was so fucking obvious he was a spy. Like Canadian media couldn't find a picture of him not being a spy so they were cropping out the NK jersey he was wearing (and NK flag in the BG) at a hockey game, to make him look like a normal Canadian doing normal things.

Spavor was kind of a go-between with North Korea and general information broker, Kovrig was involved an a shady NGO in China and was also doing information brokering for the Canadian government. Like what they were doing was probably not all that harmful to China (trading in public and semi-public information) and not even explicitly illegal, also China might have even been using Spavor for North Korea related stuff themselves. But they aren't officially connected at all with Canada and doing spy-like activites which makes them very easy to round up whenever you need to, like retaliating for the Meng arrest.