PM in China: Stop lecturing, start selling

You wonder if Liberal ministers believe the balderdash they spin or whether it’s so deeply programmed that it is instinctive, like the mammalian diving reflex or blushing.

Ottawa is on a big trade diversification push in Asia, with the prime minister talking to leaders at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations meeting in Singapore, while International Trade Minister Jim Carr and Finance Minister Bill Morneau have been flying the flag in Beijing.

Carr told reporters that the government remains interested in striking a deal with China, if it helps female entrepreneurs, Indigenous peoples and promotes other Canadian values.

Anyone seen this movie before? If not, spoiler alert — the plot-line sees a callow Canadian politician wander wide-eyed into the capital city of a nascent Asian superpower and propose opening his market, as long as said ancient civilization adopts “Canadian values” like labour and environmental protections, gender equity and Indigenous rights. Suffice it to say, it doesn’t end well – they do things differently over there.

As Justin Trudeau found out in the Great Hall of the People last December, the culmination of his trip was a stark lesson in power politics, when the Chinese reinforced the point that their century or more of humiliation is over and that foreign visitors to Beijing are expected to kowtow, not issue demands.

When Trudeau was in China last year, one Canadian businessman who has been there a while told me the golden rule of doing business is: Never try to impose your own values.

Trudeau thought he had an agreement with Premier Li Keqiang for parts of his identity trade agenda, only to find Li had no intention of signing on to anything that might one day herald more health and safety obligations, a minimum wage or collective bargaining.

The disconnect was apparent at Trudeau’s closing press conference, where he explained that “trade deals must benefit citizens, not just multinationals or a country’s bottom line.”

He said Canada was not seeking to create winners and losers in a trade deal.

Needless to say, the “citizens first” view is not shared in a country determined to shake off centuries of Western hegemony and chart its own course.

“We are not asking Ottawa to share the same ideas as us,” said an editorial in the state-owned Englishlanguage newspaper, the Global Times.

Nor does the view that trade can be “win-win” have much credence. The Chinese have the same zerosum game philosophy as Donald Trump, which is going to make resolution of the current trade war between China and the U.S. particularly tough.

If Ottawa is still paying lip-service to its progressive trade agenda, it seems to have smartened up on the perils of negotiating a full-scale trade deal with the Chinese.

Carr said Canada remains open to striking smaller sector-by-sector agreements. Trudeau met Li for an hour in Singapore on Wednesday and one of the aspirational goals laid out after the meeting was a doubling of agricultural exports to China by 2025.

The sectoral approach was the focus of a paper by the Public Policy Forum think tank last month. It suggested a strategy that would not set off the tripwire clause in the new United States Mexico Canada Agreement that appears to block the entry of any of the parties into a free trade deal with “a non-market country” — that is China.

The PPF said sectoral agreements in areas like agri-food, natural resources, education and tourism would not offend the new USMCA clause because they would not constitute a comprehensive agreement. It suggested sensitive areas like technology transfer and national security be avoided on security grounds.

But Forum president Ed Greenspon pointed out that being overly dependent on the U.S. has been a “train wreck” and any trade diversification strategy must include China — an $11-trillion economy still expanding at nearly 7 per cent a year.

Canada has to be smart, tough and cautious when dealing with the Chinese. As a recent report by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute noted, China is conducting what author J. Michael Cole called a “sharp power” campaign to influence countries like Canada that includes co-option, bribery, disinformation and censorship. If the U.S. has been less benign of late, that should be set against the context of an authoritarian Chinese regime that Cole said is becoming “increasingly Orwellian.”

Then there are the problems of trying to strike a deal with a country whose state-owned enterprises enjoy advantages with which real market economies cannot compete.

Yet Canada’s national interest requires clear-eyed engagement with China when it comes to, in Greenspon’s words, “selling lobsters, filling hotel rooms and shipping timber or oil and gas.”

Trudeau’s feel-good idealism has no place in this realistic vision of foreign policy, particularly since the finger-wagging has proven counter-productive with prospective trading partners ranging from the Philippines to India.

The government should park its brazen attempt at pandering to progressive voters and focus on giving a leg-up to all Canadian businesses — not just its favoured client groups.