Canada-China relations ripe for a tough rethink

Besides skewering Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s China strategy, Beijing’s gruff refusal last week to factor labour, gender or environmental rights into free trade talks likely marks Canada’s last gasp in a futile, decades-long effort to engage China in global institutions on Western terms.

In the early 1980s, after “Red China” abandoned its Maoist revolutionary agenda to pursue prosperity through international trade, Canada began transferring hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to China’s post-Mao régime through the Canadian International Development Agency, the World Bank and United Nations agencies.

Basically, China would name a request and Canada signed a cheque. We paid for feasibility studies for the Three Gorges Dam, we sold China CANDU nuclear reactors on highly favourable terms, we funded projects to improve the quality of Chinese wheat and pork production. Most importantly, we paid for Chinese scientists, engineers and technicians to come to Canada to acquire Canadian advanced technologies.

These programs were always characterized as “exchanges,” but the money was all Canadian, with nothing given back beyond duck dinners and Great Wall tourism.

In hindsight, we see any economic benefits were mostly limited to a few large Canadian companies with the sophistication to navigate complex relationships with Chinese Communist business networks. Meanwhile, back home, untold thousands of Canadian workers would lose solid union jobs to China’s “opening and reform.”

After the failed 1989 Tiananmen democracy movement led to massive repression, pressure grew for the federal government to emphasize “human rights, democratization and good governance” in its aid-funded China programming. China’s Ministry of Foreign Economic Relations and Trade accepted this as a cost of keeping Canada’s technology transfer funds flowing.

So, China agreed to loosely structured programs designed to turn its National People’s Congress into a democratic parliament, train judges for some future independent judiciary, encourage citizen activism on social issues, raise awareness of gender rights, et cetera.

We began a “confidential” government-to-government human rights dialogue; China even signed the UN’s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, promising to set the stage for a free press, democratic elections and protection of Indigenous and minority rights.

It was all lip service. Politicians knew these were public-relations exercises intended to soothe Canadians’ human rights concerns.

One would have to be naïve to believe that legitimate labour, gender or environmental reforms could be incorporated into a trade deal with a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship. This is a nation where Stalin is revered.

It seems the PMO assumed the Chinese premier would sign a joint statement referencing labour, gender and environment rights, while Trudeau flew home to celebrate.

But, evidently unknown to Trudeau and his advisers, President Xi

Jinping made it crystal clear at the October Communist Party Congress that it was his predecessors’ pandering to “Western bourgeois false ideologies” that had led to their “lack of drive, incompetence, disengagement from the people, inaction, and corruption.”

When Canada’s “progressive trade agenda” died in the Great Hall of the People last week, it opened an opportunity for a serious, nonpartisan rethink of how Canada should manage our role in China’s comprehensive rise to power in the years and decades ahead.