The costs of cosying up to China
It is impossible not to be tantalized by the prospect of growing Canada’s trade with China. Hundreds of billions of dollars are in play.
With access to Canada’s natural resources as his main target, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang arrived Wednesday in Ottawa for a four-day visit — the first such tour in six years.
But as was widely suspected last week when the Trudeau government secured the release of Kevin Garratt, held for two years in China on preposterous charges of spying, Canada may end up paying a stiff price for the preacher’s freedom.
The first of what could be several heavy shoes dropped Tuesday, with reports that just before Garratt was deported, Canada agreed to negotiate an extradition treaty with Beijing. This would allow China to repatriate crooked party officials and businessmen who are alleged to have absconded with staggering amounts of cash.
There had been no public acknowledgment that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s security adviser had begun such talks, The New York Times reported Wednesday. The announcement quietly appeared on the prime minister’s website.
His government’s willingness to do whatever it can to ingratiate itself with China has been apparent for some time. In May, after meeting Trudeau, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said that Canada, like his own country, opposed China’s grandiose territorial claims across a vast swath of the western Pacific and its ambitious island-building scheme in the South China Sea.
Standing beside Abe in Tokyo, Trudeau was mute on what is by far the most emotive international political subject in Asia. Later, his office issued a milquetoast statement that Canada believes in the rule of law and discourages any country from taking unilateral actions.
This is of a piece with Trudeau’s ill-considered remarks as opposition leader, when he praised China because its “basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime.”
It is not a new gambit by China to try to get western countries to agree to send back those it believes are guilty of economic crimes. But it may be the first time it works.
There can be no doubt many of those Beijing seeks to repatriate are scoundrels. The Canada Border Security Agency seized more than $15 million in undeclared money from 869 Chinese nationals arriving in Vancouver and Toronto from June 2012 until the end of 2014, according to a story published last month by Postmedia.
As dodgy as the provenance of some of the Chinese money swishing around Canada is, the problem for the government is that Ottawa’s high-minded mantra of justice and fairness for all clashes with the widely held western perception that China’s legal system is rife with corruption, conducts show trials and directs judges to take its side in political vendettas.
Beijing’s courts and prisons are constantly condemned by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch for everything from show trials to the systemic use of torture and the suppression of religious and political freedom.
What Ottawa says and does during Li’s visit and in the coming months will be instructive. Environmentalists worry that among the many dangers of cosying up to China is that the government will give its blessing to a pipeline from Alberta to the West Coast. That is an issue that cuts both ways at home for Trudeau as there are many, especially in Alberta, who are clamouring for the pipeline to be built because it will produce huge revenues.
There is also the matter of whether to allow investment in Canada by statecontrolled Chinese firms. The Harper government blocked China after allowing the $15-billion sale of Calgary-based Nexen Resources. Now, Beijing wants back in.
Spain allowed China to buy into its solar power industry. But that effectively killed that industry in Spain because the Chinese took the cutting-edge technology home and gave it to their much lower-paid workforce. Germany has similar concerns today that China is trying to do the same with its world-class industrial robots.
While Beijing remains stubbornly closed to most foreign investment itself, its proxies have been buying up factories and farmland as far away as New Zealand and Africa.
More problematic in the near future is the question of whether China will throw a tantrum and ban Canadian canola if it does not get its way on a western pipeline or the repatriation of some of those it believes are guilty of economic crimes.
The benefits of trading with China are not a chimera. Getting along with Beijing is crucial for Canada’s future economic prosperity. Like Australia, where a similar debate rages, Canada wants its share of the Chinese bounty.
Canada has other far more proven friends in Asia. It is a leading member of the western community, which is inter-dependent and shares similar values. For its own self-respect, the lure of relatively easy money must not be allowed to trump everything else.