National Post (National Edition)
Scheer’s sober and sensible approach to China.
SCHEER PULLS FEW PUNCHES ON CHINA
It was sober, substantial and sensible, and strangely, on the stuff that counts, the foreign policy approach a Conservative government would take, as sketched out by party leader Andrew Scheer in a major speech in Montreal on Tuesday, was quite similar to the approach Liberal Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland laid out in a keystone speech to the House of Commons two years ago.
There are some big differences, of course, between the world view Scheer set out in the first of five major speeches he intends to deliver over the next few weeks, and Freeland’s, which she delivered shortly after taking over the foreign affairs portfolio from the weak-kneed and hapless Stephane Dion. But first, the similarities.
Like Freeland’s June 6, 2017, address, Scheer’s speech in Montreal on Tuesday contains an explicit acknowledgement of the tectonic shift underway in international relations that is dividing the world into autocracies and liberal democracies.
Like Freeland, Scheer sees a constructive middle-power role Canada can play in navigating the tumults of this strange new state of affairs.
“A community of free democracies all over the world — in Europe, in the Indo-pacific, and everywhere in between, united to resist the forces of authoritarianism, built through Canadian leadership. That should be our goal. That would have a deeply consequential impact on global history,” Scheer said. That could have been Freeland talking.
Like Freeland, with only a slightly varying degree of tact, Scheer touched on the abdication of the United States, under President Donald Trump, from its historic role as leader of the rulesbased liberal international order. Like Freeland, Scheer sees Vladimir Putin’s Russia retreating into what he called “a Cold War mentality” and what Freeland called a folly of “military adventur
ism and expansionism.”
In her speech, Freeland stressed the importance of strengthening Canada’s role in such multilateral bodies as NATO, the G7, the Francophonie, the World Trade Organization and so on. In his speech, Scheer did the same, name-checking the same forums and institutions, with the addition of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing consortium binding Canada to the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia and New Zealand.
As one would expect, Scheer took every advantage in mocking Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s “unseriousness and misunderstanding” of his role as an ally and a contributor to world affairs, his “profound arrogance,” his overweening sense of “self-importance,” and his tendency to “style over substance.”
With a federal election only a few months down the road, this is the sort of thing that will matter. But in what was almost a nod to Freeland’s competence, Scheer didn’t mention her name once, and in his enumeration of Team Trudeau’s foreign policy failings, he said: “We have seen serious mistakes like this over and over again from this government, and they are almost always attributable to Mr. Trudeau’s poor judgment.”
But there is a big difference between Freeland’s address and Scheer’s speech, and it involves the issue that should be the primary foreign-policy battleground between the Conservatives and the Liberals in the coming election campaign.
It’ s the foreign-policy issue that exposes the Liberals as far and away the weakest and most vulnerable of the two parties: the incendiary question of China.
Scheer pulled few punches about the nature of the threat China poses to the world’s liberal democracies, and he was justifiably withering in his criticism of the Trudeau government’s approach to the state-capitalist monstrosity in Beijing. If anything, Scheer went easy on the Liberals, perhaps mindful of his own party’s many compromised, China-friendly figures and the Conservatives’ earlier occasional adoption of Liberal-like supine postures.
China gets 25 mentions in Scheer’s Tuesday speech.
When she addressed the House of Commons two years ago, Freeland mentioned China only once, and only in the context of “the rapid emergence of the global south and Asia,” emphasizing the need to “integrate these countries into the world’s economic and political system” in a way that adds to the world order and addresses climate change.
Fat chance of that.
It was an absurd proposition in 2017, and it is only more painfully obtuse now that Beijing has decided that Canada needs to be thrown up against a wall and slapped around for having dared to merely honour the terms of the Canada-u.s. extradition treaty in last December’s apprehension of one of China’s ruling-class untouchables, Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd.
The Shenzhen-based telecom giant, one of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “national champions,” has long been implicated in surreptitious evasions of U.S. sanctions on Iran.
Meng Wanzhou is wanted on a U.S. Justice Department warrant that alleges she committed bank fraud in the course of dodging those same sanctions.
After Beijing’s retaliatory hostage-taking of diplomat-on-leave Michael Kovrig and entrepreneur Michael Spavor, and two other Canadians singled out for the death penalty, and Beijing’s shredding of import contracts for Canadian canola, and further barriers going up to block Canadian soybeans and peas and pork, the Trudeau government’s response has been two-fold.
First, pretend it’s not even happening. Second, whinge about the Trump White House failing to come to our rescue.
The approach Scheer proposes is to abandon Canada’s uniquely fawning and failed approach to China altogether and start all over again.
China should be understood as one of the “three of the greatest foreign threats to Canadian security and prosperity in the 21st century,” along with Vladimir Putin’s Cold War belligerence and state sponsors of terrorism and extremism. Scheer singles out Iran, which went wholly unmentioned in Freeland’s 2017 address.
Forget about a free trade deal with China — one of the key objectives Trudeau embarked upon as soon as he took over from Stephen Harper’s mildly China-wary Conservative government in 2015. It’s a lost cause. “We have known all of this for some time, yet for many years we looked the other way as the allure of China’s market was too powerful to ignore,” Scheer said.
Canada has to start looking elsewhere for markets, “like-minded democracies in the Indo-pacific region, for example.”
In the meantime, a Conservative government would pull the Trudeau government’s $250-million investment in the Beijing-owned Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, launch complaints with the World Trade Organization to counter Beijing’s trade blockades, and bar Chinese state-owned enterprises from “unfettered access” to Canadian markets.
These are good first steps. But they’re baby steps. They might look big, but that’s only because of where the Trudeau government started in 2015. Back then, Canada’s relationship with China was effectively a wholly-owned subsidiary operation run by the compradors that comprise the Canada- China Business Council. It was a full-bore, kowtowing, contracted-out, palm-greasing, cash-for-access catastrophe.
Extricating Canada from this state of affairs was never going to be an easy job, and it should be recalled that Dion’s replacement with Freeland wasn’t just a cabinet shuffle. It was a dramatic rescue operation. Canada’s national interests were being suborned to Xi Jinping’s imperialist ambitions and the vast Belt and Road sweatshop and torture-state dystopia it is now too painfully obvious that he intends to construct in all the places where the “liberal world order” has been for the past 70 years.
The last of Scheer’s five speeches is expected to fill the yawning, gaping chasm where a Conservative policy on meeting Canada’s commitments to the 2015 Paris climate accord is supposed to be. If there is anything that will cancel out everything about Scheer’s sober, substantial and sensible approach to foreign policy, it will be a Conservative failure to get serious about that.