Chinese premier’s visit a sign of warmer ties

OTTAWA — Free trade might be a long way off, but next week’s visit of China’s premier is being viewed as a strong sign that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is succeeding in deepening Canada’s relations with the Asian giant.

Premier Li Keqiang is to visit Canada next week, less than a month after Trudeau completed his first formal trip to China. Trudeau spent a week in China in late August and early September, making both a bilateral visit and attending the G20 leaders’ summit.

It will also mark the first visit to Canada by a Chinese leader since 2010, when then President Hu Jintao came for a Canadianhosted G20.

Wenran Jiang, a University of Alberta China expert, said that is an unprecedented gap in personal political contact for Beijing with a G7 country.

Trudeau deserves credit for reinvigorating relations after the on-again, off-again years under the previous Conservative government — a decade that started with Stephen Harper waiting three years to visit China, said Jiang, who is also the director of the Canada-China Energy and Environment Forum.

But that doesn’t mean the table is set for the pursuit of a free-trade agreement between the two countries, something China has said is a priority, he added.

After Trudeau’s August meeting with Li in Beijing, the Chinese premier said the two countries would launch a feasibility study on an eventual free-trade deal. Canadian officials stressed that while the two countries were having technical discussions, actual free-trade talks were not happening.

“It’s a question that Canadians need to discuss themselves, whether it is good for us. We need to weigh that,” Jiang said.

Paul Evans, of the Institute of Asian Research at the University of British Columbia, said both sides might want “some kind of comprehensive economic partnership agreement,” but there’s still a lot of groundwork to be done.

That includes learning lessons from the free-trade deals Australia and New Zealand have with China, along with “extensive consultations on the Canadian side with key stakeholders as well as a still-skeptical Canadian public.”

While in Ottawa, Li will meet Trudeau and other senior officials to pursue a stronger, more stable relationship between Canada and China, the Prime Minister’s Office office said.

Topics of discussion include trade and investment, environmental co-operation, legal and judicial collaboration and cultural exchanges.

Li will also travel to Montreal for meetings with senior political leaders, leading business people and members of the ChineseCanadian community.

China is Canada’s secondlargest single-country trading partner, after the United States.