Grits cozying up with the Chinese
Liberals quietly building bridges, in spite of polls
I THINK THERE IS SOMETHING LIKE A COVERUP GOING ON HERE. THIS IS BEYOND THE ORDINARY. — CHARLES BURTON, BROCK UNIVERSITY
THE MORE CANADIANS LEARN ABOUT THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT, THE LESS THEY LIKE IT.
Here’s a foreign policy challenge for you: what is the most effective way for Canada’s new Liberal government to manipulate public opinion, so as to manufacture enthusiasm for ever-more supine diplomatic and trade relationships with the unelected billionaires who control the economy, the state security apparatus, the news media and the overseas acquisitions arms of the People’s Republic of China?
Specifically, how should Canada’s federal departments and agencies best allocate their resources on Beijing’s behalf to confound the incorrigible devotion of ordinary Canadians to such quaint notions as the universality of human rights? How can the Canadian fondness for liberal democratic ideals be subordinated to the interests of that exceedingly wellconnected cohort in Canada’s corporate sector that has banked its fortunes on the continued enrichment of China’s gluttonous ruling class?
It’s quite a challenge, as you might imagine, but ever since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau landed in the Prime Minister’s Office last October, the project has been taken up by the self-replenishing coterie of former and current politicians, diplomats and senior civil servants, academics, seminar-goers and lobbyists associated with the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada and, of course, the Canada-China Business Council.
For several weeks now, the new Global Affairs ministry has been quietly undertaking a root-and-branch reevaluation of Canada’s myr- iad relationships with China. Not much attention has been drawn to it. You didn’t hear anything about it during last fall’s federal election campaign. It doesn’t show up in the mandate letters Trudeau issued to Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion or International Trade Minister Chrystia Freeland. No mention of it was made in the new government’s throne speech in December.
“This strikes me as being on purpose,” Charles Burton, Brock University’s veteran China analyst and specialist in human rights and comparative politics, told me the other day. “The idea is to take the human rights and social agenda and make it separate from everything else, to make it just lipservice, to make it useless. I think there is something like a coverup going on here. This is beyond the ordinary.”
A full-bore free-trade deal with the Chinese regime is on the table, along with the proposition that Canada should back China’s admission to the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, enter into a collaboration between the Chinese military and the Canadian Forces so intimate that Canadian officers would be on a “firstname basis” with their Chinese counterparts and enact a “public energy transportation corridor” in Canada, operated by the private sector, to satisfy Beijing’s insistence on gaining and maintaining access to Canadian energy resources.
Owing to the surfeit of public opinion polling data suggesting that Canadians would take a very dim view of this sort of thing, the most strenuous exertion in message-concoction and rebranding will be required to help us all learn to like it. Dion and Freeland are getting all sorts of advice on how to go about that, too.
In the run-up to last October’s vote, a document stamped secret and expediently leaked from the Foreign Affairs bureaucracy bemoaned a standoffish and suspicious attitude toward Chinese capital and influence in Canada that was occasionally articulated by then-prime minister Stephen Harper, sometimes shared by Thomas Mulcair’s New Democrats, almost always by Elizabeth May’s Greens and overwhelmingly by Canadians themselves. The document warned that the full embrace of Beijing that Canada’s China trade lobby and the bureaucracy envisioned would require “leading public opinion on a controversial relationship and devoting less bandwidth to other regions and relationships.”
It was that same bureaucracy that joined Trudeau in celebrating the intrusion of China’s state-owned enterprises (SOEs) into Canada’s resource sector during the fierce 2011-12 debates that divided even the Conservative cabinet and caucus (Harper eventually put a halt to further SOE acquisitions after the colossal $15-billion takeover of Calgary’s Nexen Energy by the China National Offshore Oil Corp.). Bureaucrats burst into hurrahs during Trudeau’s postelection visit to the Lester B. Pearson Building on Sussex Drive last November, and were especially pleased when Trudeau chose Peter Harder, former president of the Canada-China Business Council, to lead his transition team.
Here’s where we are now: “We have to move beyond basing our criticisms of Chinese SOE behaviour on the notion of the preservation of an existing liberal and fair economic order,” wrote Pascale Massot, Dion’s policy adviser, in a submission headlined, The Political Economy of Canadian Public Opinion on China, published in a compendium of dramatic policy proposals making the rounds at Global Affairs Canada.
Among other things, Massot recommends: “Challenge our perception of developed countries’ firm behaviour as liberal and of Chinese firm behaviour as illiberal while encouraging global and sustainable Chinese competitiveness.” In a list of imagemakeover initiatives Canada should undertake on Beijing’s behalf, Massot proposes recasting China as a “fully fledged global player” like any of Canada’s traditional partners and a “potential collaborator in the pursuit of the many goals Canada is seeking to achieve,” for instance, will “resonate with the Canadian public.”
Well, good luck with that. Opinion polls show that the more Canadians learn about the Chinese regime, the less they like it. Familiarity seems to breed contempt. The more Chinese money sloshes around in Canada, the less Canadians want it. Polls undertaken by the Pew Research Centre show China’s favourability rating among Canadians, which was 58 per cent a decade ago, had dropped 20 points by last year. Only 14 per cent of Canadians like the idea of a Chinese state-owned enterprise gaining control of a major Canadian company. Canadians are anxious about China’s cyber-attacks on Canadian institutions, about the increasingly wicked repression Beijing is inflicting on the Chinese people and about the implications for Canadian society of a more powerful, more outwardly aggressive regime headed by the megalomaniac Xi Jinping. So what should Ottawa do?
“The narrative for deeper engagement should be rewritten.” That recommendation comes from a submission by Wendy Dobson, former associate deputy finance minister, and Paul Evans, a China specialist and professor of international relations at the University of British Columbia. “The most difficult part is explaining the necessity of living with China rather than expecting or requiring major changes in its basic institutions, even as we try to advance concepts like the rule of law and good governance and protect Canadian values and institutions at home.”
But should the federal government devote resources to any elaborate exercise instructing us on how we should think about China, and telling us not be so fussy about the distinction between liberal governments and illiberal regimes? Should our own government be teaming up with foreign-tied lobbyists, partisan bureaucrats and vested business interests in public-relations campaigns designed to build popular support for the policies those business interests, lobbyists and bureaucrats want the government to adopt?
Isn’t it supposed to be the other way around?