Politics 22 - Canada's Sheepishness

At the 11th annual Halifax International Security Forum held in Canada recently, Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan conveyed the strongest evidence yet that after much indecisiveness, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government has retreated into the Liberal Party’s traditional normal approach to relations with Beijing — acquiescence, and submission.

Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan

As Terry Glavin of Maclean’s said:  “The Trudeau government’s newfound faith in ‘appropriate discussion’ is the Canadian equivalent of ‘thoughts and prayers’ — an easy out when dealing with the China lobby”.

While the people of Hong Kong decisively crushed Xi Jinping’s increasingly savage aggression and belligerence by their district elections at the weekend, Sajjan said at the forums opening, “We don’t consider China as an adversary,”.  Well, Hongkongers certainly do. 

Mr. Glavin continues;  “So do the Uighurs of Xinjiang, a Muslim people whose persecution has accelerated to the point that at least a million of them are confined to concentration camps and forced-labour zones laid bare in the greatest detail yet in a trove of leaked Chinese  government documents just released by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.  So do Tibetans, whose dispossession and oppression over the past seven decades is now being replayed in Xinjiang — and whose tragic predicament, once a hallowed cause in Canada, is now rarely if ever even mentioned in polite company”.

My favourite quotes from the Maclean’s article are:

• The findings of Canada’s own National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians contradicts the weird claims Sajjan made at the Halifax conference.  Last April, in its first-ever annual report, the committee officially declared China a threat to Canada’s national security, owing mainly to Beijing’s hostile espionage, its cyber threats and its subversive overseas influence-peddling operations.

• Security Forum president Peter Van Praagh, Sajjan’s co-host at the weekend gathering, sees the same too, and he said so. “I think it’s clear that China and Canada do not share the same interests. There is some intermingling on some issues, but China has a very different view of the world than Canada’s view of the world. And so, what are we willing to surrender in terms of our own values in co-operation with China, and where is that line drawn?”

• For several weeks now it has been increasingly evident that Trudeau’s government is willing to surrender a great deal and to draw that line where Beijing has always wanted it drawn — with diplomatic and corporate relations inside the relationship, and all those bothersome “Canadian values” about human rights, democratic accountability, the international rules-based order and the rule of law left entirely outside of it.

• First came the September appointment of Dominic Barton as Canada’s new ambassador to Beijing. Barton took over from the disgraced China evangelist John McCallum, and while Beijing was sad to see McCallum go, Barton was the replacement China had hoped for.  In August, at a multinational summit in Bangkok, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi quietly told Canadian officials as much.  Barton came pre-approved by Beijing, in other words.  Barton had been an adviser to the state-owned China Development Bank, and he’d spent several years swinging big-money deals in Shanghai.  During his years as managing partner of McKinsey & Company, the global consulting giant had taken on several Chinese state-owned corporations as clients.  Just one of them was an enterprise building islands in the South China Sea, which Xi Jinping has arbitrarily annexed in defiance of the United Nations.  Last year, McKinsey held its glamorous annual retreat in Xinjiang, just a short walk from one of China’s several Uighur concentration camps.

• Ottawa still hasn’t made up its mind about allowing Huawei into Canada’s fifth-generation internet connectivity rollout, even though a green light could end Canada’s engagement with the U.S., Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom in the “Five Eyes” security and intelligence consortium.

• Canada’s new foreign affairs minister, François-Philippe Champagne, a protegé of former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, was again asking China’s Wang Yi for Kovrig and Spavor to be released.   Francois-Philippe Champagne, came straight out of the corporate sector when he was elected in 2015. He is not known to have ever uttered so much as a cautionary word about China. 

• Rounding things off was last week’s elevation of Mary Ng to the post of minister of international trade. It’s a file that’s just tacked onto her previous cabinet portfolio — small business and export promotion.  Hired as an appointments secretary in the Prime Minister’s Office after the 2015 federal election, Ng was a political unknown until only two years ago, when she was elected MP in Markham-Thornhill, the riding held by John McCallum.  There are some interesting highlights in her strangely meteoric rise to the international trade ministry, especially with regards to China.

The full text of the reference article is available at:  https://www.macleans.ca/politics/worldpolitics/ottawa-goes-meek-and-gentle-with-beijing/