Keeping an eye on Communist, Totalitarian China, and its influence both globally, and we as Canadians. I have come to the opinion that we are rarely privy to truth regarding the real goal, the agenda of China, it's ambitions for Canada [including special focus on the UK, US & Australia]. No more can we trust the legacy media as there appears to be increasing censorship applied to the topic of communist China. I ask why. Here is what I find.
It’s entirely possible. Seemingly invisible in international news feeds, China has quietly started sending trains from Yiwu in the south of China to Spain – a distance of over 13,000km. This will be the longest freight train route in the world, 40% longer than the infamous Trans-Siberian Railway.
Crossing numerous borders along the way – Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus, Poland, Germany, France and then into Spain. In November 2014, the first train has already completed the westbound journey carrying some 1000 tons of goods.
“Made in China” seems to be on everything these days, and Yiwu is one the major hubs where these products get distributed from – possibly the biggest wholesale center for small-sized consumer goods in the world.
China’s economy is not slowing down, and this rapid expansion of transportation links is just the start. What currently takes 21 days by traditional rail, is hopefully going to take just 2 days when a ‘bullet train’ corridor is complete. China to Europe in 2 days by train. That could truly change the way the world does business.
Many residents of Metro Vancouver felt shaking late Tuesday night, as a moderate earthquake struck near Victoria. The quake struck at 11:39 p.m., about 20 kilometres north of Victoria and was felt across much of southern British Columbia.
DECEMBER 30, 2015
Earthquake in Greater Victoria at 11:39 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 29, 2015. Initially reported as 4.8 or 4.9 by U.S. Geological Survey, as a 4.3 by Natural Resources Canada. Star marks approximate location of epicentre.
Photograph by: U.S. Geological Survey, Times COlonist
(UPDATED) Magnitude 4.3 earthquake felt in Vancouver
11:48 PM PST, TUE DECEMBER 29, 2015
Image: USGS
A large magnitude 4.3 earthquake was felt in Metro Vancouver late this evening at 11:40 p.m.
According to the federal government’s Natural Resources Canada department, the earthquake had a deep depth of 58.7 kilometres and an epicentre 19 kilometres northeast of Victoria and eight kilometres east-southeast of Sidney – right under the Strait of Georgia. It was also felt strongly on Vancouver Island and elsewhere on the B.C. South Coast.
The seismic event was originally classified as a magnitude 4.9 event by the U.S. Geological Survey, but it was downgraded shortly after.
There are no reports of any significant damage at this time. As well, no tsunami alert has been issued – a tsunami is not expected given the magnitude and location. SkyTrain’s Expo and Millennium lines were shut downfor approximately an hour as a safety precaution to ensure the elevated guideways were not damaged by the tremors.
This is the second moderate earthquake to strike the North American West Coast on Tuesday. At 5:48 p.m., a magnitude 4.4 earthquake was centred four kilometres outside of Devore, California – about 48 kilometres east of Los Angeles. There have been a number of smaller aftershocks since the initial event.
As shocking as it may sound, the Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake isn’t even Vancouver’s largest seismic threat. Local emergency crews are now preparing for something even more catastrophic just below the surface
October 29, 2015
By Frances Bula / Photo: Patric Sandri
....this year 2015
This article was originally published in the November 2015 issue of Vancouver magazine.
Unless you took a summer vacation from social media (or even traditional media), you probably spent a few conversations discussing the New Yorker story on the impending demise of the West Coast courtesy of The Big One, the coming 9-point-something-magnitude megathrust Cascadia subduction zone earthquake geologically identical to the one that devastated Japan in 2011. Our Kraken will rise from deep under the ocean, 75 kilometres west of Vancouver Island, where the oceanic Juan de Fuca plate wedges under—or subducts—eastward, bending and stressing the North American plate, on which Vancouver (and Victoria, Seattle, Portland, and millions of residents) sit, buckling it up and east. When our plate can’t take any more bending, it will snap back westward, producing one of the planet’s most powerful quakes ever recorded—much stronger in magnitude than anything the mere San Andreas fault is capable of. The last earthquake like this in B.C. was in 1700. It wiped out First Nations villages on the west coast of Vancouver Island, Washington state, and Oregon and generated a tsunami that hit Japan the next day.
The modern version in Vancouver will feel like a giant camel ride—up, down, up, down—as a series of enormous seismic waves moves through the ground. That’s how John Clague, a Simon Fraser University earth sciences professor and one of B.C.’s pre-eminent earthquake specialists, envisions it. “It’s not what most people think of as an earthquake,” says Clague, sitting on bedrock at his mountain office high above Burrard Inlet. “It’s a rolling type of ground motion.” No chasms will open in the earth. Buildings won’t split apart. Instead, Vancouver’s towers will begin to oscillate as though they are masts on boats at sea. Some may smash into each other. Anything that is long—a bridge, a road, a pier—will be especially stressed as the wave moves along its length, with one part rising while another part lowers.
All the land in the Lower Mainland that is essentially mud or gravel (post-glacial fill, in scientific terms) will start to quiver, to liquefy. That won’t be just in Richmond, as many people think. All of Delta, except for the bits on bluffs in the north and in Tsawwassen, will experience the same, as will the land that edges Vancouver’s False Creek and the mud flats along the shores of UBC, North Vancouver, Pitt Meadows, and Port Coquitlam.
The Cascadia subduction zone earthquake scenario described in blood-curdling detail by theNew Yorker (“Everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast”) prompted public panic when it overlaid nature’s blind destruction on today’s metropolitan grid: coastal communities obliterated by tsunamis, cities without power for weeks or months, and 40,000 dead or injured. Geologists and emergency-management personnel took to Reddit to try to calm people down soon after the story was published.
That Cascadia quake is also the earthquake scenario that the Insurance Bureau of Canada chose two years ago to assess what the impact would be in B.C. The bureau’s language was somewhat more restrained than that of the New Yorker’s, but its conclusion in the 344-page report was not. Although the report is dotted with what seem like reassuring phrases—many low-rise buildings will experience “light” or “moderate” damage; “most of the major roadways in and around Vancouver may experience only slight damage”—the total picture is catastrophic, as it describes in minute detail what would happen to various buildings, roads, and bridges when the earthquake hits on a sunny afternoon in July. About $60 billion in damage, mostly from the shaking, but also from fires, water damage from the low-grade tsunami, liquefaction, and landslides. The report, which is narrowly focused on property damage, didn’t try to estimate deaths, but presumably there would be many.
So the Cascadia Big One is bad. But it’s not the most catastrophic earthquake that will hit this city. In a plan made public in late July, Emergency Management B.C. (EMBC), using modelling from the National Resources Council, based its disaster scenario not on the megathrust Cascadia possibility, but on something much closer: a shallow crustal 7.3-magnitude earthquake somewhere under the Strait of Georgia. That one, unlike like the Cascadia quake, will produce earth ripples coming from multiple directions, the full complement of different kinds of seismic wave forms. It will hit the city, says Clague, more like a bucking bull that is humping and twisting at the same time. Since the epicentre will be much closer to the city and also closer to the surface, there will be both high amplitude and high ground acceleration. Or, put another way: “That’s where you get the Hollywood scare-movie scenes. Buildings are getting torqued like they’re in a conga line. Roads will crack. The ground may open up, just like in the movies.” Clague’s biggest worry about the city? “Those West End high-rises. I’ve never really said that in public because I don’t want to alarm people.” But they, along with many in Gastown, are among the city’s oldest tall buildings, most built before B.C. started changing its building code to consider seismic protection in the 1970s.
This is how EMBC paints the picture, which is set on a rainy afternoon in January: “For many, the earthquake is heard before it is felt. The low, rumbling sound is similar to that of a freight train, immediately followed by 10 to 20 seconds of violent shaking that knocks people located closest to the epicentre from their feet. Taller buildings sway with the high-intensity shaking. Buildings on softer soils lose support through liquefaction. Landslides and rockfalls are generated in many areas, cutting off transportation routes. Several fires start throughout the impact area from damaged electrical power and gas lines. Some buildings collapse, many shift and crack, and others are destroyed by fire. Many of those who try to run outside suffer extreme injury or death from falling and flying objects and thousands are trapped or injured. Dust, smoke, and sirens fill the air.” Deaths? Estimated at 10,000.
Those two scenarios are part of an ever-increasing focus in B.C. on planning for an earthquake in almost block-by-block detail. Spurred by a series of disasters around the Pacific Ring of Fire, where Vancouver has a seat at the table; by B.C. auditor-general reports (1997 and 2014) warning that the province doesn’t have a coherent plan for an earthquake; by public anxiety over century-old brick schools; and by individual researchers or local politicians, the region is very gradually upping its game. The Massey Tunnel and all of the bridges except the Pattullo have been upgraded. In fact, disaster scenarios estimate they’ll stand, although the roads leading to them, often built on that liquefying fill, may not. Government buildings are being assessed and retrofitted or emptied. The east wing of Vancouver’s city hall, which was cleared out last year, is the most vivid example of that. St. Paul’s Hospital, which holds the unenviable position of Hospital Most Likely to Collapse During an Earthquake, is going to move to a new building by 2022. Delta just decided to move its emergency-response centre from city hall after coming to the realization, as Mayor Lois Jackson says, that it “may be in jeopardy,” to a control room planned for the Boundary Bay Airport. Schools are slowly —excruciatingly slowly—being upgraded or replaced.
The District of North Vancouver became the first of the region’s 21 municipalities to do a building-by-building assessment, producing a map and study in April showing exactly what would crumble and what would stand. (The District also used the 7.3-magnitude Strait of Georgia quake as its worst-case scenario.) Some things to ponder, for those working, living, or commuting through the district: the land around the north end of the Lions Gate Bridge and just to the east might move laterally as much as two feet during an earthquake. That area, plus the area around the Seymour River and Ironworkers Bridge, is projected to see 20 percent or more of its buildings completely destroyed and a death and casualty rate of between five and 10 percent of the population there. That “microzonation,” done through a special collaboration between the District, which provided the millions of bits of data, the National Research Council, and the American Federal Emergency Management Agency, is the kind of overview the whole region should have, say people like Clague and others.
In the meantime, while scientists are refining the picture of exactly what an earthquake disaster will look like, the people who will be responsible for pulling bodies out of the rubble, transporting the injured to hospital, putting out fires, and trying to make the city functional again are refining theirs.
At a giant, nondescript barn of a building smack in the middle of Surrey (on high, stable land), there’s a room lined with television screens and banks of computers at seven different stations. Between the two sets of screens, the half-dozen men working here track every bus, SkyTrain car, service vehicle, and social-media spike.
This is the control centre for TransLink, which, on this particular day, is still recovering from and pondering the lessons learned during Vancouver’s summer windstorm. It’s where the people monitoring the screens had to reroute buses and deal with power outages and trees on the track.
It turns out that this centre, along with other transit hubs throughout the region, along with the good ol’ buses, will be key components during an earthquake. When either of the catastrophic quakes hit, all the SkyTrain lines will be shut down immediately until structural engineers can check them. The same will happen with all bridges and tunnels. The power will likely be out in as many places as the windstorm hit this August. There will be fires and collapsed buildings everywhere. And, since large centres typically have only two days’ fuel supply, all vehicles that don’t have access to their own source will be unusable.
Since the region’s transit centres have their own generators, emergency food supplies, radio phones, and access to fuel that others won’t have during a disaster, they will remain functional even if power, gas stations, and stores are knocked out everywhere else. They also can be the place where emergency crews set up shop, since they have lots of precious empty land around them, usually used for storing buses.
As for the buses, they’ll turn into the region’s lifelines. “They can be used for emergency crews, for evacuations, for social services,” says John Oakley, the man in charge of emergency preparation for TransLink. “They’re a shelter. And they can be turned into mobile first-aid units.”
But as ready as everyone is getting, the region is still a long way from Japan-level preparedness. So people like Oakley have one last wish for how the earthquake scenario will unfold. It’s not about whether it’s the Cascadia earthquake or the Strait of Georgia earthquake, whether it’s in January or July. “My personal worst scenario is that it happens in the middle of the day, when children are in school and everyone is at work. If it happens in the middle of the night, half our problems are solved. We almost have two operations we plan for.”
Diners across China have reacted with horror after covert pictures showing noodle factory workers sticking their bare feet in the foodstuff were released online.
One staff member at the factory in Dongguan City was even pictured taking a nap on piles of noodles before the snack was packed and sent off to customers.
The plant, called the Tongcheng Rice Noodle Factory, was involved in a similar hygiene scandal last year when owners promised to clean up their act.
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Pictures taken at the Tongcheng Rice Noodle Factory show workers putting their feet in piles of noodles (left and right), and even napping on top of the foodstuff (left image, centre) before it is sent to customers
A spokesman for the Food and Drug Administration said: 'Undercover photographs taken in the rice products factory show plain clothes employees kicking around piles of noodles on the floor with their bare feet.Share
'They are trampling over them as they walk about and even laying down to take their afternoon naps before packaging them up and shipping them to stores.
'We will not tolerate such breaches of the health and hygiene laws.'
One of the online comments posted underneath the images read: 'It’s shocking and hard to believe these pictures.'
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The same factory was involved in a similar hygiene scandal last year when owners promised to clean up their act. Bosses could now face heavy fines or jail sentences for a repeated breach
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Workers were pictured wading through piles of noodles with no shoes on and without wearing hairnets (pictured right, how workers at the factory should have been dressed)
'Let us call it stinky feet rice noodles forever,' said another, while a third added: 'It is disgusting to think we have eaten so much rice noodle before from this company. We will never eat them again!'
Dongguan Food and Drug Administration said the pictures were taken before the Chinese Spring Festival on January 31 and officials have shut it down while stringent health checks are carried out.
The operators face heavy fines and possible prison sentences for contravening basic codes of hygiene.
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Authorities say the pictures were taken before January 31 and the factory has now been closed while stringent inspections are now carried out
Commemorating the 20th anniversary of the B.C.-Guangdong Sister Province agreement and promoting exports in key sectors such as liquefied natural gas (LNG), agrifoods, clean technology and information and communications technology (ICT) are the focus of a fall trade mission to China by Premier Christy Clark.
Joining her will be International Trade Minister Teresa Wat who will also be making her first trip to Vietnam.
Premier Clark and Wat will travel to China Oct. 30 to Nov. 7, 2015, where they will make stops in Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Hong Kong. Wat will continue on to Vietnam until Nov. 11. This will be Premier Clark’s third trade mission to China since 2011 and Wat’s fourth mission to China since 2013.
Follow the conversation on Twitter with the hashtag #BCTM15
Premier Christy Clark has returned from a China trade mission where she championed British Columbia’s capacity to help China in its pursuit of a cleaner and greener economy.
Premier Christy Clark joined approximately 1,500 participants, including members of the Canadian business community, for the Terry Fox Run in Hong Kong as part of her trade mission to China.
Richmond-based waterpark company, WhiteWater West, is making waves in China with the signing of a new agreement to develop an all-season waterpark in Hong Kong.
The B.C. government is opening doors in China for B.C.’s clean technology companies with the signing of two significant climate change and clean energy-related agreements.
Premier Christy Clark and Prof Jack Lohman, CEO of the Royal British Columbia Museum, opened a major new exhibition in China exploring the first Chinese migration to Canada.
Poly Culture Group, China’s largest art and cultural company, has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to establish its North American head office in Vancouver, signalling that HQ Vancouver is well on its way to meet or exceed its target of attracting two international head offices to B.C. by 2017.
“We’ve got some good partners in China now,” said McAree. “Really stable companies with deep pockets that are serious about trying to address these [pollution] problems, and it’s starting to pay off.”
Ballard Power Systems (NASDAQ: BLDP; TSX: BLD) has announced that it has signed a definitive agreement with Tangshan Railway Vehicle Company, Limited (TRC) for development of a new fuel cell module that will be designed to meet the requirements of tram or Modern Ground Rail Transit Equipment applications.
Supplying China’s growing demand for clean energy technology and celebrating British Columbia’s strong cultural ties with China will be the major highlights of Premier Christy Clark’s third trade mission to China.
In a first for a Canadian museum, the Royal BC Museum has opened a travelling photography exhibition, Guangzhou to British Columbia: The Chinese Canadian Experience, 1858 to 1958, at a major metro station in Guangzhou, China.
As the Terry Fox Run takes place throughout British Columbia today, Premier Christy Clark has announced she will be participating in the Annual Terry Fox Run in Hong Kong during her upcoming trade mission.
Commemorating the 20th anniversary of the B.C.-Guangdong Sister Province agreement and promoting exports in key sectors such as liquefied natural gas (LNG), agrifoods, clean technology and information and communications technology (ICT) are the focus of a fall trade mission to China.
In celebration of the 20th anniversary of the twinning agreement between British Columbia and China’s Guangdong province, the internationally acclaimed Guangdong Experimental High School Choir visited B.C. in August.
MAY 30, 2005 | WESTERN STANDARD Puppets of Beijing Palsy'Walsy w/Huawei [spies]
Weeeeeeee What Fun! Giggles All Round.... An aggressively pro-China policy can only hurt Canada’s national interests. So who’s pulling the strings in Ottawa’s scheme to build up the next Communist superpower? KEVIN STEEL Norm Altenhof is in love. The 63- year-old retired 9-1-1 operator and former air force veteran from Calgary returned April 20 from a month-long tour of China bursting with enthusiasm. “I would go back there in second,” Altenhof says. “Standing on a street corner in Beijing is just like being in Toronto, only it’s cleaner.” Everywhere he went, there were outward signs that a country that had been a hermit nation barely a few decades ago had blossomed into a first-world economic miracle. There were boutiques full of Gucci shoes and businessmen in flashy BMWs. After touring nine Chinese cities, and visiting the homes of Chinese nationals of varying economic stations, Altenhof is convinced that the People’s Republic of China is a nation to watch in the 21st century. “Everybody was pretty upbeat and looking to the future. They seemed to really embrace capitalism,” he says, though he admits he only got a tourist’s eye view of things. It’s true that nobody would talk politics in public places, Altenhof admits. Especially not about the 1989 massacre of pro-democracy students in Tiananmen Square, which is never discussed openly in Beijing—though, in private, some citizens told him that the actual number of murdered students was 3,000, not the 1,000 widely reported in the West. And there were signs of a growing disparity between the rich and the poor, says Altenhof. Despite aggressive economic reforms over the past decade—including the partial privatization of state-owned firms and even the creation of a national stock exchange—it’s estimated that out of the 1.3 billion people living in China, only 250 million—about one in six—have benefited economically. Altenhof believes that what’s still missing are democratic reforms. He says that he was thrilled, for instance, to see Conservative MP Jason Kenney, on an official government visit to Beijing earlier this year, demonstrate his support for China’s underground pro-democracy movement by paying a visit to the family of Zhao Ziyang. Zhao, a former premier of China who had implemented many of the sweeping reforms, had been excommunicated from the Communist party after expressing sympathy for the Tiannanmen protestors. He spent his final days as a pariah, and, after he died in January, Kenney personally paid tribute to Zhao by visiting his home. “If people like that can keep the pressure on Beijing, then I think everything will be OK,” says Altenhof. But that kind of pressure on Beijing is exactly what Canada’s government seems desperate to avoid. Prime Minister Paul Martin castigated Kenney for his visit, claiming that he himself had chosen not to pay tribute to Zhao because the family had requested privacy—which was later proven to be false. During the January visit, Martin himself faced a barrage of criticism from human rights groups for refusing to put much pressure on his hosts over their notorious human rights abuses. He didn’t even protest when the Communist party banned certain Chinese-Canadian journalists from covering Martin’s visit because they had been critical of the state in the past. “Paul Martin’s opposition of a visit to the family of a deceased leader of a democratic movement within China is entirely in keeping with Paul Martin’s China policy in general,” says Alastair Gordon, president of the Canadian Coalition for Democracies based in Toronto. If anything, says Gordon,Martin has taken pains to coddle the Communists.“He is submitting to the will of Beijing when he denies the right of any democratically elected Taiwanese to even set foot in Canada to visit family or in transit to some other destination,” says Gordon.“He submits to the will of China when he refuses to treat the Dalai Lama as a political leader, only as a religious leader, and refuses to speak about human rights with him. He is submitting to somebody’s will when he approves $50 million in foreign aid to a country that has a gross domestic product of $7.4 trillion, the world’s largest army, its own space program, and 700 missiles aimed at Taiwan.” The fact that Canada is sending millions in relief to an undemocratic country with the fastest-growing economy on the planet—and successfully launched its first space mission in 2003— does seem odd when you consider that, on April 19,Minister of International Cooperation Aileen Carroll announced that foreign aid is being given on the basis of need and good governance. MAY 30, 2005 | WESTERN STANDARD COVER STORY 30 Population: 1,306,313,812 (20.5% of the world) Area: 9,596,960 sq. km (fourth largest) GDP total: US$7.262 trillion GDP per capita: US$5,600 Annual military spending: US$67.5 billion Military service: Compulsory, age 18, two years Life expectancy: 72.27 years Religion: Official atheism Internet users: 94 million Total exports: US$583.1 billion Total imports: US$552.4 billion Oil consumption: 4.96 million bbl/day Oil imports: 2.41 million bbl/day Percentage of world’s commodities China consumes:* Coal: 31% Oil: 7.7% Finished steel: 26.9% Aluminum: 18.6% Copper: 19.7% Pork: 50.4% Fish: 32.3% Rice: 32.8% Cigarettes: 34.8% *2004 ESTIMATES SOURCES: CIA WORLD FACTBOOK, FORTUNE SPOTLIGHT ON CHINA But Martin had more pressing matters to discuss with China’s Communist rulers than to nag them about executed dissidents, persecuted Christians or the systematic obliteration of Tibetan culture. There was a little matter of oil. Or rather, the big matter of oil. Before leaving Beijing, Martin had inked a multilateral trade agreement that promised the Chinese government even more kindness from Canada, specifically greater co-operation in several industries, but with an emphasis on oil and gas. “Canada and China have decided to work together to promote cooperation in the oil and gas sector, including Canada's oil sands, as well as in the uranium resources field,” read a press release from the Prime Minister’s office announcing the agreement. “Canada and China will therefore encourage Canadian and Chinese enterprises to develop mutually beneficial commercial partnerships in these sector”With its explosive growth— by 2020, China’s GDP is expected to quadruple from its 2000 level—the Red state is thirstier than ever for resources. Across the globe, the Communist government is fanning out and buying up any available precious metals and crude oil it can lay its hands on.China now consumes about 4.956-million barrels of oil a day (about a quarter of the 19-million barrels Americans guzzle daily), with about a quarter of it imported. But economists estimate that by 2030, oil consumption in China will quadruple, far outstripping domestic production. In addition to cutting deals in oil-rich countries, such as Venezuela, Sudan and Iran, the Chinese are aware of the potential of the Alberta oilsands. The People’s Republic of China has already secured a foothold in the northern Alberta oilfields. There’s Husky Energy Inc., controlled by Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing’s Hutchison Whampoa group, which recently announced it is going ahead with a $10- billion oilsands development project scheduled to be in full production by 2009. Around the same time, a new pipeline should be complete, to deliver all that oil through the Rockies to the B.C. coast, where it can be loaded onto tankers for export. The project, announced April 14, is a joint venture between Canada’s largest pipeline builder, Enbridge Inc., and one of the PRC’s major oil producers, Petrochina. CNOOC Ltd., another massive stateowned Chinese oil producer, made its first foray into the oilsands in April, scooping up a 17 per cent stake in Calgary-based MEG Energy Corp. But given that Canada is situated right next to the largest energy market in the world—and the Americans are interested in the oilsands as a secure source for crude, one that comes with a lot fewer complications than relying on Mideast suppliers—some are wondering why we’re so anxious to let the Chinese lock up so much of the reserves. The Communists, after all, are in the midst of an unprecedented military buildup, they’re still one of the worst human rights abusers on the planet and they seem increasingly willing to draw the U.S. into a war over Taiwan if that country ever declares independence (a move that President George W. Bush has indicated he will defend). 31 AP/DAN LOH Most Canadians remember Peppergate at the November 1997 Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Vancouver for its images of the RCMP’s brutal treatment of Canadians protesting against the human rights abuses of then Indonesian president Suharto. The cops doused the demonstrators with pepper spray and ripped down their signs. Canadians probably also remember then prime minister Jean Chrétien’s cold attempt at making light of the undemocratic assault by quipping about the pepper spray: “For me, pepper, I put it on my plate.” An inquiry was subsequently called to investigate whether the protesters’ rights were violated. The inquiry concluded that the RCMP ignored the protestors’ charter freedoms in executing their violent crackdown. But how many Canadians know the story behind the story? Why was the Canadian political elite so eager to please a detested dictator who was to be ousted by his own people a mere six months later, anyway? During his 32-year reign, the corrupt General Suharto had amassed a huge financial empire and is ranked as the sixth richest man in the world, with an estimated personal wealth of $16 billion. And one of the businesses dealing with Suharto’s family was none other than then finance minister Paul Martin’s. Paiton Shipping, a Barbados-based company 50 per cent owned by Martin, was awarded a huge contract from the Paiton Power Plant just one year before the APEC fiasco. Controlled by Suharto’s son, the power plant hired Martin’s shipping firm to transport clean coal from COVER STORY MAY 30, 2005 | WESTERN STANDARD Business before displeasure Why was Ottawa so quick to crush human rights protests at the 1997 APEC summit? Mounties take down a demonstrator protesting the presence of Indonesian dictator General Suharto at the 1997 APEC conference in Vancouver. At the time, the corrupt Suharto regime was in business with then finance minister Paul Martin So, what exactly is Canada’s interest in providing fuel to a country that may soon represent a bigger threat to world stability than Iran or North Korea? “We’re left with a foreign policy toward China that absolutely defies explanation as to how it’s in regional interests, trade interests, political interests, economic interests, Canadian interests,” says Gordon. Though he does think there’s one explanation, unpleasant as it may be: that the politicians who devise Canadian foreign policy have their own reasons for getting close to China. “The kind of connection between those who make our China policy show that they have the potential to benefit by submitting to the will of Beijing.” Long before average Canadians like Altenhof caught on to the potential of China, Paul Martin was getting in on the ground floor. Back in the days of Chairman Mao, when China’s economy was still heavily agrarian and backwardly collectivist, the future prime minister was already planting the seeds of commerce. “I first came to China in 1972, during the waning years of the Cultural Revolution. I was in business then,” Martin said, in a Jan. 21 speech in Beijing.At the time, the aspiring businessman was working for Power Corporation of Canada, a firm with $16 billion in revenues controlled by Montreal’s powerful Desmarais family. It was clearly an eye-opening experience because he’s been making deals in China ever since. Canada Steamship Lines, the gargantuan shipping company Martin purchased from Power Corp. in the eighties, that is now run by his children, has taken advantage of China’s cheap workers to build ships. Three CSL container ships were built in the Jiangnan Shipyard, controlled by the People’s Liberation Army. A fourth was refurbished in Shanghai.Martin actually owns 35 per cent of China’s Tangshan Jinshan Marine Co. The Chinese interests of the Desmarais family—who have been strong financial backers of Martin’s political campaigns from early in his political career—run even deeper. Power’s chairman, Paul Desmarais, is the founding chairman of the Canada China Business Council, which promotes trade between the two nations. The honorary chairman is his brother, André Desmarais, CEO of Power. Power Corp. has longstanding ties with one of the PRC’s leading corporations, CITIC Group.As André remarked at a general meeting in May 2000, “Shareholders are aware through our annual reports that for over 20 years we have had a relationship with the stateowned China International Trust and Investment Corp. of Beijing.” In 1997, the relationship culminated in Power paying $358 million for a four per cent interest in the Hong Kong firm, whose interests include coal-fired power-generation facilities, automobile and food distribution concerns, hotels, shopping malls, infrastructure, and communications firms. Their primary business is in aerospace, owning a major stake in Cathay Pacific airlines and manufacturing fighter jets for the People’s Liberation Army. With a direct stake in such a broad swath of China’s economy, the Desmarais surely stand to benefit from Canada’s increasingly cozy relationship with the Communists in Beijing. But it’s not just Martin they have to thank. It was his predecessor, Jean Chrétien, under whom Ottawa took a distinct pro-Beijing turn. André Desmarais, who sits on the board of directors of CITIC Pacific Ltd., a CITIC subsidiary, is married to Chrétien’s daughter, France. And it was in the same year that Chrétien’s son-inlaw was negotiating the major investment in CITIC that Canada, for the first time in six years, withdrew its support for a UN resolution censuring China over its abysmal human rights record. Today, China is still cited by groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International as a major abuser of human rights, including its jailing of political opponents, persecution of religious groups and its population control measures,which include forced abortions. But 1997 was a pivotal year for Sino- Canadian relations in other ways. It was that year that a group of investigators with the RCMP and CSIS wrapped up a probe into the systematic infiltration of Canadian society by Chinese gangs. It was dubbed Operation Sidewinder. But almost immediately after the security report that followed, titled “Chinese Intelligence Services and Triads Financial Links in Canada,” was completed, CSIS ordered it destroyed. At the time, the head of CSIS was Ward Elcock. Elcock, in fact, is the nephew of Michael Pitfield, a confidant of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau. Pitfield co-authored the report in the early eighties that led to the creation of CSIS.Today, he is a director of Power Corp. CSIS officials would later claim the report was destroyed because it was full of fantastical conspiracy theories. But they not only eradicated the report 32 a Suharto-owned business in Borneo (the plant has since been closed after nearly US$300 million went missing from its funding and Suharto’s successors determined that the generator was never needed in the first place). The financial backer for the Suharto family coal business is Moctar Riady, through his firm, the Lippo Group. Riady was named as a key Chinese agent in the Sidewinder report suppressed by Canadian security officials, and Lippo identified as a front company for the People’s Liberation Army. Riady was also front and centre in the U.S. Chinagate scandal—his son James pled guilty to giving illegal contributions to former president Bill Clinton’s campaign. But the Canadian connection to one of Asia’s most despised dictators doesn’t end there. In March 1997, the Liberal government gave a $250-million Export Development Canada loan to one of billionaire Suharto’s companies, Indofoods, ostensibly to purchase Canadian wheat for manufacturing noodles. Martin’s businesses were supposed to be operated in a blind trust while he was in cabinet, so he couldn’t possibly have known that he was doing business with Suharto at the time the APEC assault and the EDC loans were ordered—could he have? Well, in February 2003, it emerged that Martin had exercised a so-called “peek-a-boo clause” in his supervisory agreement at least a dozen times while a cabinet minister, meaning he was able to talk business with the directors and executives managing his multimillion-dollar shipping empire. In other words, in 1997, he could have known that Suharto was a customer of his. So who cares if a few dozen human rights activists had to be violently suppressed to make the general’s visit a bit more comfy? After all, as any good businessman knows, the customer is always right. — KEVIN STEEL MAY 30, 2005 | WESTERN STANDARD COVER STORY itself—CSIS took the unusual step of ordering all notes pertaining to the report shredded. In 1999, someone leaked one of the few surviving copies of Sidewinder to the press. The revelations were explosive: the security agents had found that PRC operatives had managed to infiltrate key sectors of the Canadian economy. Through their association and, in many cases, investments in property, technology firms and security, the spies had managed to cultivate influence in Canadian politics and our economy,while harvesting valuable information from our industries and military. One of the companies prominently identified in Sidewinder was none other than CITIC, which had invested hundreds of millions of dollars in Canadian real estate and resource companies. Sidewinder also noted that caches of arms had turned up on Canadian Indian reserves that had been manufactured by a CITIC subsidiary. Meanwhile, China’s stateowned shipping firm COSCO had made the port of Vancouver its main shipping hubs.Reports from U.S. intelligence show COSCO ships have smuggled arms into the U.S., North Korea, Pakistan and Iran. Brian McAdam, a former foreign service bureaucrat who ran Canada’s immigration office in Hong Kong from 1968 to 1971, and again from 1989 to 1993, was one of the key figures whose suspicions about the PRC’s infiltration of Canada led to the Sidewinder investigations. He says that in the eighties, as the Chinese takeover of Hong Kong in 1997 began to draw near, the Communists in Beijing struck a deal with the powerful Hong Kong triads—criminal organizations specializing in the international smuggling of drugs,weapons and humans. The government and the gangs would work together to exploit the West for mutual advantage. One of the primary strategies was to curry favour and influence with political leaders through large campaign donations.“They are very good at talent spotting,” McAdam says, noting that Chinese agents were donating to Bill Clinton’s campaigns while he was still governor of Arkansas. In fact, the same sort of so-called conspiracy theories that characterized Sidewinder were unearthed in an American investigation into Chinese influence peddling and intelligence gathering in that country. In 1999, the Chinagate scandal rocked the Clinton presidency, when it emerged that the president had accepted large campaign contributions throughout the nineties directly or indirectly from Chinese intelligence agents. What followed, under Clinton, was a U.S. foreign policy adjusted in a way that made it easier for the Communists to get their hands on leading military technology. Defence contractors were permitted to work closely with the PLA to help advance its missile capabilities. What the Chinese couldn’t get legally, they stole through a series of front companies based in the U.S. and Canada. Detailed in an investigation headed by U.S. Representative Christopher Cox, the 1999 scandal was partly overshadowed by the disclosure of then president Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, and few took notice, especially here in Canada. But many of the same figures that were identified in the Cox report were the same ones fingered by Sidewinder. Both look into the connections of Li Ka-shing, who, in addition to his Husky holdings, has invested millions in Canadian properties, banks and telecom firms. Also making appearances in both the U.S. and Canadian reports are Macau gambling magnate Stanley Ho,COSCO and CITIC, which was caught making illegal contributions to Clinton’s campaign. Al Santoli, director of the Asia America Initiative and a former national security advisor in the U.S.Congress, says the Sidewinder report made a big impact in the States. “It got people to look at what was developing here in the U.S.,” he says. “It was something that was systematic. It had a pattern to it.And because of the deft knowledge of the authors—and a few other reports that were coming out at that time—it drew an expanded light on what was going,” Santoli says, adding that 33 PHOTOS.COM, CP/ RYAN WHITE Beijing-controlled corporations have been manoeuvring to buy up large pieces of Canada’s oilfields and mining interests to fuel the booming Chinese economy. In April, rumours that a Shanghai company was looking to take over CP Ships sent the Canadian corporation’s stock soaring COVER STORY MAY 30, 2005 | WESTERN STANDARD the Canadian intelligence underlined the extent to which political systems and electoral processes were being subverted. “Sidewinder put it in a contextual pattern and that was very important.” Had CSIS had its way, those details might never have come to light. The agency’s unorthodox attempts to suppress the report eventually resulted in an investigation in 2003 by Canada’s Security Intelligence Review Committee, the public body that oversees CSIS. Shortly afterward, the investigation was quietly abandoned. Coincidentally, there were several members of the SIRC board who themselves were linked to some of the names that popped up in the Sidewinder report. Former Ontario premier Bob Rae also sat on the SIRC board. Rae’s brother, John, is an executive and director at Power Corp. (with its stake in CITIC). The SIRC board was headed by Paule Gauthier, who up until her first appointment to SIRC, in 1995, had spent 25 years as the corporate secretary of Power Communications, a Power subsidiary. Power Corp’s links to CITIC are mentioned in the Sidewinder report, under “Case Studies.” Exactly how much influence the Chinese nationals named in Sidewinder managed to procure in Canada remains uncertain; the probe was originally intended to be a starting point to stimulate further investigation. What is known is that Li Ka-shing has been a supporter of Martin’s, with Husky donating $10,000 to the prime minister’s leadership campaign in 2003 and another $10,000 from Li-controlled firm Concord Pacific Group Inc. (Li, who is one of the most powerful men in Asia, has said the accusations that he is working for the Communists are nonsense.) According to documents obtained through the Access to Information Act, Martin had several meetings with Li Ka-shing during a 1995 trip to Hong Kong when he was still finance minister. The substance of those meetings however, remains a mystery, as nearly every detail in the minutes of the meeting relating to Li has been blacked out by the government, with notes indicating that the information was highly sensitive and pertained to national security. In other words, Li, a foreign national, was privy to a meeting where things were discussed that are now considered too sensitive for Canadian citizens to hear. Meanwhile Li, whose companies make up an estimated 15 per cent of the capitalization of the Hong Kong stock exchange, is alleged, in intelligence documents, to work closely with the Chinese government. According to the Sidewinder report: “On 23 May, 1982, Li Ka-shing and [Triad boss] Henry Fok met with [PRC leaders] Deng Xiaoping and Zhao Ziyang in Beijing to discuss the future of the peninsula. Their task would be to advise and educate the Chinese authorities on the basic rules of capitalism. In return,Beijing would give them privileged access to the Chinese economic basin.” Martin’s predecessor, Jean Chrétien, who was prime minister at the time Sidewinder was ordered suppressed, has links to Li as well.While on one of his few hiatuses from politics, between 1986 and 1990, Chrétien sat on the board of Gordon Capital—a company run by Li Ka-shing’s son, Richard Li—and personally brokered deals between Gordon Capital and Power Corp. The investment bank became the focus of mini-scandal in 1995, when Gordon won the federal contract to take Petro- Canada public, shocking the Bay Street business community, which expected the multimillion-dollar deal would go to a larger,more experienced Canadian firm. At the time Martin was with Power Corp., he got his start working for Maurice Strong. Strong, the former head of PetroCanada, who remains a senior adviser to Martin today and is a member of the Privy Council, never lost his enthusiasm for the Chinese commercial market. A multimillionaire—though he is an avowed socialist, his personal motto being, “Think like a socialist, act like a capitalist”—Strong, an honorary director of the Canada China Business Council, has family ties to the Communist state. According to a story told to Elaine Dewar in the Strong biography, Cloak of Green, Strong’s cousin was the famous American Marxist writer Anna Louise Strong. After she eventually moved to China, becoming a member of the Comintern, Anna was held in such high esteem by the Maoists that when she died, in 1970, her funeral was personally arranged by former Chinese premier and communist hero Chou En-lai. Today, Maurice—who some wags have not coincidentally dubbed “Chairman Mo”—also spends much of his time in Beijing, where he keeps an office.That is, when he’s not working alongside Secretary General Kofi Annan at the UN, as his special adviser and personal envoy. (In April, Strong stepped aside as the UN special envoy to North Korea after the investigators into the Iraqi oil-for-food scandal revealed he had ties to a Korean accused of bribing UN officials.) He has also been hired as a business consultant to the government of the Chinese province of Anhui. Currently, Strong is working with Anhui to help develop its Chery automobile industry, and has also been hired by former New Brunswick sports car impresario Malcolm Bricklin, who plans to export the Chery to North American markets. But perhaps Strong’s most lasting legacy will be the Kyoto Accord, which is considered to be largely his brainchild, emerging from recommendation from 34 PHOTOS.COM MAY 30, 2005 | WESTERN STANDARD COVER STORY 35 ABACA/OLIVIER DOULIERY the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, which Strong chaired. And the Chinese should be grateful for it. The accord, while binding the hands of western countries like Canada, by forcing them to lower greenhouse gas emissions, could turn out to be a windfall for the Communists. China, one of the world’s worst polluters, thanks to its massive coal burning industries, is not only exempt from achieving any Kyoto targets, it is permitted to sell so-called offset credits, that is, gas allowances it doesn’t use, to regulated nations, such as Canada, for millions, perhaps billions of dollars. Canada can also gain greenhouse credits through a process called “joint implementation,” whereby Ottawa pays to construct power plants in countries like China that are more efficient than existing infrastructure. In the $10-billion Kyoto plan unveiled in April, the Liberals specified that Canada will both utilize offset credits and joint implementation strategies to meet its Kyoto targets. Meanwhile, companies in China unbound by emissions limits, such as CITIC’s electrical generation and manufacturing interests, can only expect to gain more competitive advantage over their North American peers. While western governments such as Canada’s have been taking pains to act as multilaterally as they can, by signing on to agreements such as Kyoto, political observers point out that China plays by a different set of rules. Even if Beijing had sold off all of its carbon emissions credits, it’s unlikely it would ever feel obliged to limit its own carbon emissions and risk stifling its thundering economic growth.After all, the Communists routinely flout all sorts of international agreements, from human rights codes to trade rules. “China has proven that despite all the promises it made when it joined the World Trade Organization and everything else, it has no intention whatsoever in being a good international corporate citizen,” says the American Foreign Policy Council’s Santioli. If anything, the country that Ottawa seems so eager to do business with is becoming more menacing every year. William Hawkins, senior fellow in National Security Studies at Washington’s U.S. Business and Industry Council Education Foundation, visited China last November on a fact-finding tour. He stayed in a CITIC-owned hotel in Zhuhai where the company was promoting a nearby air show, displaying large models of its fighter jets in the lobby. Hawkins remembers the chilling sight of hotel porters dressed like the jet fighter’s ground crew and the women behind the front desk decked out like fighter pilots. “So far, Chinese reform has moved from communism to fascism,” says Hawkins. “You still have the party running things, but you’ve just changed the economic system. It’s directed capitalism, national capitalism.” While the Cold War was fought with the understanding that the Soviet economic system was unworkable, and would eventually collapse on itself, “a China with a booming economy is going to be a much bigger challenge than Communist Russia was,” says Hawkins. “China is using its gains from trade to build and finance the next great world power whose ambitions and values are different from ours.” John Thompson, director of the Toronto-based MacKenzie Institute, a security think-tank, says China “scares the hell” out of him—more so, even, than Arab terrorists. “After the jihadists they are the big security threat,” says Thompson. “The jihadists are noisy and in our face, but in the long run they are not our real threat.They can be an inconvenience, but if they ever really goad us sufficiently we’ll be sorry about what we did to them, but they won’t be around. China is the emerging security threat. They are going to give us as severe a challenge as the Nazis and the Fascists in the 1940s.” Washington seems to be taking the signals coming from China—from its huge military buildup to its rocket launches—as that the Communists are jockeying to become the world’s second superpower, if not the first, and are warning allies to stop abetting the enemy. In April, the U.S. Department of Defence banned Israel from participating in a massive air force project after Israel agreed to help the Chinese army upgrade its unmanned drones. A few weeks earlier, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke out against a plan by European countries to lift a 15- year ban on arms sales to China,warning that the weapons may one day be used against America. “It is the United States—not Europe—that has defended the Pacific,”Rice told a news conference. “The European Union should do nothing to contribute to a circumstance in which Chinese military modernization draws on European technology or even the political decision to suggest that it could draw on European technology.” Rice’s comments came just days before she paid a visit to the Red state. While there, she made a point of attending a service at one of the officially atheist nation’s few legal churches, as a sign of protest against the Communists’ suppression of religious freedoms. It’s that kind of public pro-democratic gesture, the sort that Paul Martin scrupulously avoided on his Beijing visit, that optimists like Norm Altenhof hope will pressure the Chinese to reform their fascist state. In the meantime, Martin and those who surround him seem to prefer that things in China stay just the way they are.
