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Terrible Terry Glavin unleashes his keyboard’s wrath on our political and business elites:
Canada’s servile relationship with China
More from Terry GlavinIt’s pathetic, really…Canada’s foreign affairs establishment is now expecting us to believe that the latest of Beijing’s demands, to which Immigration Minister John McCallum has now so loudly and cheerfully acquiesced, were really Canada’s ideas all along.If there is another plausible explanation for McCallum’s surprise “request” last week that Beijing allow the tripling of visa application centres in China with a view to radically boosting the number of Chinese students and temporary foreign workers in Canada, that explanation has not come from McCallum. All we’ve heard is the usual treacle about Canada’s openness to the world [why not some similar move in other countries, eh?].An acceleration of the availability and volume of Canadian visas accessible to Chinese citizens that the authorities in Beijing would encourage to sojourn in Canada was one of the many demands enumerated less than three months ago by Wang Yi, the Chinese Foreign Minister who made an international spectacle of himself at a press conference by barking at Canadian journalists that they had “no right” to raise questions about human rights in China [see, note “Comments”: “New Government’s Stealthy Diplomacy Promoting Sino-Canadian Relations” plus ‘How Convenient: “Ontario minister Michael Chan defends China’s human-rights record”‘] .Now we’re expected to believe that Wang’s little-noticed demand that Canada boost the supply of visas available to Chinese citizens who are in good standing with Beijing was actually a Canadian idea. We will all be expected to believe a great deal of claptrap like this in the coming days, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s visit to China approaches in advance of the Sept. 4-5 G20 Summit in Guangzhou [in fact PM’s visit starts Aug. 30 for a week]. So be alert.…While dozens of Canadian politicians and mandarins went on to enrich themselves in China trade consultancies — most of them Liberal party grandees and their civil service hangers-on — the prosperity all these Disco Generation wise guys promised us has accrued mainly to a parasitic class of Chinese Communist Party multibillionaires and their few corporate accomplices in Canada. For all the smiles and the smooching that Ottawa and Beijing put on for show, the underlying “message” Beijing transmits nowadays is always the same: nice little country you have here. Shame if anything should happen to it.…the B.C. government’s recent 15-per-cent sales tax imposition on properties bought by foreign nationals isn’t expected to change a thing [see “Mainland Chinese Buying-Up Vancouver: A Taxing Issue“]. What Vancouverites have gotten out of this is one of the world’s least affordable cities, bitterly divided against itself. Average house prices in Metro Vancouver have nearly tripled over the past 15 years. Home ownership for working families is a thing of the past. Now we’re being sold on a Chinese version of the temporary foreign worker program…You’d think Xi Jinping would have bigger files to concern himself with, but he’s just put the fix in to scuttle Canada’s trade in canola oil to China. It’s a $2.6-billion business, representing Canada’s biggest agricultural export to the People’s Republic. It’s hard to say what price Canada will be expected to pay to have this latest strong-arm extortion lifted [Chicom story sort of says it all: “Nation holds firm on higher standards for canola imports: Authorities want to encourage domestic cultivation of crop: experts”].But we will pay. We always do.
Relevant:
Mark Collins, a prolific Ottawa blogger, is a Fellow at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute; he tweets @Mark3Ds
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