Terry Glavin: The Liberal government has become a pro-China propaganda machine
You’ve really got to hand it to the China-trade lobbyists, deal-makers and sycophants who have insinuated themselves into federal Liberal power circles
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang at a business luncheon in September 2016 in Montreal.
You’ve really got to hand it to the creepy China-trade lobbyists, deal-makers and sycophants who have so successfully insinuated themselves into federal Liberal power circles and the upper echelons of the foreign affairs bureaucracy over the years.
Never mind the weird go-ahead that Economic Development Minister Navdeep Bains gave to the estimated $1 billion acquisition of a Vancouver nursing home conglomerate by the opaquely-structured Chinese insurance and real-estate giant Anbang, and what it means now that Anbang chairman Wu Xiaohui has been “disappeared” by Chinese President Xi Jinping’s corruption police. Who knows? Wu’s vanishing might be just another operation in Xi’s purge of headmen he doesn’t like. And never mind for a moment the equally inexplicable green light Bains gave the Chinese telecom giant Hytera, without a proper national security review, to tender a bid for Norsat International Inc. — a high-tech firm with contracts that include the U.S. military’s communications satellites.
Set aside as well all the corporate Chinese involvement in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s sketchy cash-for-access fundraisers and that squalid state dinner in honour of Chinese Premier Li Keqiang that Trudeau invited 61 Liberal party donors to attend last September, along with all those corporations, law firms and lobbyists up to their necks in dirty Chinese money.
When it comes to the cause of browbeating reluctant Canadians into subscribing to the sleazy proposition that an ever-more intimate relationship with the thuggish police state in Beijing is in Canada’s national interest, you’ve got to hand it to them. These people just won’t quit.
The latest exertion in the strategic formulation and pretty packaging of pro-Beijing business propaganda — and can we please be at least honest about what this is? — will take place this week in Ottawa. It’s a no-reporters-allowed gathering of the Public Policy Forum, a weirdly hybrid government-corporate mind-meld of senior bureaucrats and Canadian business executives already so deeply entwined in lucrative associations with Beijing’s corrupt billionaire princelings that they simply can’t be taken seriously.
It’s the kick-off to a two-year effort aimed at changing Canadians’ minds about China’s ravenous kleptocracy to suit the purposes of the Canadian firms that want in on the action. The PPF president is Edward Greenspon, the Globe and Mail’s former editor in chief, who hasn’t yet commented on this week’s conclave. Only two months ago the Globe commissioned a Nanos Research poll showing that, once again, Canadians remain ill-disposed to the Liberal Party grandees’ hopes for a free trade deal with China. Sorry, Mr. Greenspon. That must have stung.
The Nanos poll showed that two-thirds of survey respondents want Canada to press China on human rights in any free trade talks, and only one in 10 Canadians is daft enough to believe that Chinese state-owned enterprises should be allowed to ferret away their ill-gotten, racket-derived billions in the Canadian economy any more than they’ve already been allowed to get away with. Given the effort that Justin Trudeau’s Liberals have put into making us feel all warm and squishy about Beijing’s gangland ruling class, it’s a tribute to the democratic impulses of ordinary Canadians that they’re still skeptical at all.
It’s nearly forgotten now, but during the 2015 federal election campaign, the persistently slippery China hands in Foreign Affairs leaked a think-paper that was intended to make fun of Stephen Harper’s hot-and-cold approach to China — inviting Beijing-run corporations in, for instance, and then closing the door after the China National Offshore Oil Corporation scooped up Nexen Energy for $15.1 billion. Ottawa should be “leading public opinion” on cultivating deeper ties with Beijing to the exclusion of other foreign-policy priorities, the faceless, nameless mandarins advised.
It’s also rarely recalled that Justin Trudeau’s Liberals were strangely quiet on the hustings about their intentions to radically remodel Canada’s China policy to the purposes of slavishness, palm-greasing and a full-bore free trade deal. But that is exactly what Trudeau’s “sunny ways” government set about doing. You will often hear it said that the Liberals are behaving in this reckless way because they’re all naive. Don’t believe it.
After Trudeau plucked Canada-China Business Council president Peter Harder to lead his transition team (Harder was quickly rewarded with the top Liberal post in the Senate), Stéphane Dion’s rebranded Global Affairs Canada was pressed into a top-to-bottom reconfiguration that depended upon a long-march manipulation of Canadian public opinion in Beijing’s favour.
A phalanx of Beijing-friendly bureaucrats threw themselves into the effort. Think pieces made the departmental rounds advocating that senior Canadian Armed Forces personnel acquaint themselves “on a first-name basis” with the generals of the People’s Liberation Army. Another bright idea: the whole point of the hoped-for Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement — to build an alternative to Beijing’s economic bullying throughout Asia — should be turned on its head, to embrace Beijing as a signatory and beneficiary.
Senior Global Affairs functionary Pascale Massot proposed that Global Affairs devote itself to convincing Canadians that many Chinese state-owned firms — the overseas acquisitions arms of the Chinese Communist Party — were not the “illiberal” cartels anyone with a lick of sense knows them to be, but rather perfectly benign, profit-driven companies. And China should be understood not as the vast, cyber-hacking, dissident-jailing, Tibetan-murdering captive labour sweatshop that it really is, but rather as a “potential collaborator in the pursuit of the many goals Canada is seeking to achieve.”
That is the sort of propaganda it has now fallen to the Public Policy Forum to conjure and circulate, so brace yourself for two more years of self-serving hogwash served up by the same old array of endowment-flush academics, consultants, corporate lobbyists, and the plodding battalions of back-scratchers from the Asia-Pacific Foundation, the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, and the Canada-China Business Council, Harder’s former roost.
It’s no coincidence that Harder was also a senior adviser with Denton’s Canada LLP, the baby sister of Denton’s Beijing Dacheng behemoth, which specializes in deal-making on behalf of Chinese state-owned enterprises. It is at least darkly amusing that former Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, Denton’s “company counsel,” is still occasionally trotted out for the television cameras as some sort of sage guardian of Canadian interests in these sordid affairs. Right. Pull the other one.
For all the perplexed speculations prompted by that mere passing reference to China in her otherwise clear-headed and candid foreign-policy assessment in the House of Commons earlier this month, there is a simple and straightforward reason why Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland mentioned China only in the same breath as India, and only as an example of “developing world” pluck and economic vitality.
Owing to the surfeit of backroom conniving and feculence in her own government in the matter of fabulously wealthy Liberal Party donors and their corporate money-grubbing in Guangdong, Shanghai, Dalian and Hangzhou, it would have been impossible for an honest person such as Freeland to dwell on the subject for more than a moment without throwing up.
National Post
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