Glavin: China, not the United States, is the greater threat to Canada's trade & sovereignty

TERRY GLAVIN

Updated: October 17, 2018

Best buddies: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau meets Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing, China on Dec. 5, 2017. 

In all the deranged punditry, partisan histrionics and alarmist nonsense kicked off by Article 32 of the just-concluded renewal of the North American Free Trade Agreement – let’s call it the Chinaclause – it is disheartening that the prize for hyperbole should probably go to the ordinarily level-headed Michael Chong. The Conservatives’ shadow minister for science and MP for Wellington Halton Hills, Chong also-ran in last year’s federal Conservative leadership race and the former head of the Privy Council during Stephen Harper’s term as prime minister.

Just to quickly set the preposterously muddied record straight, Article 32 is an American innovation that merely stipulates that Canada may not enter into a “free trade” agreement with a non-market economy – by which the Americans have since helpfully conceded they meant a command-and-control police state like China – without so much as a by-your-leave from the other parties to the newly christened U.S. Mexico Canada Agreement. For that matter, neither may the United States or Mexico.

If any of the three parties choose to enter into talks with a non-market economy (from here on we’ll just say “China”), the other parties are to be given three months prior notice. During the talks, the other parties are to be kept abreast of what’s on the table and what’s not. If the other parties don’t like the resulting deal, they can put China’s partner outside the USMCA and carry on by themselves in a bilateral trade arrangement.

That this should have incited such hoarse-throated imbecilities about Canadian “sovereignty” to emanate from Canada’s international-trade policy establishment and the Canada-China business lobby (same thing, as often as not) and a section of the business press should tell you something about just how far the rot has spread since former prime minister Jean Chrétien’s first Team Canada brigade was so warmly welcomed in Beijing back in 1994.

With nearly a quarter of a century of lucrative post-politics sinecures, Canada-China “friendship” sleaze-baggery and shameless pro-Beijing think-tankery having taken its moral and intellectual toll, it is no wonder that the very idea that China is some kind of normal trading country has been normalized.   

Not to pick on Michael Chong, but he went so far as to rise in the House of Commons and evoke the memory of Canada’s 60,000 First World War dead, and the blood sacrifice they made so that Canada might earn its foreign-policy sovereignty with the 1931 Statute of Westminster, to traduce the USCMA. “Article 32 makes us a vassal state,” Chong declared.

With nearly a quarter of a century of lucrative post-politics sinecures, Canada-China “friendship” sleaze-baggery and shameless pro-Beijing think-tankery having taken its moral and intellectual toll, it is no wonder that the very idea that China is some kind of normal trading country has been normalized.

Well no, it does not. Even the case that Canada’s sovereignty has been sacrificed owing to the United States reserving the right to have its own courts decide what constitutes a “non-market” country falls apart under the slightest scrutiny. The United States, the European Union and Japan all agree with the blindingly obvious, that China is indeed a “non-market” economy, that Beijing duped the World Trade Organization in gaining membership 17 years ago, and that its leader, Xi Jinping, is moving China ever farther from anything resembling a “normal” trading country by the hour.

Still, Wenran Jiang, the exuberantly Beijing-friendly think-tanker with the Institute of Asian Research at the University of British Columbia, whose name seems to be an indelible must-consult entry in each and every digital CBC news and public-affairs show rolodex – was beside himself about Article 32. “Anything now we do must be subject to American approval, and this is a severe concession and a sacrifice and a giveaway of our sovereignty, period,” he told CBC News.

While Wenran Jiang’s rubbish is barely distinguishable from the shouting coming from the Chinese Embassy, and Duncan Cameron, “publisher emeritus” of the chronically unserious pseudo-left webzine Rabble is making pretty well the same stupid noises about Canadian sovereignty as Ontario economic development minister Jim Wilson, you have to laugh. But it is no laughing matter that among the G7 countries, Canada’s political class remains uniquely persistent in its refusal to recognize China for what it is: a vicious, expansionist police state ruled by a violent, corrupt oligarchy that is quite explicit about its intent to overthrow the American-led world order that has guaranteed Canada’s peace and prosperity over the past 70 years.

Only this week, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau again rebuffed American entreaties to exclude Huawei Technologies from Canada’s fifth-generation cellular systems. Trudeau said he would not allow “politics” to intrude on such decisions, and would rely instead on the advice of experts – by which he meant the assurances of bureaucrats at the Communications Security Establishment that they’re up to the job of ensuring that Huawei, a behemoth based in Shenzhen, China, won’t be allowed to get away with spying.

In so doing, Trudeau is ignoring three former heads of Canada’s spy services, including former Canadian Security Intelligence Services director Ward Elcock, who has stated bluntly that Huawei “is essentially under the control of the Chinese government.” Trudeau is also choosing to ignore the counsel of six U.S. intelligence agencies and the Australian security and intelligence establishment. These are not “experts”? This is not about “politics”? Of course it is.

The 190-member international police agency Interpol learned last month something of the cost of treating China as though it were a normal country. After stupidly allowing Chinese nominee Meng Hongwei to serve as Interpol’s president, Meng was abruptly “disappeared” by Beijing. It took 10 days for Xi Jinping’s officials to admit they they’d apprehended Meng on what are almost certainly trumped-up bribery charges. A resignation letter from Meng was produced, but he hasn’t been seen since.

Earlier this year, Canadian police and intelligence agencies received an extensive report from a 15-member coalition, authored by Amnesty International, setting out in detail the extent to which Chinese-Canadians who raise their voices about human rights abuses in China are subjected to threats, intimidation, disinformation operations and other strong-arm tactics, including persecution of family members back in the old country.

This is far and away a greater trespass upon Canadian sovereignty than Article 32 of the USMCA, but there has been pitifully little outrage or high-blown rhetoric in the House of Commons or anywhere else about any of that.

Despite Article 32, Trudeau has insisted that Canada will continue to pursue ever-closer trade ties with China. As for a free trade deal, it was never possible anyway. You can’t strike a genuinely “free” trade deal with a wholly unfree country with a closed society such as Communist China. Besides that, if an anodyne clause like Article 32 has turned Canada into a “vassal state” of the U.S., what would you expect would become of Canadian sovereignty under a full-bore comprehensive trade agreement with the princeling oligarchs of Beijing, overseers of the largest and most sophisticated slave state in human history?