Terry Glavin: O'Toole's policy on China is getting a thumbs-up from pro-democracy activists
The new Conservative leader has a robust and detailed plan to deal with the geopolitical predicament Canada finds itself in
Conservative Party of Canada Leader Erin O'Toole speaks after his win at the 2020 Leadership Election, in Ottawa on Aug. 23, 2020
Something that has to be said about what to expect from the Conservative party now that the leadership race is over and Erin O’Toole has come out on top: when it comes to foreign policy, at least the Conservatives will have one. That’s O’Toole’s edge over Justin Trudeau’s government, and the Liberals, along with the other Opposition parties, are going to have a hard time of it if they want to cite O’Toole’s foreign policy as evidence that he’s some sort of right-wing populist.
Front and centre in O’Toole’s foreign-policy platform is a self-evident proposition that the Liberals and the other parties can barely bring themselves to acknowledge out loud: “For Canadians, there is no greater geopolitical issue than dealing with the Communist Party of China’s intentions to impose its own model of authoritarian governance on the world and erode a rules-based approach.”
The Liberal party’s most embarrassing foreign-policy weakness is its historic and deeply-entrenched enthusiasm for warmer relations with the Chinese regime. It’s an affection that Chinese supreme leader Xi Jinping has most dramatically spurned by abducting and imprisoning diplomat-on-leave Michael Kovrig and entrepreneur Michael Spavor, in retaliation for Canada’s detention of Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou on a U.S. Justice Department extradition request.
At least the Conservatives will have a foreign policy
O’Toole’s strength is that he has a robust and detailed plan to deal with the broader geopolitical predicament Canada finds itself in, thanks to Xi’s determination to reshape the world according to the Chinese Communist Party’s economic and international-relations model. And O’Toole’s program is consistent with the positions adopted by human rights activists, and with the perspectives of the intelligence community, and with the views of the overwhelming majority of Canadians as expressed in several recent public opinion polls.
It’s a strange state of affairs that has left Alliance Canada Hong Kong executive director Cherie Wong, a 24-year-old Ottawa equity consultant who describes herself as a “very left” intersectional feminist, wondering why the New Democrats and the Liberals are so comparatively weak on foreign policy generally, and on China policy specifically. When it comes to the concerns of pro-democracy Hongkongers, Wong told me, O’Toole is way out in front of both Prime Minister Trudeau, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, the Greens and the Bloc.
“That doesn’t necessarily mean that pro-democracy Hongkongers or pro-democracy Chinese folks are just going to say yes to O’Toole in an upcoming election,” Wong said, “but I do really like his China policies, and I think they are in line with what the Alliance is pushing. I think it’s a good start. I think it’s the start of a conversation that I hope other parties would follow. If the NDP had policy like that, I wouldn’t hesitate to support the NDP, but this kind of leadership on China issues is not evident in any of the other parties, especially with the Liberals right now.”
The veteran campaigner Ivy Li of Canadian Friends of Hong Kong says she’s found herself in the same spot, wondering why Trudeau’s Liberals and the purportedly left-wing NDP are being outpaced so easily and dramatically by the Conservatives, and even more so now that O’Toole is the Conservative leader. “I am definitely an environmentalist. I am very progressive left,” Li said. And yet, she said, she has to hand it to O’Toole.
A great part of the political dissonance across the liberal-left may be the effort the Chinese Communist Party has poured into appropriating the language of inclusion, anti-imperialism, tolerance and diversity in its propaganda strategies, Li said. A great many Western liberals and progressives have bought into the notion that China simply has a “different” system, a different way of doing things — as though the Chinese people have any say in the matter — and that it’s unseemly for Westerners to criticize the Chinese regime.
The Chinese Communist Party has gone to great lengths in party-controlled universities and think-tanks, devising political and rhetorical strategies that exploit fashionably leftish sentiment in the world’s liberal democracies, Li said, and it seems to have worked surprisingly well in the Liberal and NDP activist base. China has similarly convinced some of the larger environmental organizations that Beijing is an environmental champion and an ally in the global campaign on climate change, when the opposite is true.This advertisement
Sometimes, however, the ploy fails comically, as it did last year when China’s former ambassador to Canada, Lu Shaye, called Canada’s objections to the abduction of Kovrig and Spavor an eruption of “white supremacy.”
Whatever the reason for the liberal-left timidity and incoherence, Wong and Li spoke approvingly of O’Toole’s approach to China. Among his strongest points:
• In response to the continued imprisonment of Kovrig and Spavor, an O’Toole government would impose a variety of sanctions and asset freezes on Communist Party leaders including Xi Jinping himself, along with the chairman of the Standing Committee of the National Party Congress and the president of the Supreme People’s Court. O’Toole would also impose similar sanctions on officials implicated in the persecution of China’s Uyghur Muslim minority and the revocation of Hong Kong’s autonomy, and on officials implicated in cybersecurity attacks on Canadian companies and institutions.
• A crackdown on the CCP’s extensive influence operations in Canada, including its infiltration of Canadian institutions and co-ordinated harassment and intimidation of Chinese-Canadians; a suspension of the Canada-China Legislative Association; a foreign agent registry; and a five-year hiatus barring former politicians and government officials from taking up contracts with the Chinese government or with entities owned or controlled by Beijing.
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• Huawei Technologies would be banned from participating in the rollout of Canada’s fifth-generation (5G) internet connectivity technology, and Chinese state-owned enterprises would be effectively barred from investing in Canada.
• New alliances in the Indo-Pacific region and close co-operation with the U.S., Australia, the U.K., New Zealand, Japan and other democratic allies in decoupling from Chinese supply chains and countering China’s overseas aggression.
And that’s just for starters.
“There’s room for improvement in his platform,” Wong said, “But it’s a really good start.”
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