11 minute read
Compromising Position
Strategic Vision vol. 6, no. 33 (June 2017)
Ottawa allows Beijing to use Canada ties to legitimize Chinese regime
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Dean Karalekas
Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, right, shares a toast with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing in October 1973.
photo: Peter Bregg/Canadian Press
At the very moment the world was learning of the death of Chinese Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo, almost universally excoriating the Chinese regime for callously allowing the prisoner of conscience to die while in government custody, Chinese President Xi Jinping was in Beijing, smiling for photographers and shaking hands with Canada’s de facto head of state, Governor General David Johnston. This display was just the latest in a long history of Ottawa’s misguided China policy that has allowed Canada to be used as a public-relations tool for the People’s Republic of China (PRC), helping to water down its image as an expansionist authoritarian state and conferring legitimacy on the one-party regime.
Since the election of Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau as Canada’s 23rd prime minister, it has become even less likely that Ottawa will join the growing international chorus demanding change from Beijing on such issues as its human rights record and its aggressively expansionist actions in the South China Sea and along its border with India.
Indeed, Trudeau himself made this very point during a week long state visit to China in August 2016 when he suggested that stronger ties with Canada would allay global fears about China’s rise and its seemingly expansionist ambitions. Speaking at the China Entrepreneur Club, the prime minister said that Canada could “help China position itself in a very positive way on the world stage,” according to a report by Canada’s CBC news. This is the kind of support that money can’t buy, and the government in Beijing has long been buying influence among Canada’s civil servants, political leaders, and community organizers. For example, concerns have been raised about the cozy relationship that Beijing enjoys with Ontario’s Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and International Trade Michael Chan, himself an ethnic Chinese member of the provincial Liberal Party. In describing his role, Chan was quoted in the Globe and Mail as saying, “For me, it is how I am able to bridge Canada and China.”
Influencing politics
Chan has used his influence to build a network of fellow pro-China candidates in Canada to aid in lobbying for closer Sino-Canada ties. While there is nothing untoward about seeking more amenable foreign relations, concerns have been expressed about the degree to which money from Beijing is being used to influence politics in Canada, and whether foreign agents have the ear of highly placed public servants. Among the parties asking questions about such influence was the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS), which suspects that Chan has been under the “undue influence of the government of China” to serve the purposes of the Chinese regime, according to a report in the Globe and Mail.
According to pro-democracy activists among the Chinese community in Toronto, community groups including the National Congress of Chinese-Canadians, founded in 1991, and the Confederation of Toronto Chinese-Canadian Organizations, founded in 1985, serve as lobbyists for the city’s Chinese consulate, as a means of influencing the Canadian government and directing the efforts of the ethnic Chinese community.
Michael Chan, Ontarios’s Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and International Trade, speaks at a fundraising event.
photo: Janis Rees/Tom Sandler Photography
These efforts are bearing fruit: media reports have highlighted a disturbing level of influence in Canada’s Chinese-language media, intimidation of leaders in the Chinese-Canadian community, and interference with initiatives of Taiwan representative offices in Canada.
As an example of the latter, journalist Yuli Hu was refused entry to cover the triennial gathering of the International Civil Aviation Organization held in Montreal in February 2016. Hu, it should be stressed, is a Canadian journalist, living and working in Canada, but because she was writing for the Taiwan based Central News Agency, she was told to leave the premises despite having already registered with ICAO to cover the event. It was reportedly the Beijing regime that stipulated that no Taiwanese organization could be allowed to attend the Montreal conference, and the Canadian authorities deemed it proper to enforce this decree. While the incident earned disapprobation from such international press freedom organizations as the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders, the Trudeau government was conspicuously silent.
Taiwanese expatriates in Canada pasted protest stickers around the ICAO Montreal headquarters condemning the group for excluding Taiwan.
photo: Exile on Ontario St
With the election of Justin Trudeau as Prime Minister, Canada’s position on China ties has taken a more amenable turn. Trudeau’s predecessor, former Prime Minister Stephen Harper of the Progressive Conservative Party which is now in opposition in Ottawa, was less taciturn about irking Beijing. He welcomed His Holiness the Dalai Lama on a visit to Parliament Hill over Beijing’s strident objections, for example, with the spiritual leader even meeting privately with Harper in the Prime Minister’s office. Moreover, Harper’s administration put in place safeguards to ensure that corporate acquisitions by foreign state-owned firms—especially those involving sensitive technology—would be carefully scrutinized by Ottawa. Although Harper, too, was excoriated by his critics for expanding trade ties with Beijing during his tenure, his administration was far more circumspect about the relationship that Trudeau’s.
“When we say that Canada is open for business, we do not mean that Canada is for sale to foreign governments,” Harper was quoted as saying in 2012.
Closer business ties
In defense of the Trudeau administration, the new leader is actively seeking closer business ties with Beijing and appears uninterested in putting a values based foreign policy in place with China—at least not compared to its stance on trade with the United States, where it has made much hay out of inserting progressive social issues such as gender equality into the recently opened renegotiations over the North American Free Trade Agreement. Unfortunately, the Liberal government seems unwilling to extend this professed concern for human rights and equality to its dealings with China. This selective delinking of trade and rights may put the national security of Canada—as well as that of its allies—in jeopardy.
Earlier this year, the Trudeau government reversed a decision by Harper’s Conservatives to block the sale of ITF Technologies to O-Net Communications, based in Hong Kong, on the grounds that it would put sensitive dual-use laser technology in the hands of the Chinese. Moreover, the Liberal government okayed the sale of Vancouver-based high-tech firm Norsat International Inc. to Hytera Communications of Shenzhen, China. Indeed, the administration greenlit the latter takeover without conducting a full national-security review or determining the implications it would have on technology transfers outside Canada. Because Norsat’s most important clients in the sale of its transceivers and radio systems include the US military and Canada’s other NATO allies, it is perhaps not surprising that major concerns have been raised, with one commission in Washington labeling the deal as a “threat to US national security,” it was reported. As a result, the Pentagon has announced it would review its contracts with the firm.
While Trudeau has defended the deal on the grounds that it would not harm national security, others disagree, pointing out that unlike in Canada, firms in China are state-owned, or at the very least client corporations of the Politburo, and as such represent a tremendous security risk. In addition to worries over security, such deals with Chinese firms carry with them an inherent lack of reciprocity on market access, not to mention the absence of rule of law in China to protect Canadian businessmen and adjudicate any possible future disputes (to say nothing of the rampant violation of patents and intellectual property rights routinely committed by Chinese firms). Indeed, the government in Beijing has outright stated its intention to acquire strategic assets around the world, including just such defense-related proprietary information. Moreover, the acquisition of military and dual-use technologies is but one avenue in a multi-pronged approach through which China engages in a massive scale of espionage in Canada.
Given these self-evident facts, one might wonder why the Trudeau government is so keen to engage further with China, thereby using Canada’s good name to confer international legitimacy upon an authoritarian state that allows its dissidents do die in prison. There are a number of reasons for this, none of which paints Canada in a particularly good light.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper (Right) and the Dalai Lama pose with the khata scarves they exchanged before their meeting on Parliament Hill in 2007.
photo: Canada Tibet Committee
For one thing, Trudeau may simply be following in the footsteps of his illustrious father, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, who made Canada one of the first Western nations to recognize the Beijing regime on October 13, 1970, and who two years later became the first Canadian Prime Minister to visit the PRC. The fact that he was spearheading this rapprochement even as the country was in the throes of the Cultural Revolution did not bother the elder Trudeau. After meetings with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, Trudeau spoke of his hosts in glowing terms, praising their genius in building a social system that strives “to provide human dignity and equality of opportunity for the Chinese people.”
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree it would seem, and recent events confirm that the younger Trudeau shares his father’s predilection for admiring the Chinese regime and forgiving it its sins. The aforementioned Norsat sale was most likely fast-tracked in exchange for forward motion on a bilateral free-trade deal with China, which the Trudeau government is reportedly very keen to ink. One of the biggest obstacles to such a deal is resistance from the average Canadian citizen.
Canadians skeptical
According to the results of a recent poll by Nanos Research commissioned by the Globe and Mail, nearly nine out of every ten Canadians are either “uncomfortable” or “somewhat uncomfortable” with China’s government-controlled businesses gaining more access to Canada’s economy, with a mere 11 percent of respondents reporting being comfortable with that idea. Moreover, two-thirds of respondents said they agreed with the idea that China’s human rights ought to be linked to any free trade deal.
In order to overcome this obstacle, stakeholders in the proposed free trade pact have bankrolled a two-year public-relations campaign to persuade Canadians to accept such a deal. Led by the Public Policy Forum, an Ottawa-based think tank with ties to the federal government and Canadian corporations, the project is aimed at changing Canadians’ perceptions of China, who according to the federal government department Global Affairs Canada, are “ill-informed and negatively biased” on the issue. In the words of Maclean’s Magazine’s Terry Glavin, “there is now no practical distinction anymore between the goals of the federal government, corporate Canada’s China trade lobby, and China’s foreign trade bureaucracy.”
In fact it is the federal government and Canadian corporations themselves that are ill-informed on the China issue: Canadians seem to have an instinctive disinclination toward getting into bed with the authoritarian human-rights abuser, and this speaks well of the average Canadian. It also represents an opportunity for Taiwan.
While the government of Taiwan is at a disadvantage in dealing with Canada, given that China’s influence over the Trudeau government is likely to derail any positive advancements, the administration of ROC President Tsai Ing-wen can and should focus its efforts on Track II and people-to-people ties. This represents one avenue to counter the efforts of the Beijing government and its allies in corporate Canada and the Liberal Party to whitewash Beijing’s troubling human rights record and paint the country as a benevolent economic partner. Indeed, there is a solid foundation upon which to build.
According to Canadian government sources, Taiwan is Canada’s 12th-largest trading partner, and there are an estimated 200,000 people of Taiwanese descent living in Canada, with between 50,000 to 60,000 Canadian passport holders residing in Taiwan. Moreover, Taiwan is Canada's tenth-largest export market for education, with long-term Taiwanese students in Canada contributing US$80 million to the Canadian economy. An additional 1.000 Taiwanese young people visit Canada every year to travel and work through the International Experience Canada program.
Most importantly, Taiwan and Canada share many of the same values-values that are anathema to the Chinese regime. These include such liberal democratic values as freedom of speech, of assembly, of religion; a commitment to transparency in government operations; a belief in equality for all regardless of race, gender, and sexual orientation (Like Canada, Taiwan recognizes same-sex marriage, having become the first country in Asia to do so); and of course, democracy.
These existing ties and shared values should be highlighted by the Tsai administration in order to initiate a grassroots efforts to raise awareness among Canadians about Taiwan, the precarious state of cross-strait ties, and the need for a strong relationship between Canada and Taiwan. As long as the Trudeau government and the Chinese Communist Party are allowed to dictate the narrative, Canadians and Taiwanese will be deprived of opportunity to allow their budding relationship to flower.
Performers with the Taiwan Pavilian pose for a photograph at the 2012 Heritage Festival in Edmonton, Alberta.
photo: Kurt Bauschardt
Dr. Dean Karalekas is a Canadian researcher specializing in civil-military relations and Asia-Pacific security. He can be reached for comment at dkaralekas@hotmail.com
