Juno News - Canada is finally decoupling from China

00:00:00.000 It is unbelievable that the RCMP had awarded a contract for sensitive telecommunications equipment

00:00:06.480 to a company that was in part owned by the Chinese government and that was facing charges in the

00:00:12.680 United States related to espionage. How on earth did this happen? People are asking. Now the sort

00:00:18.960 of kind of good news is that the federal government has stepped in. They've called the time out on

00:00:23.520 this contract. They're looking into it and they're looking into a whole bunch of other contracts.

00:00:27.180 National Defense is now saying we got to see if this sort of thing is going on in other places in

00:00:32.040 the government. So I guess that's good but why I call it sort of kind of good news is well this is

00:00:37.300 only happening because this contract was talked about in the media and it's become a bit of a

00:00:41.360 scandal and also how are we doing this right now in the fall of 2022 where these contracts were only

00:00:48.660 recently signed. This contract was signed in October 2021. I think the answer to it is because until not

00:00:55.700 too long ago this sort of thing was normal. Now I remember saying several years ago that we need

00:01:01.800 to pretty much flat out ban state-owned enterprises from being able to bid on government contracts in

00:01:07.360 Canada. Chinese state-owned enterprises and a lot of people felt that was was a step too far. Maybe we

00:01:12.360 can get to the point where we can ban state-owned enterprises from bidding on on very sort of secret

00:01:18.040 things related to uh the military related to state secrets and which this one would fall under the RCMP

00:01:24.140 contract. Now I think we're more than willing to talk about just flat out banning Chinese state-owned

00:01:29.360 enterprises from having anything to do with our government contracts but it's it's and I'm glad

00:01:33.640 that the conversation is at the point where of course people would say yes we should do that

00:01:37.460 but a couple years ago a lot of parliamentarians felt like no we can't possibly do that. What

00:01:43.400 happened? Well we have heard recently from figures in Washington connected to the White House and the

00:01:48.700 Biden administration that they are now applauding the Trudeau liberal government for saying it's time

00:01:53.320 to decouple from China. That we are echoing things that they have been saying but we've also heard from

00:01:58.500 some representatives with the Biden administration that they flat out admit that they were worried that

00:02:03.360 Canada was not going to get on the right page and wasn't going to get on the same page with them and

00:02:07.520 they were giving us some prodding which is I think why we've seen in the past few months a number of

00:02:12.160 cabinet ministers Christia Freeland, Melanie Jolie, Francois-Philippe Champagne all talk about the

00:02:17.220 need for a decoupling from China. Look I'm happy to say that when they've done something right I

00:02:22.540 acknowledge it and they're doing something right in this direction but it's interesting they're all

00:02:26.480 doing it right now all at the same time because Washington's told them get with the program. The

00:02:31.520 Biden administration's had to say you guys got to go ahead with this decoupling which was I think most

00:02:36.180 aggressively started by the Trump administration. Biden has picked up on a lot of aspects of it. The U.S.

00:02:41.280 is clearly just seeing that's the direction they have to go in. So how was this contract signed in

00:02:46.440 the first place with a partially Chinese state-owned operation getting a sensitive contract with the

00:02:51.920 RCMP? Because that's how we used to roll. That was the default position that we accepted that as

00:02:58.060 normal. We normalized that sort of thing but it wasn't normal. It shouldn't have been allowed to

00:03:02.820 happen. Thankfully we're drifting away from all of that but I can't believe it took all of this

00:03:07.340 to make that happen.

Juno News - December 12, 2022