Juno News - December 29, 2021


How will Canada deal with China in 2022？


Episode Stats

Length

3 minutes

Words per Minute

176.11438

Word Count

698

Sentence Count

29


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 When it comes to big year-in-review stories happening here in Canada,
00:00:07.640 one of the biggest stories, aside from COVID-19, of course, has been dealing with China.
00:00:13.220 And we see Canadians are increasingly frustrated with the authoritarian Chinese Communist Party regime of Xi Jinping.
00:00:20.200 They're seeing what's really going on there.
00:00:22.340 More and more news stories are making them think,
00:00:24.540 hold on a second, do we really want to cozy up to this nation?
00:00:27.660 Or do we want to do more to decouple from China, to distance ourselves from that nation,
00:00:32.960 and to stop that rising global superpower from bringing us more into their orbit,
00:00:37.640 from allowing them to have even more leverage over us?
00:00:41.160 Lots of people were frustrated with the Two Michaels story,
00:00:43.960 seeing the story about the young tennis player seemingly being disappeared for a bit
00:00:48.280 after she made an allegation of sexual assault against a former Chinese Communist Party senior ranking official.
00:00:54.600 All of these things are causing more and more people to wake up,
00:00:57.240 and public opinion in Canada is against China more than ever.
00:01:02.860 And now's the opportunity to talk more about things that we can do
00:01:06.500 to make sure that they do not have further leverage against us
00:01:10.140 in the years, in the decades ahead,
00:01:12.600 because this really is about the future stability of Canada.
00:01:15.960 Now one thing we can definitely do is something that most of our allies are actually calling on us to do,
00:01:20.660 whether it's the United States or the UK, which is to ban Huawei,
00:01:25.520 to say no to that company from playing a role in helping devise our 5G infrastructure grid.
00:01:31.660 I think that's the big obvious one.
00:01:33.720 There's some other smaller, somewhat more technical issues that really need to be talked more amongst the general public,
00:01:40.440 like the fact that we need to put a ban on state-owned enterprises from being able to purchase Canadian firms,
00:01:46.920 particularly firms of a sensitive nature.
00:01:49.660 There's been a lot of talk about this,
00:01:51.400 because China goes out and their state-owned enterprises,
00:01:54.060 which are public sector companies that are companies that are controlled by the Chinese government,
00:01:58.960 they go out and they try and buy various different assets around the world.
00:02:02.440 I think a lot of people would be surprised to see just how much China owns around the world.
00:02:07.180 And we got to say no to them being able to do that here in Canada,
00:02:09.980 because they're bidding on various projects, they're trying to purchase things.
00:02:13.320 The Trudeau government actually recently rejected two bids that they did,
00:02:17.360 trying to buy corporations here.
00:02:18.860 I think it's good that the government made those decisions,
00:02:20.780 and let's hope they make more moving forward.
00:02:23.180 But we can also change the laws here and the rules,
00:02:25.760 such that the Chinese government just isn't allowed to buy up entities in Canada that are important to us.
00:02:31.400 One other big thing is withdrawing from the Asian Investment Infrastructure Bank.
00:02:36.240 This is an organization that was created by China to kind of be their replacement of things like the World Bank
00:02:42.360 and the International Monetary Fund.
00:02:44.240 And whatever you think of those global finance operations,
00:02:47.140 those are things that more come from a post-World War II U.S.-led infrastructure,
00:02:53.260 where U.S. values and by default Canadian and Western values are ones that are generally driving the conversation.
00:02:59.300 China is saying, uh-uh, we want to redirect the game in our favor.
00:03:03.240 And Justin Trudeau, along with former finance minister Bill Morneau,
00:03:05.840 they actually signed Canada up for that project.
00:03:08.140 But what are we doing there?
00:03:09.440 Should we really be a part of something that is trying to redirect things in China's favor?
00:03:14.040 There are various other initiatives that we can be a part of that China is also a part of many of them,
00:03:18.520 but just aren't led by China, aren't driven by them and by their values.
00:03:22.020 So we got to talk more about heading in that direction.
00:03:24.540 Regardless, lots of action items that are on the table for Canadians to consider
00:03:28.860 because they've made it clear that they're really cautious about the relationship with China.
00:03:33.460 So that's the direction that we got ahead in.
00:03:35.540 Thank you.