Juno News - Let’s ask why Canada is part of China’s big bank

00:00:00.000 For a while there the stories about Canada's troubled fractious relationship

00:00:13.800 with China dropped off the front pages. We had a little thing called lav scam

00:00:17.700 that proliferated for a few months was let's just say a big headache for Prime

00:00:21.400 Minister Justin Trudeau. Well the China spat is back on the front pages and I

00:00:26.040 think that's actually something of a good thing because it's making us really

00:00:29.760 reassess and challenge a lot of assumptions that the political class in

00:00:33.560 Canada and throughout the West had about this emerging superpower. Just a few

00:00:38.820 recent news stories show just how troubling the situation has become. The

00:00:43.020 other night on CBC our former ambassador to China Guy St-Jacques he said that he

00:00:47.340 had heard that the government of China had been telling regional governments to

00:00:51.240 compile lists of the Canadian firms they do business with so they have a hit list

00:00:56.920 of companies to go up against. This is all coming after our canola exports have

00:01:02.240 effectively been banned. China is saying in a trumped up way that there are pests in

00:01:06.600 our canola therefore they're they're unclean they're unsanitary they can't

00:01:10.160 allow it to go to market in China. Now we know that's bogus we know that they know

00:01:15.260 it's bogus but so far all Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has done is said well we're

00:01:19.260 going to send a delegation there to say oh come on there's not pests it's clean and

00:01:23.400 so forth. So rather than call their bluff he's almost kind of enabling and

00:01:27.760 authenticating what they're saying and playing the game by their own rules. Plus

00:01:32.500 we have the newly breaking news that a second Canadian in China has been

00:01:36.200 sentenced to death for drug dealing. Now China already has a pretty pretty strict

00:01:41.440 penalties for drug dealing and they do dole out the death penalty in all of this

00:01:45.280 so it's hard to exactly figure out where this sits in the equation but they

00:01:49.460 maybe would have sentenced the person just to 10 or 15 years as they do for

00:01:53.640 some other people in this situation rather than the death penalty perhaps to

00:01:57.860 show a signal send a sign to Canada. All this brings us to the question of what do

00:02:03.260 we do now? Well Andrew Scheer had some proactive ideas about that at a press

00:02:07.160 conference on Monday he said he was very frustrated with Justin Trudeau's weak

00:02:10.920 response and he proposed a number of measures such as proposing bridge financing

00:02:15.620 for canola farmers as they struggle to make it through this impasse. He also

00:02:20.100 wants to see a World Trade Organization complaint waged against China for the

00:02:24.680 canola issue and he would like to see a new ambassador appointed to China. The

00:02:28.320 position has been vacant since John McCallum stepped down. And his last one

00:02:32.720 seems like maybe a technical one that caused a lot of regular Canadians who heard

00:02:36.980 it probably to just their eyes gloss over. He called for Canada to withdraw its

00:02:41.240 funds from the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. Now I think this is the

00:02:46.320 most interesting one that Scheer put forward and the one that we should be

00:02:49.520 talking about and looking at the most. What is this infrastructure bank? Well it's a

00:02:55.160 thing that China started just a few years ago where it's basically a development

00:02:58.840 bank that funds infrastructure in the Asia-Pacific area. It's kind of like the

00:03:03.660 International Monetary Fund or the World Bank but here's the thing it's led by

00:03:09.020 China. Whereas those two global financial organizations well they're led

00:03:12.740 by the United States and its allies and a broader sense of Western democracy and

00:03:17.800 Western capitalism. You know our values and that's sort of what drives these banks

00:03:22.640 and the businesses they do, the operations that they get up to. The Asia

00:03:26.480 Infrastructure Investment Bank is a brainchild of the Chinese government, the

00:03:30.180 Communist Party and President Xi Jinping who is very defiant and very certain

00:03:34.820 about who he is and what he wants to accomplish and let's just say it is not

00:03:38.840 one that is all that compatible with Canadian values and Canadian views about

00:03:43.280 Western democracy and so forth. So we are actually in this bank even though the

00:03:48.980 United States and Japan asked us not to join it. Now initially we didn't join it

00:03:54.440 under Stephen Harper. Stephen Harper said no we're gonna take a pass on that and we

00:03:58.700 kind of balanced out the G7 because it was us Japan and the US who were not

00:04:03.220 joining it and then the other countries did join it. So you can say it was kind

00:04:06.820 of even keel. Then Justin Trudeau got in, he turned a page and him and Bill Marnot

00:04:11.500 signed us up for the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and then they tilted it

00:04:15.940 and that pretty much put the G7 in favor. So basically the G7 signing up for a

00:04:22.060 bank and kind of authenticating, giving the seal of approval to a bank that pretty

00:04:26.920 much the express purpose of it is to supplant the United States as the world

00:04:31.240 leader on these issues and to let China, the rising superpower, forge ahead with

00:04:35.980 all of this. Do we want to be a part of this? We got 250 million dollars in it

00:04:41.140 which I mean we don't want to be throwing that money around but it's not

00:04:44.460 that big of amount of money in the grand scheme of things. That allows us to own

00:04:48.900 one percent of the bank. China owns 30 percent of it and other countries own

00:04:53.760 two percent, three percent, 0.2 percent, about that much and there are 70

00:04:57.800 companies that companies that constitute the ownership of all of this. Now is the

00:05:02.240 perfect time to be having the discussion about this bank, whether or not we want to

00:05:06.280 stay in it, what we think about it, and really let Canadians know about it. Because

00:05:12.180 Justin Trudeau made this decision, I'm not going to say behind closed doors, but we

00:05:16.100 didn't have a national conversation about it. Yet it really does strike to what is

00:05:20.480 the future of not just Canada but the future of the world that we want for our

00:05:25.540 children and for our grandchildren. Do we want to be signing up for institutions

00:05:29.980 that basically acknowledge the dominance of China over the United States? I think

00:05:35.620 I know the answer to that and I hope a lot of Canadians would agree. Maybe it is

00:05:39.460 time to reassess our membership in this bank.

Juno News - May 01, 2019

Let’s ask why Canada is part of China’s big bank

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