Let’s ask why Canada is part of China’s big bank
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Summary
The China spat is back on the front pages, and it s making us really reassess and challenge a lot of assumptions that the political class in Canada and throughout the West had about this emerging superpower. What do we do now?
Transcript
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For a while there the stories about Canada's troubled fractious relationship
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with China dropped off the front pages. We had a little thing called lav scam
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that proliferated for a few months was let's just say a big headache for Prime
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Minister Justin Trudeau. Well the China spat is back on the front pages and I
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think that's actually something of a good thing because it's making us really
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reassess and challenge a lot of assumptions that the political class in
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Canada and throughout the West had about this emerging superpower. Just a few
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recent news stories show just how troubling the situation has become. The
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other night on CBC our former ambassador to China Guy St-Jacques he said that he
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had heard that the government of China had been telling regional governments to
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compile lists of the Canadian firms they do business with so they have a hit list
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of companies to go up against. This is all coming after our canola exports have
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effectively been banned. China is saying in a trumped up way that there are pests in
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our canola therefore they're they're unclean they're unsanitary they can't
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allow it to go to market in China. Now we know that's bogus we know that they know
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it's bogus but so far all Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has done is said well we're
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going to send a delegation there to say oh come on there's not pests it's clean and
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so forth. So rather than call their bluff he's almost kind of enabling and
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authenticating what they're saying and playing the game by their own rules. Plus
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we have the newly breaking news that a second Canadian in China has been
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sentenced to death for drug dealing. Now China already has a pretty pretty strict
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penalties for drug dealing and they do dole out the death penalty in all of this
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so it's hard to exactly figure out where this sits in the equation but they
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maybe would have sentenced the person just to 10 or 15 years as they do for
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some other people in this situation rather than the death penalty perhaps to
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show a signal send a sign to Canada. All this brings us to the question of what do
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we do now? Well Andrew Scheer had some proactive ideas about that at a press
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conference on Monday he said he was very frustrated with Justin Trudeau's weak
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response and he proposed a number of measures such as proposing bridge financing
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for canola farmers as they struggle to make it through this impasse. He also
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wants to see a World Trade Organization complaint waged against China for the
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canola issue and he would like to see a new ambassador appointed to China. The
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position has been vacant since John McCallum stepped down. And his last one
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seems like maybe a technical one that caused a lot of regular Canadians who heard
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it probably to just their eyes gloss over. He called for Canada to withdraw its
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funds from the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. Now I think this is the
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most interesting one that Scheer put forward and the one that we should be
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talking about and looking at the most. What is this infrastructure bank? Well it's a
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thing that China started just a few years ago where it's basically a development
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bank that funds infrastructure in the Asia-Pacific area. It's kind of like the
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International Monetary Fund or the World Bank but here's the thing it's led by
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China. Whereas those two global financial organizations well they're led
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by the United States and its allies and a broader sense of Western democracy and
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Western capitalism. You know our values and that's sort of what drives these banks
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and the businesses they do, the operations that they get up to. The Asia
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Infrastructure Investment Bank is a brainchild of the Chinese government, the
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Communist Party and President Xi Jinping who is very defiant and very certain
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about who he is and what he wants to accomplish and let's just say it is not
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one that is all that compatible with Canadian values and Canadian views about
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Western democracy and so forth. So we are actually in this bank even though the
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United States and Japan asked us not to join it. Now initially we didn't join it
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under Stephen Harper. Stephen Harper said no we're gonna take a pass on that and we
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kind of balanced out the G7 because it was us Japan and the US who were not
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joining it and then the other countries did join it. So you can say it was kind
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of even keel. Then Justin Trudeau got in, he turned a page and him and Bill Marnot
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signed us up for the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and then they tilted it
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and that pretty much put the G7 in favor. So basically the G7 signing up for a
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bank and kind of authenticating, giving the seal of approval to a bank that pretty
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much the express purpose of it is to supplant the United States as the world
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leader on these issues and to let China, the rising superpower, forge ahead with
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all of this. Do we want to be a part of this? We got 250 million dollars in it
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which I mean we don't want to be throwing that money around but it's not
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that big of amount of money in the grand scheme of things. That allows us to own
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one percent of the bank. China owns 30 percent of it and other countries own
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two percent, three percent, 0.2 percent, about that much and there are 70
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companies that companies that constitute the ownership of all of this. Now is the
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perfect time to be having the discussion about this bank, whether or not we want to
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stay in it, what we think about it, and really let Canadians know about it. Because
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Justin Trudeau made this decision, I'm not going to say behind closed doors, but we
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didn't have a national conversation about it. Yet it really does strike to what is
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the future of not just Canada but the future of the world that we want for our
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children and for our grandchildren. Do we want to be signing up for institutions
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that basically acknowledge the dominance of China over the United States? I think
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I know the answer to that and I hope a lot of Canadians would agree. Maybe it is