Juno News - May 01, 2019


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

Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Stephen Harper Andrew Scheer Guy Saint-Jacques John McCallum Bill Morneau Xi Jinping
Liberal ties explain why SNC-Lavalin never faces consequences True North Report： SNC-Lavalin never has to face consequences

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

190.17

Word count

1,090

Sentence count

37


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

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

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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.