The Blueprint: Canada's Conservative Podcast - April 25, 2017


China is not Canada’s best friend

Hosted by
Jamie Schmal
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Tony Clement Lu Shea Speaker Harper
Full Episode： May 9, 2017

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

142.67

Word count

817

Sentence count

51

Harmful content

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode of The Blueprint, Conservative MP and National Security Critic, Tony Clement, talks about China and how Beijing is trying to dictate the terms of Canada's relations with China on a whole host of issues, from trade, to human rights, to the South China Sea, and much more.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 You're listening to The Blueprint, Canada's Conservative Podcast.
00:00:09.000 Well, they thought they were going to have an easy day over there today, but not so fast, Mr. Speaker.
00:00:16.640 What is it going to take for the Prime Minister to have any respect for any laws in this country that may curb his out-of-control behaviour?
00:00:25.320 And now, here's your host, Tony Clement.
00:00:31.260 Welcome back to Blueprint, Canada's Conservative Podcast.
00:00:34.640 I'm your host, Tony Clement, here with you in beautiful downtown Ottawa.
00:00:40.120 But obviously, through the wonders of the internet, you can download us and you can share us as well.
00:00:45.160 Share us on Facebook or whatever means you can, because it is important we have this dialogue with as many Canadians as possible.
00:00:51.760 Topic right now is China.
00:00:53.220 There was a recent article in McLean's magazine entitled, China is no friend to Canada.
00:00:58.660 And boy, that is a point to be made, because of course, China and its leadership in particular are going to look after Chinese interests.
00:01:05.140 This is something that the Trudeau government doesn't seem to get.
00:01:07.780 Remember when Justin Trudeau, before the last election campaign, said that his next best model for governance was the People's Republic of China?
00:01:16.640 Remember that little snafu?
00:01:18.040 Well, of course, it's coming home to ruse now, now that the Liberal government is well ensconced in power.
00:01:23.900 And we're seeing now how Beijing, how the official Chinese Communist Party, is trying to dictate the terms of engagement with the Canadian government on a whole host of issues.
00:01:34.940 Whether it's trade, whether it's bilateral issues, whether it's human rights issues, China is trying to dictate to the Canadian government, to the Trudeau government, exactly how things are going to go.
00:01:45.520 And we see a bunch of examples of that, most recently, Canada's new ambassador to China, Lu Shea, for instance, arrived in February.
00:01:54.560 He was saying, you know, we're going to have a trade agreement with Canada, but here's what we're not going to discuss.
00:01:59.720 We're not going to discuss human rights.
00:02:01.100 We're not going to discuss China's record on the broader issues of what's happening in the South China Sea, for instance, where China is literally building islands from scratch to create a sovereignty issue and, of course, infringe upon other allies of the West.
00:02:21.220 So that's the Chinese agenda, and they're saying, we can have trade with Canada, but it's going to be on our terms and only our terms. 0.83
00:02:30.580 We've also seen that in the most recent example of a takeover of a Canadian company.
00:02:35.940 This is called the O-Net controversy.
00:02:37.900 O-Net was a Hong Kong-based company, but controlled by the Chinese government as a state-owned enterprise.
00:02:44.920 They buy a Canadian company, which has the ability to use laser technology in defense contracts and other commercial fields.
00:02:56.120 When the Harper government was in charge, we said, wait a minute, this might infringe upon our national security interests.
00:03:02.380 We disallowed the investment.
00:03:04.320 The liberals come along and totally reverse that process.
00:03:07.080 They allow the investment to take place against the concerns of the national security establishment.
00:03:17.080 Again, Beijing being favored over Canada's national security interests.
00:03:22.300 We're seeing this time and again, and it is not a good sign, certainly, when we see this out of the liberal government.
00:03:29.440 You know, there's a lot of business interests I know that are Canadian business interests that do some business in China.
00:03:34.840 Look, China is a commercial country.
00:03:38.080 We should do business with China, but we shouldn't do it at the expense of either human rights concerns that we have or the national interest, the security interest of our country. 0.88
00:03:47.880 I'm the Conservative Party's national security and public safety critic, and I see these issues time and again where China is on the offense in this country, hacking into our systems, including government systems as well as commercial systems, and advancing the Chinese interest. 1.00
00:04:04.020 We've got to have a government that is looking out for us in these negotiations, not trying to defer to Chinese interests all the time.
00:04:13.180 So this is an issue.
00:04:14.620 If you think it's an issue too, write to us in whatever social media means or send us a message, however you want to do so.
00:04:22.560 We want to hear from you too.
00:04:23.640 But let's make sure that we are there for Canada's interests, not the interests of the government of China.
00:04:31.300 And I place the emphasis on that.
00:04:33.580 Not the people of China. 0.99
00:04:34.700 That's a different story.
00:04:35.620 But the government of China has its own interests, and we should be looking after Canadian interests.
00:04:40.140 If you agree or disagree, send us a line, and we'd be happy to hear from you.
00:04:43.600 Thank you for listening to The Blueprint, Canada's Conservative Podcast.
00:04:56.800 To find more episodes, interviews, and in-depth discussions of politics in Canada, search for The Blueprint on iTunes or visit podcast.conservative.ca.
00:05:05.460 Thank you.
00:05:13.600 Thank you.