Six months after Prime Minister Mark Carney called China Canada’s greatest security threat, Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand is gushing about forging a “strategic partnership” with it.
“There are going to always be challenges in any relationship,” Anand cheerily told The Canadian Press last week. “What we are aiming to do is recalibrate the relationship, so that it is constructive and pragmatic.”
This is all par for the course with the Carney government, where words literally mean nothing, or more accurately, mimic Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass where, as he scornfully advises Alice: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
Where Carney’s “Elbows Up” rhetoric during the election campaign, about how to handle the trade threat posed to Canada by U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff war, has become a series of public concessions to Trump with no discernible benefit to Canadians.
Now it’s as if the goldfish brain Liberals have forgotten the 2023-25 foreign interference inquiry.
The one that identified China as a primary threat to Canadian democracy.
That’s to say nothing of it kidnapping and imprisoning Canada’s two Michaels , or Chinese agents threatening Canadian citizens of Chinese origin, as well as opposition MPs who publicly oppose Beijing’s dictators.
This along with China’s standard operating procedures of buying influence with governments, industrial espionage and intellectual property theft.
Carney, who in his previous life had many business dealings with China, says that in forging a new economic relationship with it, guard rails will be put in place to ensure these efforts don’t undermine Canada’s security concerns, given the Liberals’ own description of China in 2023 as an “increasingly disruptive global power.”
But Carney, who hopes to have a sideline meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in South Korea this week, himself downplayed an incident during the election when a Liberal MP urged people to hand over a Conservative candidate to the Chinese consulate and claim a bounty.
Meanwhile, Canada still doesn’t have an operational foreign agency registry requiring foreign lobbyists to register with the government, that was recommended by the foreign interference inquiry
While it is by no mean a panacea for disrupting foreign interference , the Liberals claim they’ve been actively considering one since 2021.
Now we’re all the way back to 2019 – six years ago – where then defence minister Harjit Sajjan startled a global security conference in Halifax with his proclamation that the Canadian government did not “consider China as an adversary.”
Similarly, then environment minister Catherine McKenna in 2018 fatuously praised China – the world’s largest emitter of industrial greenhouse gases – as a global leader in addressing climate change, to the point where she was lovingly quoted by China’s state-run media, consistent with then-prime minister Justin Trudeau’s infamous quip that he admired China’s “basic dictatorship” because it could “go green” quickly.
Ditto during the pandemic in 2020, when then-Liberal health minister Patty Hajdu accused a journalist of engaging in conspiracy theories when he questioned the veracity of suspect reports coming out of China about its COVID-related death rates.
Two weeks later, China suddenly upped the death count in Wuhan, the original epicentre of the outbreak, by 50%.
Like McKenna, Hajdu was also praised by China when Canada rejected banning flights from there at the start of the pandemic.
Obviously, the federal government can’t ignore China (or for that matter India) when it comes to expanding our international trade beyond the U.S.
But as my Postmedia colleague Warren Kinsella observed on X, it’s a bizarre world when, in Canada, “Israel is the enemy and China is our ally.”
