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Access to markets vs the real cost. Both the EU and the UK face a similar dilemna.....
Terry Glavin: Canada’s servile relationship with China
Terry Glavin | August 17, 2016 6:35 PM ET
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, left, and Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion hold a press conference in Ottawa on June 1.
It’s pathetic, really. Already notorious among G7 countries for its supine, happy-face relationship with the increasingly decrepit and belligerent Chinese police state, Canada’s foreign affairs establishment is now expecting us to believe that the latest of Beijing’s demands, to which Immigration Minister John McCallum has now so loudly and cheerfully acquiesced, were really Canada’s ideas all along.
If there is another plausible explanation for McCallum’s surprise “request” last week that Beijing allow the tripling of visa application centres in China with a view to radically boosting the number of Chinese students and temporary foreign workers in Canada, that explanation has not come from McCallum. All we’ve heard is the usual treacle about Canada’s openness to the world.
An acceleration of the availability and volume of Canadian visas accessible to Chinese citizens that the authorities in Beijing would encourage to sojourn in Canada was one of the many demands enumerated less than three months ago by Wang Yi, the Chinese Foreign Minister who made an international spectacle of himself at a press conference by barking at Canadian journalists that they had “no right” to raise questions about human rights in China.
Now we’re expected to believe that Wang’s little-noticed demand that Canada boost the supply of visas available to Chinese citizens who are in good standing with Beijing was actually a Canadian idea. We will all be expected to believe a great deal of claptrap like this in the coming days, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s visit to China approaches in advance of the Sept. 4-5 G20 Summit in Guangzhou. So be alert.
Related
Terry Glavin: The butchers of Beijing
Terry Glavin: How the Liberals are paving the way for a stronger relationship with China ’s despotic regime
True, there is often little to distinguish what Beijing wants from what Canada’s foreign-affairs mandarins want out of the Canada-China relationship, which is in any case rarely even close to what Canadians want — like some demonstrable public benefit for once, the opinion polls consistently show. Now that the Liberal party has returned to power after nearly a decade of Stephen Harper’s Conservative government and its on-again, off-again friendliness with Beijing, the propaganda line is that Canada-China relations are on the verge of a “new golden age.” Count on it. There will be a price, and we will pay. We always do.
We’ve been hearing this sort of thing since the 1980s, when there really was cause to imagine that the emancipation of the Chinese masses was finally foreseeable and China’s vast untapped markets would prove a boon to the Canadian economy. But by the 1990s, after it became obvious that things weren’t evolving quite as we’d been told they would, the China lobby convinced Canadians that all that was required was a big old-fashioned skid-greasing.
Successive federal and provincial governments poured $20 billion into “Pacific gateway” infrastructure, and all Metro Vancouver got in return for being 58 hours closer by ship to China than Los Angeles was an elaborate road, rail and port complex that allowed Beijing to flood North America with cheap goods. Canada got even less. In 1988, federal data showed a modest China-trade surplus of $1.6 billion in Canada’s favour. By last year, Canada was saddled with an annual Chinese trade deficit of $45 billion.While dozens of Canadian politicians and mandarins went on to enrich themselves in China trade consultancies — most of them Liberal party grandees and their civil service hangers-on — the prosperity all these Disco Generation wise guys promised us has accrued mainly to a parasitic class of Chinese Communist Party multibillionaires and their few corporate accomplices in Canada. For all the smiles and the smooching that Ottawa and Beijing put on for show, the underlying “message” Beijing transmits nowadays is always the same: nice little country you have here. Shame if anything should happen to it.
As with the Pacific gateway, Canadians were similarly hoodwinked by the Immigrant Investor Program (IIP). Begun by Conservative free trader Brian Mulroney and conceived mainly as a way to lure thousands of jittery cash-rich Hong Kong entrepreneurs to Canada, the IIP ended up as the primary means by which Canadian real estate became a favoured bolthole for all the money being spirited out of the People’s Republic. As the country descends deeper into the abyss, Chinese banks were drained of nearly a trillion dollars in illegal money transfers last year alone.
The IIP had to be folded up by the Harper Conservatives after it became clear — and as it took the South China Morning Post’s Ian Young to reveal — that Canada’s ragged refugee-class immigrants had contributed more to Revenue Canada than the IIP’s big-spender immigrant investors did over the life of the program. Now, in an inter-provincial ripoff far more outrageous than any of those “equalization payment” uproars between “have” and “have-not” provinces that have erupted from time to time, the Quebec government has taken over the immigrant-investor racket. Quebec scoops up an $800,000 loan from every IIP arrival – roughly 2,000 “investors” annually — nine out of 10 of whom then immediately get back on a plane and fly elsewhere, mainly Vancouver.
The B.C. treasury gets nothing out of this — and the B.C. government’s recent 15-per-cent sales tax imposition on properties bought by foreign nationals isn’t expected to change a thing. What Vancouverites have gotten out of this is one of the world’s least affordable cities, bitterly divided against itself. Average house prices in Metro Vancouver have nearly tripled over the past 15 years. Home ownership for working families is a thing of the past. Now we’re being sold on a Chinese version of the temporary foreign worker program. Conceived as a short-term remedy to the occasional ailment of acute labour shortages in key industries, the indentured-labour service had to be dismantled by the Conservatives owing to its inevitably scandalous abuse by disreputable employers. By 2012, there were 338,000 temporary foreign workers in Canada. Last year the number was down to about 90,000. Now, McCallum is championing a ramped up, Beijing-vetted version. You would not be unwise to wager that this will not end well.
China is falling apart. The kleptocracy overseen by Chinese President Xi Jinping is more vicious and brutally anti-democratic than any regime run by any clique the Chinese Communist Party’s ruling elite has vomited up since the days of Mao Zedong. Having annexed the South China Sea in defiance of every principle of international maritime law, Beijing is intruding ever deeper into Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East. Just last weekend, Chinese military envoy Xie Xiaoyan initialled an aid-and-training deal between the Chinese People’s Liberation Army and the Syrian defence ministry in Damascus.
You’d think Xi Jinping would have bigger files to concern himself with, but he’s just put the fix in to scuttle Canada’s trade in canola oil to China. It’s a $2.6-billion business, representing Canada’s biggest agricultural export to the People’s Republic. It’s hard to say what price Canada will be expected to pay to have this latest strong-arm extortion lifted.
But we will pay. We always do.
National Post
http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/terry-glavin-canadas-servile-relationship-with-china
Terry Glavin: Canada’s servile relationship with China
Terry Glavin | August 17, 2016 6:35 PM ET
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, left, and Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion hold a press conference in Ottawa on June 1.
It’s pathetic, really. Already notorious among G7 countries for its supine, happy-face relationship with the increasingly decrepit and belligerent Chinese police state, Canada’s foreign affairs establishment is now expecting us to believe that the latest of Beijing’s demands, to which Immigration Minister John McCallum has now so loudly and cheerfully acquiesced, were really Canada’s ideas all along.
If there is another plausible explanation for McCallum’s surprise “request” last week that Beijing allow the tripling of visa application centres in China with a view to radically boosting the number of Chinese students and temporary foreign workers in Canada, that explanation has not come from McCallum. All we’ve heard is the usual treacle about Canada’s openness to the world.
An acceleration of the availability and volume of Canadian visas accessible to Chinese citizens that the authorities in Beijing would encourage to sojourn in Canada was one of the many demands enumerated less than three months ago by Wang Yi, the Chinese Foreign Minister who made an international spectacle of himself at a press conference by barking at Canadian journalists that they had “no right” to raise questions about human rights in China.
Now we’re expected to believe that Wang’s little-noticed demand that Canada boost the supply of visas available to Chinese citizens who are in good standing with Beijing was actually a Canadian idea. We will all be expected to believe a great deal of claptrap like this in the coming days, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s visit to China approaches in advance of the Sept. 4-5 G20 Summit in Guangzhou. So be alert.
Related
Terry Glavin: The butchers of Beijing
Terry Glavin: How the Liberals are paving the way for a stronger relationship with China ’s despotic regime
True, there is often little to distinguish what Beijing wants from what Canada’s foreign-affairs mandarins want out of the Canada-China relationship, which is in any case rarely even close to what Canadians want — like some demonstrable public benefit for once, the opinion polls consistently show. Now that the Liberal party has returned to power after nearly a decade of Stephen Harper’s Conservative government and its on-again, off-again friendliness with Beijing, the propaganda line is that Canada-China relations are on the verge of a “new golden age.” Count on it. There will be a price, and we will pay. We always do.
We’ve been hearing this sort of thing since the 1980s, when there really was cause to imagine that the emancipation of the Chinese masses was finally foreseeable and China’s vast untapped markets would prove a boon to the Canadian economy. But by the 1990s, after it became obvious that things weren’t evolving quite as we’d been told they would, the China lobby convinced Canadians that all that was required was a big old-fashioned skid-greasing.
Successive federal and provincial governments poured $20 billion into “Pacific gateway” infrastructure, and all Metro Vancouver got in return for being 58 hours closer by ship to China than Los Angeles was an elaborate road, rail and port complex that allowed Beijing to flood North America with cheap goods. Canada got even less. In 1988, federal data showed a modest China-trade surplus of $1.6 billion in Canada’s favour. By last year, Canada was saddled with an annual Chinese trade deficit of $45 billion.While dozens of Canadian politicians and mandarins went on to enrich themselves in China trade consultancies — most of them Liberal party grandees and their civil service hangers-on — the prosperity all these Disco Generation wise guys promised us has accrued mainly to a parasitic class of Chinese Communist Party multibillionaires and their few corporate accomplices in Canada. For all the smiles and the smooching that Ottawa and Beijing put on for show, the underlying “message” Beijing transmits nowadays is always the same: nice little country you have here. Shame if anything should happen to it.
As with the Pacific gateway, Canadians were similarly hoodwinked by the Immigrant Investor Program (IIP). Begun by Conservative free trader Brian Mulroney and conceived mainly as a way to lure thousands of jittery cash-rich Hong Kong entrepreneurs to Canada, the IIP ended up as the primary means by which Canadian real estate became a favoured bolthole for all the money being spirited out of the People’s Republic. As the country descends deeper into the abyss, Chinese banks were drained of nearly a trillion dollars in illegal money transfers last year alone.
The IIP had to be folded up by the Harper Conservatives after it became clear — and as it took the South China Morning Post’s Ian Young to reveal — that Canada’s ragged refugee-class immigrants had contributed more to Revenue Canada than the IIP’s big-spender immigrant investors did over the life of the program. Now, in an inter-provincial ripoff far more outrageous than any of those “equalization payment” uproars between “have” and “have-not” provinces that have erupted from time to time, the Quebec government has taken over the immigrant-investor racket. Quebec scoops up an $800,000 loan from every IIP arrival – roughly 2,000 “investors” annually — nine out of 10 of whom then immediately get back on a plane and fly elsewhere, mainly Vancouver.
The B.C. treasury gets nothing out of this — and the B.C. government’s recent 15-per-cent sales tax imposition on properties bought by foreign nationals isn’t expected to change a thing. What Vancouverites have gotten out of this is one of the world’s least affordable cities, bitterly divided against itself. Average house prices in Metro Vancouver have nearly tripled over the past 15 years. Home ownership for working families is a thing of the past. Now we’re being sold on a Chinese version of the temporary foreign worker program. Conceived as a short-term remedy to the occasional ailment of acute labour shortages in key industries, the indentured-labour service had to be dismantled by the Conservatives owing to its inevitably scandalous abuse by disreputable employers. By 2012, there were 338,000 temporary foreign workers in Canada. Last year the number was down to about 90,000. Now, McCallum is championing a ramped up, Beijing-vetted version. You would not be unwise to wager that this will not end well.
China is falling apart. The kleptocracy overseen by Chinese President Xi Jinping is more vicious and brutally anti-democratic than any regime run by any clique the Chinese Communist Party’s ruling elite has vomited up since the days of Mao Zedong. Having annexed the South China Sea in defiance of every principle of international maritime law, Beijing is intruding ever deeper into Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East. Just last weekend, Chinese military envoy Xie Xiaoyan initialled an aid-and-training deal between the Chinese People’s Liberation Army and the Syrian defence ministry in Damascus.
You’d think Xi Jinping would have bigger files to concern himself with, but he’s just put the fix in to scuttle Canada’s trade in canola oil to China. It’s a $2.6-billion business, representing Canada’s biggest agricultural export to the People’s Republic. It’s hard to say what price Canada will be expected to pay to have this latest strong-arm extortion lifted.
But we will pay. We always do.
National Post
http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/terry-glavin-canadas-servile-relationship-with-china
