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China policy says everything and nothing

MARTIN R E GG C OHN TWITTER: @ REGGCOHN

Red China is no more, but the menace is back.

We no longer call it a country of Communist bandits, as we did through the 1960s. Nor do we toast our friendship at every diplomatic banquet, as our leaders did from the 1970s on.

Now, after all the tense times of the past four years, we are going back in time: China, our erstwhile enemy, longtime friend and recent frenemy, is once again our all-out adversary.

It’s more or less official. A longawaited federal strategy lays out Canada’s reconfigured foreign policy toward China — and the region China keeps destabilizing.

On the surface, the upbeat title heralds hope: “The Indo-Pacific: A new horizon of opportunity.”

But there is more unpredictability than “opportunity” within its 24 pages. And greater peril than potential.

Three years in the making and unmaking, writing and rewriting, the document is a mixed bag of diplomatic code words, political proclamations, economic aspirations and environmental exigencies. As a playbook, it alternates between political hostility and economic opportunity, while arguing for diplomatic co-ordination amid mutual suspicion.

Which is to say the new strategy says everything and nothing. That is not so much a criticism as a recognition of the perilous balancing act facing Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly this week as she unveiled a new blueprint for a long unstable edifice. As the architect of Canada’s updated foreign policy, Joly is trying hard to be optimistic while stressing realpolitik.

“China is an increasingly disruptive global power,” the paper argues — disruptive being the diplomatic term for aggressive. It catalogues China’s “foreign interference,” “disregard” for UN rulings, “unilateral claims,” “arbitrary” legal manoeuvres, bending the rules of trade, predatory lending practices, human rights abuses in Tibet and Xinjiang, menacing of Taiwan, security crackdown in Hong Kong, attempts to “militarize” the region, and “coercive diplomacy” against Canada (after the “Two Michaels,” Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, were ransomed as hostages in the Huawei affair in late 2018).

Beyond the explicit criticisms of China, there are thinly veiled references elsewhere to Beijing’s “economic coercion,” “intellectual property theft,” and the “malign actors who seek to exploit our open society.”

After this recognition of reality, there is repetition of rhetoric: Page 7 notes our “clear-eyed understanding of this global China,” reinforced a few paragraphs later by our “clear-eyed assessment of today’s China.”

Yet for all that repeated clarity of vision, there are conspicuous blind spots. While trying desperately to level the playing field with China, it quietly ignores the daunting imbalance in bilateral trade that underpins this unequal relationship.

One can find the latest trade statistics with India (a comfortable $400-million surplus), alongside similar data for Japan and Korea (where Canada is commendably holding its own). But nowhere in its 24 pages does it acknowledge the depressing deficit with our secondbiggest trading partner — you’d have to look it up yourself on Statistics Canada’s website to see that we were $26 billion in the red last year (in goods and services).

That economic imbalance is a metaphor for the mismatch between our two countries. It is a reminder of the need for continued diplomatic engagement and economic efforts while also dealing with the growing misconduct and rancour.

As Joly’s paper concedes, no country can afford to ignore the world’s fastest-growing economy, which is destined to dominate global trade. Nor can Canada discount Beijing’s weight on environmental matters, as its economic engine spews ever greater amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.

Another conspicuous omission: While Joly boasts of an increased Canadian military presence in the Pacific, symbolized by the deployment of a frigate, nowhere does the document acknowledge that Canada is missing the boat on the socalled Quad alliance of Asia-Pacific democracies — India, Australia, America and Japan — assembled to keep an a close eye on China. The Quad is the quintessential sort of multilateral alliance that is the mainstay of Canadian foreign policy, yet Ottawa remains the outlier looking in, uninvited and unacknowledged.

Instead, the report resorts to nostalgia, promising a reprise of the old Team Canada trade missions — as if travelling delegations of federal and provincial politicians will magically open doors abroad while closing deals.

We have been down this road before. In 1970, then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau restored diplomatic relations with the old Red China in hopes of tapping into its massive market, as a prelude to promoting trade with Europe in pursuit of his “Third Option” to diversify our economic ties away from the U.S.

All these years later, with his son Justin Trudeau in the prime minister’s office, Canada is once again trying to rebalance its lopsided trade ties — this time diversifying beyond China across the Indo-Pacific. The idea is not merely to minimize our massive bilateral deficit, but also to reduce our exposure and vulnerability to coercion by Beijing.

Yet that 1970s aspiration to diversify beyond America into Europe quickly stalled. Similarly, today’s ambition to expand beyond China across the region lacks traction.

Then as now, there is no credible game plan to get us where we need to go. The unspoken assumption in this document is that “The world needs more Canada” (as Bono famously said two decades ago) but saying it won’t make it so.

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2022-11-29T08:00:00.0000000Z

2022-11-29T08:00:00.0000000Z

https://torontostar.pressreader.com/article/281659669057981

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