There is supposedly a shadowy fight between Canadian spooks and their civilian masters over the country’s external and trade policies towards China. In the past two years, unnamed sources from the intelligence services have been brazenly leaking stories of varying veracity to the press about alleged Chinese interference in Canadian affairs, including the last two elections.
The transparent intention is to force the supposedly pro-China Liberal government of Justin Trudeau to take a U-turn. Never mind, of course, that Ottawa has already taken that decisive turn; it’s just been less vocal about it than the opposition parties, which, politics being what it is, must try to portray the Trudeau government as being “soft on China”.
An influential segment of the military, intelligence and foreign policy establishment in Canada has been prepping the country for Cold War 2.0 in perfect sync with the United States, along with Britain and Australia of the Five Eyes of English-speaking nations. New Zealand, as usual, has been the odd man out.
According to influential right-wing think-tanker Brian Lee Crowley, Canada is now in a civil war. Really? “[In] this civil war,” he wrote in The Telegraph last week, “the two sides are a political elite that yearns for the days when China was an economic opportunity, and a national security community aware of Beijing’s ambition to deindustrialise the West economically and neuter it geostrategically.”
Deindustrialise the West? I think the US and Britain have been doing a fine job at it without the need for evil Chinese intervention. As for commodity-rich Canada and Australia, there has always been a limit to their “deindustrialisation”.
Crowley is head of the hard-right Macdonald-Laurier Institute and a close associate of the last Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper, who was well-known for his anti-China stance. The institute was pushing for Western sanctions against China and Iran over the pandemic before anyone in Canada was even thinking about it.
Nothing would please men like Crowley and Pierre Poilievre, who now leads the Conservative opposition, more than Cold War 2.0. What is perhaps more surprising is that the leftist New Democratic Party (NDP) is also sounding tough.
The Conservatives and the NDP have now forced Trudeau to launch an official public inquiry into foreign interference, re China. This is despite the findings of the foreign interference special rapporteur that the country’s electoral integrity was never compromised.
From the right and the left, both political parties have attacked the Trudeau government for not joining Aukus, the trilateral security pact between Australia, the United Kingdom and the US. That might have prompted Ottawa – not wanting to look weak on China – to authorise a naval frigate to transit through the Taiwan Strait early in June in a joint exercise with a US destroyer that provoked an attempted interception by a Chinese warship.
The Liberals can read the polls as well as the Conservatives and the NDP. A majority of Canadians have turned decisively against China in their perception.
Ironically, Washington’s bungled extradition case against Huawei’s Meng Wanzhou in Canada turned out to be a public opinion bonanza for the Americans. Probably no other diplomatic incident has turned more Canadians against China in recent decades than the Chinese’s detention of the “two Michaels”, Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, in retaliation for Meng’s house arrest in Vancouver.
Repeated polls in the past two years have found that a solid majority of Canadians now view China either as “a threat” or “an enemy”.
The war in Ukraine has only solidified the Canadian hard line – as represented officially by Trudeau’s deputy, Chrystia Freeland, who is of Ukrainian heritage and Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly – on the Russian-Chinese partnership.
The Trudeau government is already fully committed to supply-chain friendshoring, cooperative mining of strategic minerals and the forced divestment of Chinese companies from the Canadian economy, on the US derisking or decoupling model.
It remains to be seen whether Canada will go all in with its military for Cold War 2.0.
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