My Take | Across the political spectrum, Beijing has already lost Canada
- Just like their American counterparts, the three main Canadian political parties – spanning left, right and centre – are now decisively anti-China
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.