Canada's New China Policy Isn't New.

Or if it is, it's Stephen Harper's policy of 2006 & Hillary Clinton's of 2010. Has the penny finally dropped, or has Team Trudeau simply noticed that 84 percent of us are offside?

That’s the gist of my column in the Ottawa Citizen and the National Post today, which follows my backgrounder in the Post on Tuesday. It’s either Harper 2006 and Clinton 2010, or it’s more of the same. It’s not that easy to know. Maybe too early to tell.

My guess is it’s likely to be a mixed bag, with Team Trudeau pushing the envelope and kowtowing as much as it can get away with without anyone noticing. And they will not want us noticing.

In early November a Nanos poll showed that more than 84 percent of Canadians see China as a negative world influence. Only eight percent want what the Trudeau government had so desperately wanted from the beginning, which was closer, deeper, “more more more” ties with the People’s Republic of China.

Selling a pivot away to the Indo-Pacific (which would suit me fine) can only work well if it’s sold as a pivot away from China, which explains Ottawa’s allegedly “blunt” flourishes about China this week. Only 18 percent of poll respondents said they see the Indo-Pacific as a top trade priority, compared to 68 percent who say the top priority should be deeper ties to Europe.

From the “golden decade” that never was, a wince-inducing moment: Trudeau ushers Chinese premier Li Keqiang onto the ice at the Bell Centre in Montreal, in Canadiens jerseys. Such sunny ways!

We’ve waited ten years for Justin Trudeau to be disabused of the messianic role he’d imagined for himself as the human conduit for a “win-win” reconciliation between China’s foul state-capitalist oligarchy and the liberal rules-based order that arose from the ashes of the Second World War. Has the penny finally dropped?

(In Tuesday’s newsletter I mentioned a special Real Story I’d have out this week. It’s a scorcher, mercifully unrelated for a change to China or to Canada-China unseemliness. It’ll finally be out Friday, much of it necessarily on the far side of a paywall. It’s been a really busy few days).

Back to business. . .

This is what should dawn on us when we consider everything that was unveiled and every word that was spoken at Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly’s Indo-Pacific Strategy photoshoot and foreign-policy rebranding exercise last Sunday, with Vancouver Harbour as a backdrop:

It’s not like any of us should have expected Joly to admit that everything her prime minister has ever imagined and articulated about Canada-China relations has been proven catastrophically wrong.

I mean, be fair, people.

Joly wasn’t going to stand there and say her government’s trusted benefactors and advisers in the Desmarais circle and the “truly bilateral” Canada-China Business Council and Dominic Barton’s McKinsey (Parts 1 and 2) and Jean Chretien’s palm-greasing network were not right about China, not once. In all the time that rank-and-file Liberals wasted humouring Trudeau in his delusions since coming to power in 2015, the compradors weren’t right even once.

I thought long and hard for this week’s column because I didn’t want to come off like a scold. Truly. I’ve gotten used to Well, Glavin would say that.

It’s true that long ago I threw in my lot with China’s human rights activists and journalists and civil-rights lawyers, with the country’s independent workers’ movement, with the Uyghurs, with Tibetans, and with Hongkongers. It’s true that I’ve insisted on noticing that Trudeau’s Liberals have tended at every opportunity to side with or cut slack or run interference for their persecutors and tormentors.

Xi Jinping strangled the Hong Kong democracy movement, destroyed Hong Kong as a thriving Asian bastion of liberties and tore up a U.N.-registered treaty, the Sino-British Joint Declaration. And the Trudeau government hasn’t sanctioned a single Communist Party functionary, not a single police-state official, for that historic outrage. When the House of Commons passed a resolution declaring that Beijing’s slave-camp obliterations of the Uyghur people amounted to genocide, Trudeau and his cabinet absented themselves from the vote.

It doesn’t matter that I was every bit as saucy with Harper’s Conservatives. I figured maybe I would be reflexively hard on Trudeau and Joly, so I made a genuine effort to refrain from slagging their Indo-Pacific package out of hand. It’s just that when it came time to file my column I hadn’t been able to discern in its contents any substantively new China policy. Was it just me?

I was reassured that it wasn’t just me when I later read Campbell Clark’s take in the Globe and Mail. Clark knows a thing or two about these things.

“The good thing about Canada’s Indo-Pacific strategy is that there actually is one, an important thing for a country whose recent foreign policy has been mostly make-believe,” Clark writes. We’re suddenly all very “clear-eyed” about China, “which presumably means that years were spent lumbering through a cataract-clouded fog.”

That’s pretty much the case I make about four years’ worth of Ottawa’s mumbo jumbo about impending China-policy “frameworks” with “cornerstones” and “prongs” in my column today, with the added observation that the Americans are fed up to their eye teeth with Ottawa. They’d been warning us away from Huawei, for instance, since the Obama years, but we thought we were clever. That didn’t work out very well for us, did it.

In September last year, Canada was left out of a new Indo-Pacific defence intelligence arrangement between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. It was only a few months ago that Canada finally caught up with the rest of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing partners (the U.S., the U.K., Australia and New Zealand) in barring Huawei and ZTE from our core 5G internet connectivity infrastructure.

Earlier this year, Canada was left out of the 12-nation Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity, a major American-led collaborative partnership that includes Japan, South Korea, India, Singapore, New Zealand and Australia. So we had a lot of catching up to do.

I especially liked this line in Campbell Clark’s piece: “The dirty little secret about Canada’s foreign policy is that Canada doesn’t really have one.”

I’d quibble with the dissing of the Yanks in John Ivison’s assessment in the Post, but he’s dead right that “there is very little in the strategy that will dissuade Beijing’s agents seeking to influence Canadian elections or intimidate the Chinese diaspora in this country: there is no foreign influence registry; no watchdog office to counter China’s efforts across business, politics and academia; and, no proposals to allow Canada’s spy agency to share information more freely with law enforcement and civil society.”

Also, Ivison’s sentences are even longer than mine.

Anyway, I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me. Do yourself a favour and subscribe if you don’t already. Do me a favour and make it a paid sub. The next newsletter is going to be a doozy.