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It was all lip service. Politicians involved from both countries knew that these were public relations exercises intended to soothe Canadians’ human rights concerns.

Last week, Ottawa’s cynicism with regard to appeasing Canadians on Chinese rights and freedoms did play out again. One would have to be naïve to believe that legitimate labour, gender or environmental reforms could be incorporated into a trade deal with a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship. This is a nation where Stalin is still revered as a significant forefather of Chinese Communism under current President Xi Jinping — with whom our prime minister dined just days ago.

It seems the PMO assumed the Chinese premier would sign a joint statement referencing labour, gender and environment rights, while Justin Trudeau flew home Chamberlain-like to celebrate his squaring the circle on the conundrum of trade versus protecting Canadian values in Canada-China relations. And by the time negotiations were complete some years hence, any labour, gender and environment clauses would have been relegated to irrelevant statements of principles with no binding effect.

But, evidently unknown to Mr. Trudeau and his advisers, General-Secretary Xi Jinping made it crystal clear at the October Communist Party Congress that it was his predecessors’ pandering to “western bourgeois false ideologies” that had led to their “lack of drive, incompetence, disengagement from the people, inaction, and corruption.”

The days of Chinese lip service to Canadian wishes have definitely come to an end, but as one era ends, a new one begins. When Canada’s “progressive trade agenda” died in the Great Hall of the People last week, it opened an opportunity for a serious, non-partisan re-think of how Canada should manage our role in China’s comprehensive rise to power in the years and decades ahead.

Charles Burton is an associate professor of political science at Brock University in St. Catharines, and is a former Counsellor at the Canadian Embassy in Beijing.