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As China continues its rapid descent into police state repression and President Xi Jinping’s ruling Communist Party faction tightens its increasingly brutal grip on the country, the bill for all the unseemly intimacies that Ottawa has cultivated in Beijing since the days when the Liberal party ran the roost in Ottawa is coming due. It’s going to sting. The whirlwind is spinning suddenly, at a dizzying, nightmarish pace. The Canadian economy will take a hit, perhaps in the billions of dollars. The political fallout is going to be atrocious.

It’s not so complicated if you think of the catastrophe as a series of falling dominoes.

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The first to fall was Communist Party kingpin Bo Xilai, whose last foreign-dignitary guest was Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Bo was sentenced to life in prison on bribery charges in 2013. He’d been Canada’s go-to guy in China’s ruling elite for more than a decade. Jean Chrétien, who championed Canada’s trade links to China while he was prime minister and took up the lucrative business himself immediately after leaving office in 2003, called Bo an “old friend.”