Article content continued

Now we’re expected to believe that Wang’s little-noticed demand that Canada boost the supply of visas available to Chinese citizens who are in good standing with Beijing was actually a Canadian idea. We will all be expected to believe a great deal of claptrap like this in the coming days, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s visit to China approaches in advance of the Sept. 4-5 G20 Summit in Hangzhou. So be alert.

True, there is often little to distinguish what Beijing wants from what Canada’s foreign-affairs mandarins want out of the Canada-China relationship, which is in any case rarely even close to what Canadians want — like some demonstrable public benefit for once, the opinion polls consistently show. Now that the Liberal party has returned to power after nearly a decade of Stephen Harper’s Conservative government and its on-again, off-again friendliness with Beijing, the propaganda line is that Canada-China relations are on the verge of a “new golden age.” Count on it. There will be a price, and we will pay. We always do.

We’ve been hearing this sort of thing since the 1980s, when there really was cause to imagine that the emancipation of the Chinese masses was finally foreseeable and China’s vast untapped markets would prove a boon to the Canadian economy. But by the 1990s, after it became obvious that things weren’t evolving quite as we’d been told they would, the China lobby convinced Canadians that all that was required was a big old-fashioned skid-greasing.



Successive federal and provincial governments poured $20 billion into “Pacific gateway” infrastructure, and all Metro Vancouver got in return for being 58 hours closer by ship to China than Los Angeles was an elaborate road, rail and port complex that allowed Beijing to flood North America with cheap goods. Canada got even less. In 1988, federal data showed a modest China-trade surplus of $1.6 billion in Canada’s favour. By last year, Canada was saddled with an annual Chinese trade deficit of $45 billion.While dozens of Canadian politicians and mandarins went on to enrich themselves in China trade consultancies — most of them Liberal party grandees and their civil service hangers-on — the prosperity all these Disco Generation wise guys promised us has accrued mainly to a parasitic class of Chinese Communist Party multibillionaires and their few corporate accomplices in Canada. For all the smiles and the smooching that Ottawa and Beijing put on for show, the underlying “message” Beijing transmits nowadays is always the same: nice little country you have here. Shame if anything should happen to it.