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If any of the three parties choose to enter into talks with a non-market economy (from here on we’ll just say “China”), the other parties are to be given three months prior notice. During the talks, the other parties are to be kept abreast of what’s on the table and what’s not. If the other parties don’t like the resulting deal, they can put China’s partner outside the USMCA and carry on by themselves in a bilateral trade arrangement.

That this should have incited such hoarse-throated imbecilities about Canadian “sovereignty” to emanate from Canada’s international-trade policy establishment and the Canada-China business lobby (same thing, as often as not) and a section of the business press should tell you something about just how far the rot has spread since former prime minister Jean Chrétien’s first Team Canada brigade was so warmly welcomed in Beijing back in 1994.

With nearly a quarter of a century of lucrative post-politics sinecures, Canada-China “friendship” sleaze-baggery and shameless pro-Beijing think-tankery having taken its moral and intellectual toll, it is no wonder that the very idea that China is some kind of normal trading country has been normalized.

Not to pick on Michael Chong, but he went so far as to rise in the House of Commons and evoke the memory of Canada’s 60,000 First World War dead, and the blood sacrifice they made so that Canada might earn its foreign-policy sovereignty with the 1931 Statute of Westminster, to traduce the USCMA. “Article 32 makes us a vassal state,” Chong declared.