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Set aside as well all the corporate Chinese involvement in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s sketchy cash-for-access fundraisers and that squalid state dinner in honour of Chinese Premier Li Keqiang that Trudeau invited 61 Liberal party donors to attend last September, along with all those corporations, law firms and lobbyists up to their necks in dirty Chinese money.

When it comes to the cause of browbeating reluctant Canadians into subscribing to the sleazy proposition that an ever-more intimate relationship with the thuggish police state in Beijing is in Canada’s national interest, you’ve got to hand it to them. These people just won’t quit.

The latest exertion in the strategic formulation and pretty packaging of pro-Beijing business propaganda — and can we please be at least honest about what this is? — will take place this week in Ottawa. It’s a no-reporters-allowed gathering of the Public Policy Forum, a weirdly hybrid government-corporate mind-meld of senior bureaucrats and Canadian business executives already so deeply entwined in lucrative associations with Beijing’s corrupt billionaire princelings that they simply can’t be taken seriously.

It’s the kick-off to a two-year effort aimed at changing Canadians’ minds about China’s ravenous kleptocracy to suit the purposes of the Canadian firms that want in on the action. The PPF president is Edward Greenspon, the Globe and Mail’s former editor in chief, who hasn’t yet commented on this week’s conclave. Only two months ago the Globe commissioned a Nanos Research poll showing that, once again, Canadians remain ill-disposed to the Liberal Party grandees’ hopes for a free trade deal with China. Sorry, Mr. Greenspon. That must have stung.