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Beijing has behaved from the outset more like an embezzler

Only if you ignore the fact that the feat was accomplished by merely easing back on the Maoist collectivization of the economy that had induced a famine that killed roughly 45 million people during the 1958-62 Great Leap Forward — a vast crime against humanity that Justin’s father Pierre strangely failed to even notice at the time, while he was touring the country and swanning around with China’s elites.

It is not as though there are no riches in China. The Communist Party elites have amassed fortunes to themselves equal to the Gross Domestic Product of Sweden. They have the money, the guns, the technology, the numbers, the UN votes, the lot. And now Beijing is openly and explicitly waging an ideological global war against democracy, the rule of law, free speech, the “rules based” global economic order, the whole schmeer. They’re quite candid about it, too.

It is not as though there are no riches in China. The elites have amassed fortunes

There is much that might be done, even in the absence of an American presidency commanded by a sane person, to at least curb Beijing’s ravenous appetite for global hegemony. Australia and New Zealand are desperately attempting to extricate their democracies from Beijing’s money and influence, and they’re reaching out to other liberal democracies in hopes of forging a common cause. Through the Trans-Pacific Partnership talks, Japan is attempting — with no help from Trudeau’s government — to shore up a defensive economic bloc against Beijing.

But nothing Trudeau or his ministers or their friends in the Canada-China trade lobby have ever said or done suggests that they have the slightest inkling of the implications of cultivating such intimacies with Beijing as Trudeau says he desires. Even worse, you can look back over the past 30 years, and all of the shiny forecasts about trade with China, every premise of every policy, all of it, has been wrong. The Chrétien-Trudeau Liberal grandees have not been right once in 30 years. Not once.

You want to believe them now?

“A strong relationship with China is essential to creating jobs, strengthening the middle class, and growing the Canadian economy,” Trudeau says.

Here is a modest proposition then: No. It is not.

National Post