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Along with pro-Beijing lobby groups headquartered in Canada, the Chinese Communist Party’s “soft power” brokers have picked up the costs of dozens of getting-to-know-you trips to China over the years for several Liberal and Conservative MPs and senators. All by himself, John McCallum, the cabinet minister Trudeau appointed ambassador to China last year, racked up freebie trips to the value of $73,300.

You never can tell when public disgust will reach a tipping point

But what the hell. A drop in the bucket. Xi Jinping’s increasingly imperialistic regime spends an estimated $18 billion a year on subversion and overseas propaganda, which in its Canadian content is now practically indistinguishable from the boilerplate produced by the Office of the Minister of International Trade and the Canada-China Business Council.

We are all supposed to be somehow impressed, for instance, or at least surprised, that Trudeau’s purportedly principled insistence on gender, labour and environmental provisions in a free trade agreement with China was the cause of some hullabaloo in Beijing this week. It’s a handy storyline. Even Trudeau’s noisiest critics will settle for it. What a dolt! Dolt or not, the proposition that it’s a big deal falls apart on the fiction that there is some important distinction to be drawn between proceeding with “preliminary negotiations” as expected, and advancing to “high level exchanges” on free trade instead.

Never mind for the moment that “free trade” isn’t even possible with a police state, let alone the sort that has lately rededicated itself with relish to the thuggery necessary to the enforcement of a command-and-control economy – which Xi Jinping has explicitly articulated as a matter of fundamental state policy. Trudeau can at least be confident that he can persist in his cringe-inducing infatuation with the Chinese regime, and that Beijing will continue to return the compliment with the flattery that he obsessively craves.