A rchive Date
[ 20-10-2022 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[https://nationalpost.com/opinion/terry-glavin-chrystia-freeland-is-right-to-condemn-doing-business-with-dictators-will-trudeau-listen
Chrystia Freeland is right to condemn doing business with dictators. Will Trudeau listen?
The West has enriched the world’s police states, which now outnumber democracies
Terry Glavin Oct 19, 2022
There were a couple of things that were quite striking about Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland’s clarion call at a Brookings Institution forum last week where she called for a radical dismantling of the global trade paradigm that Russia and China have lately proved so successful in subverting by coercion, blackmail and war.
The first thing was that what Freeland had to say could be easily read as a renunciation and a rebuke of everything Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has stood for on the “world stage,” ever since he was first elected in 2015. The second thing is that there’s nothing about her remedies for what ails the broken “rules-based international order” that would be held as especially radical these days in Brussels or Tokyo or Washington or Warsaw.
In a nutshell, what Freeland had to say was that the form of globalization ushered in by the end of the Cold War 33 years ago has become a catastrophe. The advanced democracies have done quite well for themselves, but the dictatorships have done even better. We’re now reaping the whirlwind of Moscow’s admission to the International Monetary Fund in 1992 and the World Trade Organization’s accession of Beijing in 2001.
The “West” has enriched the world’s police states, which now outnumber democracies. And the dictators are writing the rules. Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is a regression to the rules of the 19th century, while China is a torture state that uses trade to bully any country that fails to do its bidding.
The international norms of global trade weren’t built for this state of affairs, and democracies are responding partly in common, and partly independently. U.S. President Joe Biden, for one, has had quite enough of it, setting aside $350 billion to rebuild the American manufacturing base and develop semiconductor production and research. It’s part of a suite of initiatives various democratic governments are contemplating that defy the way global trade is supposed to work, by “onshoring,” or re-shoring lost economic resilience.
What Freeland proposes has been called “friendshoring,” an approach that secures supply chains for critical resources among and between democracies. The significance of that notion, for Canada, is that it would represent a dramatic departure from the mix of foreign-policy incoherence and trade policy enthusiasm for China, the world’s preeminent police state, that has been the hallmark of Trudeau’s government.
Not even the kidnapping of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor was sufficient to shake the Liberal foreign policy establishment out of its starry-eyed devotion to deeper integration with Xi Jinping’s China. After five years of waiting for a China policy “reset,” we appear to be back to square one, with Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly’s determination to rekindle Beijing’s affections. Instead of a China policy, Joly has lumped China in with several democracies and semi-democracies in an “Indo-Pacific” strategy that is supposed to be complete by the end of this year.
Several years after Canada’s partners in the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing network had already barred Xi Jinping’s “national champion” Huawei Technologies from their core fifth-generation internet connectivity architecture, Canada followed suit only this past May. Long after Vladimir Putin had invaded Eastern Ukraine and annexed Crimea in 2014, Trudeau’s first foreign affairs minister, Stéphane Dion, was arguing for a normalization of relations with Moscow and an end to the early sanctions that had barely even kicked in by then.
While Freeland’s proposal for what would amount to a trading bloc among democracies is a radical break from her own government’s policy, her remedies essentially replicate what U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde have been saying for some time now.
It’s not that Canada has found itself uniquely vulnerable to Beijing’s blackmail. Canada-China trade remains about five per cent of Canada’s offshore trade accounts, and by the time SARS-CoV-2 emerged from the Chinese city of Wuhan, China was the world’s major producer of ventilators and respirators, and half the world’s medical masks were sourced from Chinese factories. The U.S. relied on China for 97 per cent of its antibiotics, and between 70 and 95 per cent of its vitamin C, ibuprofen, hydrocortisone and acetaminophen.
The democratic world’s crippling dependency on China for rare-earth minerals and photovoltaic cells is surpassed in urgency only by Europe’s reliance on Russian energy resources — and Putin counted correctly on that vulnerability when he launched his full-on invasion of Ukraine last February.
“And so, nearly eight months after the invasion of Ukraine, we find ourselves in a world where bloody history is back,” Freeland said, “and where muscular dictatorships show little sign of mellowing into liberal democracies — and yet also where, in conscious contrast with the age of the Iron Curtain, we have spent three decades building an interconnected global economy.”
And that’s why we’re in this mess.
What Freeland proposes is threefold.
First, a deepening and expanding NATO, and NATO’s co-operation with democratic partners around the world, especially the Indo-Pacific. The second pillar of Freeland’s doctrine is a concerted effort among democracies to mirror NATO’s discipline economically, in supply chains that run through each other’s economies.
“Canada is proud to be the only G7 country with trade deals with every other G7 partner. But we would be happier still to give up our bragging rights and to have our feat replicated by each of our allies,” she said. That’s quite the departure from the Trudeau doctrine. It wasn’t that long ago that Trudeau wanted bragging rights for being the first G7 country to sign a free trade agreement with China. And it was odd, too, that Freeland held up the European Union’s proposed prohibition on imports produced with forced labour as something that exemplifies our “shared values.” In Ottawa, a senate bill that has finally found support in the House of Commons to do the same is still malingering in committee.
Then there’s the problem of the “in-between” countries. Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean states may take quite a bit of convincing to choose the right side in all this, and it would be naive to think the Global South is going to happily march in unison under democracy’s banner.
But we can’t go on like this.
“It is wishful thinking for western governments and western companies to believe we can do business with dictatorships on the same terms we do business with democracies,” Freeland said. And that’s true enough. But it may also be wishful thinking to imagine that Trudeau and the rest of her cabinet colleagues are up to facing the realities of the 21st century as clearly and honestly as Freeland does.
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 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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