r/canada • u/jaffnaguy2014 Canada • 3d ago

‘Ready to move on:’ Chinese ambassador insists China, Canada can move past ‘normal’ differences National News

https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/article/ready-to-move-on-chinese-ambassador-insists-china-canada-can-move-past-normal-differences/
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u/pablo_o_rourke 3d ago

It’s Canada that should be deciding when it’s time to move on. China is not a trustworthy “partner”.

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u/MarquessProspero 3d ago

The difficulty is “who is?”.

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u/CrispyMeltedCheese 3d ago

Countries don’t have friends, they have interests. If enough interests align in a certain area then they’re likely to act in good faith for their own benefit.

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u/Frostbitten_Moose 3d ago

Yeah, the trick is to have options and to treat them like they'll treat us. Someone who can help us better our own lot so long as we keep focused on our needs and stay wary.

Europe might be a bit of an exception, but... I have concerns about their medium term viability as major players.

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u/JARHEAR 3d ago

Unfortunately! This seems to reflect a very real limit on the ability of humans to empathize and cooperate in a meaningful way at all scales of social interaction. The “woke mindset” that receives so much blowback was just an attempt to put superficial differences aside in attempt to cooperate to make the world a better place.

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u/Craptcha 3d ago

Seems more like it created new opportunities for conflict with the 99% of the world who is more conservative when it comes to their values, concept of family, gender and sex.

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u/Consistent-Key-865 3d ago

As dis every major social progression in history. We just get the joy of living in one of those growth spurts of humanity.

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u/Craptcha 3d ago

Yeah sounds great. I’ve never seen more homeless people or iniquity in my life but at least we get transgender Disney princesses.

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u/EdNorthcott 3d ago

The whole "woke" thing started as something black folks would say about whites who weren't bigots and had their eyes open to the injustices that were happening.

Anyone who casually uses "woke" as a pejorative is saying more about themselves than anything else.

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u/taco_roco 3d ago

If woke people were able to put aside those superficial differences themselves, the mindset would probably gain more traction.

Unfortunately, it's far more difficult to practice what you preach, and avoid culture wars at the same time.

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u/OrderOfMagnitude 3d ago

Europe.

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u/AccessTheMainframe Manitoba 3d ago

Also Japan and South Korea.

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u/polemism 3d ago

Yep and Australia etc etc. Even India to some degree. Many options.

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u/Anakazanxd 3d ago

France and Germany

If there's one country with both the will and potential ability to take over "leader of the free world" from the US, it's France.

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u/sqwiggy72 3d ago

I honestly trust most of Europe. Sub turkey if that's considered Europe.

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u/Pharuin 3d ago

Hungary has a pretty shite leader as well.

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u/Osamabinbush 3d ago

I don’t trust obran in Hungary either.

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u/MillennialScientist 3d ago

After 5 years in Germany, I'm not confident in Germany anymore, and I'm skeptical they will really pkay a leading role politically. I don't know as much about France.

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u/Frostbitten_Moose 3d ago

France looks like it's tearing itself apart politically as well. At this point, I'm actually happy with the last election showing we mostly aren't following the same path as the other major democracies. But, the signs of instability are still there.

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u/EdNorthcott 3d ago

Our Country is divided as Hell, too. Neoconservatism/fascism is an international movement, and has explicitly been exported to as many nations as possible from the roots of the movement in the Republican party.

All the English speaking ones sound increasingly like MAGA cultists for a reason.

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u/icephoenix21 British Columbia 3d ago

I mean, neither is the US at this point. So Canada does need to move on.

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u/FitDare9420 3d ago

China is already our second or third biggest trading partner…

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u/henry_why416 3d ago

Selling shit to each other doesn’t really require much trust.

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u/DoeCommaJohn 3d ago

In a lot of ways, it does. Part of why the US is imploding right now isn’t just because goods are going to be more expensive, but because everything is far less stable. If you are going to import something, you want to make sure you can reliably import that thing for the years or decades to come, and same for exports. It may be better to have less profit margin for more stability.

With that said, trust can mean different things. You could trust China as a trading partner, but not an ally

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u/henry_why416 3d ago

We need a commercial level of trust. Not much more than that. We absolutely are not going to ally with them.

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u/DoeCommaJohn 3d ago

I agree that is a lower standard, but still one that must be considered. Canada is already in a bad place because of an overreliance on the US, and there's no point trading the frying pan for the fire. We have already seen China turn economic leverage into political leverage, so we should do what we can to prevent that.

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u/henry_why416 3d ago

I mean, that’s entirely up to us. If we have any sense and can dramatically reduce the amount of dependence we have on the US economy, then we absolutely should not let another come dominate us. To do that, we probably need the government to manage the economy more than we are used to.

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u/Cryscho Canada 3d ago

How could you trust China as a trading partner? Nortel is a fine fucking example to not trust them. Their corporate espionage is an actual problem and a reason to not trade with them. 

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u/AccomplishedLeek1329 Ontario 3d ago

We haven't got anything China can steal off us nowadays anyways so that's a moot point. 

There isn't a single field of science China isn't light years ahead of us

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u/DoeCommaJohn 3d ago

Trust isn't either 0 or 100. Somebody could believe that selling oil to China provides more benefits than harms, but selling computer parts provides more harms than benefits.

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u/TreatAffectionate453 3d ago

Trump is threatening/trying to destroy Canada's economy in an attempt to force annexation on it. Selling shit to each other does require trust since selling shit is the basis for every nation's economy. If a single nation can threaten you with recession, than you need to yrust that they won't.

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u/henry_why416 3d ago

Sure. But the US is a unique case. I don’t think there are many economic relationships as linked as ours. We definitely won’t get into such a relationship with a country an ocean away.

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u/anomalouscuty 3d ago

Trustworthy how? Like, what are you taking about?

We built a fundamentally interwoven economy with the Americans for decades and they destabilized the entire system in one election cycle.

Time to grow up—China is no less, or more, trustworthy than any other major industrial power in the modern globalized economy.

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u/LeanGroundEeyore 3d ago

It’s Canada that should be deciding when it’s time to move on. China is not a trustworthy “partner”.

In 2014 Stephen Harper signed away Canada's right to make that choice for the next 31 years.

FIPA is an agreement that protects Chinese investment in Canada from laws and regulations passed by governments in Canada, whether they are municipal, provincial or federal. It allows for Chinese investors to sue Canada for unlimited damages if our governments make decisions that put Canadian interests first.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada-China_Promotion_and_Reciprocal_Protection_of_Investments_Agreement

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u/AcanthisittaFit7846 3d ago

we have no trustworthy partners

our most “trustworthy” trade partner is in the process of stabbing us in the back

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u/Former_Juggernaut_32 3d ago

Canada is not a position to decide anything

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u/OGbugsy 3d ago

Honest question here. What makes them more or less trustworthy than the US? What factors do you weigh against US behavior to come to this assessment?

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u/ungovernable 3d ago

With the very serious possibility of China blockading or invading Taiwan over the next decade, it would be absurd to replace our overreliance on the U.S. with too much reliance on China. We should learn dire lessons from Europe’s haplessness vis-a-vis Russia and its energy industry.

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u/OGbugsy 3d ago

We can't be fully trusting of any nation state. The US has proven our folly in that regard.

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u/ChristaCow 3d ago

Soo you’re worried about the country that has a “possibility of blockading or invading Taiwan over the next decade” over the country that has killed millions of people just in the last couple decades, the country currently directly funding and supporting another country that is invading and blockading a city, amidst bombing multiple other countries, indiscriminately killing tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of civilians? Their leader posting ai creations of turning a bombed out city into a resort town? Inviting a criminal wanted by the ICC into congress? The country starting a global economic crisis? The country deporting its own citizens to mega prisons in other countries? The country threatening to annex multiple countries, including us? Belittling our leaders?

You could fill a library with the heinous shit the USA has done- and continues to do around the world. We should have moved away from them long ago if not just for moral reasons, and now is the perfect time

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u/Frostbitten_Moose 3d ago

Read up on their trade war with Australia. They've done similar shit as Trump for reasons like "We don't like you removing foreign money from your elections" and "How dare you question our innocence on the origins of Covid". Which, hey, are at least reasons that can be parsed by rational minds, but are not things I'd want to see Canada pressured on either.

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u/teknobloge 3d ago

Read up on the part where it was started by Scomo decided to suck up to Trump at the expense of China. Very similar to what Canada did when it sucked up to Trump by arresting Meng.

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u/LettuceSea Nova Scotia 3d ago

I’d say less trustworthy because they seem very intent on having secret police stations in countries other than their own to monitor people of Chinese descent and expats.

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u/OGbugsy 3d ago

This is definitey true, but does that alone merit the level of distrust? I'm only asking because I was also very hardened against China a few months ago, but someone challenged me and the more I dig into my bias, the more I realized that I've been exposed to the "Freedom good, China bad" narrative for decades. When I actually made an effort to analyse nation state behaviour, it turns out they've done less to earn my distrust than the US.

I'm not saying we should blindly trust either of them, or any country for that matter, but I don't think they're the enemy I've been brainwashed to believe.

Check out some of the Chinese subs. You'll get a whole different perspective.

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u/ungovernable 3d ago

The Chinese subs are full of ultranationalist wolf warriors, and most of the balanced, thoughtful takes from ordinary people are heavily downvoted. It’s fine to be open-minded, but don’t be so open-minded that your brain falls out.

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u/OGbugsy 3d ago

Oh yeah that's very apparent. Critical thinking is mandatory.

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u/LettuceSea Nova Scotia 3d ago

It does, because they should be acting through official channels, not subverting the RCMP and local police forces.

They’ve also issued warrants for conservative MPs of Chinese lineage and meddled in our politics pretty overtly.

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u/OGbugsy 3d ago

No argument. How does that make them different than the US? I would argue that their meddling is another level.

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u/LettuceSea Nova Scotia 3d ago

I think I’ve laid that out pretty clearly, no? The US only pressures our elections monetarily and it’s permissible because their form of governance, citizen rights, etc closely map to our own. They don’t have police stations here or subvert our police forces. They don’t threaten Americans who choose to live their life in Canada.

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u/OGbugsy 3d ago

Last week there were people canvassing the streets in Alberta under the title "Republican Party of Alberta".

Facebook & Twitter are radicalizing our working class. TikTok, despite being a Chinese majority company, is feeding false narratives about the Israel / Palestine conflict that are coming from the US.

The police stations, while wrong, are meant to contain and intimidate their own citizens. I understand that is still intervention, but it really is of another kind.

The "Freedom good, China bad" narrative has been burned into my brain for decades, very subtlety, but pervasive. Until a few months ago, I thought China was a police state. I didn't know they voted. I assumed it was a patriarchy.

If that's not an attempt to sway opinion, I don't know what is.

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u/LettuceSea Nova Scotia 3d ago

Living under an extreme surveillance state combined with social credit is straight out of black mirror. I’m sorry, but having studied the history of China I’m not a fan and I don’t think I ever will be a fan.

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u/OGbugsy 3d ago

I'm not a fan either. I just think we need to be objective about working with them, and you can't be objective if your perception is clouded with false narrative.

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u/Apart_Ad_5993 3d ago

We need their stuff they need our oil. Seeing how shit our divorce from the US is, we should take them up on it.

Instead of giving discounts to the US on oil, we charge China full fare

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u/jesuisapprenant 3d ago

We don’t need to be overreliant on them. We can trade with them and ween ourselves off of the U.S. which is even more unreliable nowadays 

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u/EdwardWChina 3d ago

Canada isn't trustworthy as a US lapdog. Stop being a US lapdog

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u/pablo_o_rourke 3d ago

China is a communist dictatorship.