The Paul Wells Show - A history of Chinese influence in Canada

Episode Date: May 1, 2024

Is the commission into foreign election interference asking the wrong question about China? That’s what journalist Jonathan Manthorpe thinks. He argues the real issue is that for decades Canada has failed to confront China’s efforts to control Canadians of Chinese heritage and influence Canadian institutions.    He wrote a book about it, Claws of the Panda: Beijing’s Campaign of Influence and Intimidation in Canada. It was originally published in 2019, but it’s now been updated to take into account everything that’s happened since, right up to the Foreign Interference Commission 

I asked one of the leading experts on Canada-China relations what he makes of the public inquiry into election interference. His answer might surprise you. It's irrelevant. Oh really? I mean I've watched it and but it's the wrong question. I mean, actually, it makes me quite angry. Today, Jonathan Manthorpe on Canada's failed attempt to fix China. I'm Paul Wells, the Journalist Fellow-in-Residence at the University of Toronto's Munk School. Welcome to The Paul Wells Show. I was excited to hear that Jonathan Manthorpe, one of the country's most experienced journalists,

is coming out with a new edition of his book, Claws of the Panda, Beijing's Campaign of Influence and Intimidation in Canada. The original edition, published five years ago, was a masterful survey of the Chinese Communist Party's long campaign to control Chinese expats in Canada and Canada's foreign policy. I started recommending Manthorpe's book to everyone I knew, and it took on a life of its own. Without a lot of press attention, it became a durable bestseller. He has a lot of

material for a new edition. Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor were arrested just before his first edition hit the bookshelves. The allegations of interference by the Beijing regime in Canadian elections and Justice Marie-Josée Hugues' public inquiry into those allegations, which is still going on, have all happened since. The new book covers all of that. But why does Manthorpe think the inquiry is irrelevant? Because to him, what matters isn't whether the Beijing regime has a little influence at the margin on a Canadian election. It's how completely Beijing dominates the lives of innocent Chinese expats

who are trying to live a good life in Canada. That's the story he wants to tell. Jonathan Manthorpe, thanks for joining me. My pleasure, Paul. My pleasure. I've been hearing about you for almost as long as I've been a journalist because in the early 90s, I was at the Montreal Gazette when you got announced as Southern News' Asia correspondent. Right.

Was that essentially when this book started to... No, no, no. It goes way back. The seeds of this book, when I look back on it now, were when I was a political reporter for the Globe and Mail in the late 1960s, and around the time of Canadian diplomatic recognition with Beijing in 1970. And there was a fascinating character that the Globe kept in close touch with called Dr. Paul Lin. And he was running the Asia Pacific Institute at McGill University. And his history is extraordinary. He was born here in BC. His father was an immigrant from southern China. In fact, his father was the first ethnic Chinese Anglican priest in Canada. But Paul Lin was a very bright young man. He went to university in the

United States in the 1940s and became an ardent Chinese nationalist, led anti-Japanese organizations in the States, and through his wife had links to the Communist Party. So when the communists took over in China in 1949, he went to China with his family and became a senior figure in their propaganda department. after the Great Leap Forward and the famine in 1960, and was then about to try to come out of exile around 1962, Chow Yun-Lai, who was Mao's right-hand man, thought that this would be a good moment to get Paul Lin out of China and get him back to Canada, and get him essentially serving China in Canada. So he came back to Canada in 1962. He had quite a lot of difficulty finding a spot in the university, got to McGill, set up the institute there, and then battled on really three fronts. One was to get diplomatic recognition between Canada and the People's Republic of China, which happened in 1970.

He gave a lot of speeches through the course of the 60s. The second was to get some strong relationships between Canadian and Chinese universities, which he managed very well. And third was to get a business establishment between Canada and China, which he did with the founding in the early 70s of the Canada-China Business Council, which remains to this day the most significant agency of influence, in my view, between Beijing and Canada. All the aristocracy of Canadian business were founder members. One has to assume they got sort of sweetheart deals in the early years with China in the early 1970s. And of course, the Power Corporation is behind the Canada-China Business Council.

Power Corporation has employed one way or another four prime ministers of Canada. Power Corporation and the Canada-China Business Council remain the most significant creation of Paul Lin. To his credit, he fell out with Beijing over the Tiananmen Square massacre, and his wife and his son finished his autobiography after he died. But that really tells the story of the 1960s and 70s creation of the network of influence in Canada by Beijing and the Chinese Communist Party. Now, as you point out in your book, there's a significant sort of missionary influence in the early days of the Canada-China relationship and a missionary impulse. The idea that if Canadians spent enough time among the Chinese, they could make China more like Canada.

One of the kind of the central thesis of your book is that didn't work. That's right. That's right. I mean, this is fascinating because Lester Pearson is central to this. He had been a member of the student Christian movement when at university. had been a member of the student Christian movement when at university. And when after the Second World War, he, as deputy minister, was sort of in charge of creating essentially Canada's first independent foreign ministry and foreign policy. He was actually very heavily influenced by the Canadian missionaries abroad, and particularly the missionaries in China.

He insisted that all the reports coming from China, from the missionaries in China. He insisted that all the reports coming from China, from the missionaries, many of which went through or over the desks at external, what was then external affairs, that he get all the salient information. So that whole ethic that you described of Canada bringing a virtuous view of the world to the world, that very much imbued the whole creation of the Department of External Affairs after the Second World War. And it's still there, of course, still there. Okay, let's kind of back up a little bit. What would you say, this now nearly century-long story arc between Canada and China, nearly century-long story arc between Canada and China. How would you describe the general contour of that relationship? What's been going on at the sort of top floor level between Canada

and China all this time? Very clear idea on the part of the Chinese Communist Party of what it wanted out of the relationship and massive self-delusion on the part of the Canadians. Let's take the latter part first. What is the content of the self-delusion? Well, the content of the self-delusion is just what we were talking about. It is that if the Chinese Communist Party sees the virtues of Canada, sees the potential for political reform, they will embrace it, and they will embrace our view of the world. They will become dependable stakeholders on the international stage. They will see the benefits of economic reform, and this will all be down to them having understood Canada's intrinsic

virtues. But this was never on the Communist Party's agenda. What the Communist Party wanted from the relationship was, A, technology. If you look at the first student exchanges, it's very clear. Paul Lin sent all his Maoists to go and learn about the Cultural Revolution. And China then, as now, right up to this very moment, even as we speak, sent people to Ghana as much technological information and advancement from Canada as they possibly could. And initially, of course, we were very willing to give all that because we wanted to aid the economic and technical development of China. and technical development of China. But there was a sort of switch over probably in the 1990s when it became not so much aiding in Chinese development as China pillaging Canadian intellectual property. And not only here, they pillaged it from every Canadian business that tried to set up in China as well. This is to some extent a variation of a story that we see in a lot

of different ways around the world, which is that Canadians walk into this with the sense that the world needs more Canada, as though we have something to offer that hasn't occurred to millions of people around the world. And it kind of makes us easy marks because every new Canadian generation of politicians arrives a little bit naive and they're facing people who are not that naive. Absolutely. It's a great shame. And the extraordinary thing is, I think, that we've languished in it for so long. If you look at other countries that are in similar positions as ourselves, for example, Australia, I mean, I always find it very worthwhile to see what the Australians are up to, because although we have very, very similar cultural heritages,

there are one or two dramatic differences which are really important. The main one being geography. We have never had to look after our own security. For the first half of our life as a country, we could depend on Britain to maintain our sovereignty and security. And for the last half, it's been the United States. The Australians, also with a vast territory and small immigrant or settler population, has always had to look after its own security. And that has meant two very, very important things. They've always had a much clearer idea of their national interests than we have done. They have always been far more, skeptical is perhaps the wrong word, they've been far more questioning about other people's motives, other countries' motives. And also, defence and foreign policy have always

been non-partisan issues, essentially. They have been bipartisan, and changes of government do not mean dramatic differences in the relationship with defence policy or foreign policy. And those have, I think, been great weaknesses in Canada. We have never, until really now, had to face up to defining our own national interests and how we deal with our own national security in the broadest sense, not just sort of physical, but cultural and political and economic security. Okay. Now we're talking today because your book, Claws of the Panda, has been very substantially updated since its original publication about five years ago. But what made you decide to turn all of this observation and experience into a book leading

up to 2018, 2019? It was a very difficult process. I mean, as I told you that I was coming across Paul Lin in 1970 that started me on this track. But then I became a columnist for the Star and then foreign correspondent for the Star in Britain and then in Africa. And then, as you pointed out, in 1993, I was posted to Asia. And this, of course, was a time when it was just after Tiananmen Square in China, and it was very clear there was not going to be any political reform in China. The Chinese Communist Party had set themselves dead against it, but it was also a time of great companies come to grief in various places. They would set up shop and then two weeks later, they'd find that their intellectual property had been stolen by some guy up the road who'd set up a factory producing what they were producing at a fraction of the price,

which is why there are no major Canadian companies in China operating in China to this day. So there was all that excitement going on. It was also, of course, the time of the handover of Hong Kong, which was why I was based in Hong Kong. And then when I came back to Canada in 1998, I began to, I mean, I'd already seen the gap between the fantasy and the reality of Canada's relationship with the People's Republic of China on the ground. I saw it more and more when I was based in Vancouver. And then it was really about 2015, I think, that I realized I had a book. But I was very concerned about it. I was very hesitant about

whether I should write it or not, because I feared that it might spark a backlash against Canadians of Chinese heritage. If I'd really feared that that would happen, I wouldn't have written the book. But I talked to many, many friends of mine of ethnic Chinese heritage, and they all, without hesitation, said to me, Jonathan, you have to find a way of writing it. We are under pressure from the Chinese Communist Party here on the streets of Canada every day of the week. We need mainstream Canada to understand what's happening here. And so I decided I had to find a way of writing it. And I think in the introduction, I said very clearly, this is not a story about ethnicity. This is a story about a foreign government and political party waging a

war of influence and intimidation in Canada. Ethnicity is by the way, it is not a central part of it at all. And you must keep our eye on the story, not the ethnicity of the participants. But it was difficult getting it published, I can tell you. It was very hard. It was not easy. You mentioned that you started thinking about the book as a book in 2015. One of the big things that happened in 2015

was that Justin Trudeau became the prime minister. How did Mr. Trudeau and his government, in their perceptions of China look to you at the time? I didn't see any change. To a certain extent, it seemed a bit of a reversion. We'd had that strange moment when Harper became prime minister. He had appeared to turn his back on the relationship with China. He had said, you know, there are more important things than the almighty dollar. Now, I was in Vancouver at that time and watching Canada-Asian affairs very closely. from Canadian universities, from Canadian businesses getting on the plane every Monday morning to go and lobby like hell in Ottawa all week to get Harper to change his tack. And of course, he did. There were some reservations, but the pressure came on him

from the business community via the Canada-China Business Council and from the universities and from institutions like the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada, which at that time was heavily, heavily oriented towards China. It's not anymore, thank heavens. But at that time, really, you know, Asia was a synonym for China, so far as the Canadian Institute was concerned. And they did get Harper to change his mind. So when Trudeau came to power, I saw just really a continuation of the attitude that had been in place since his father's day. And indeed, you know, Mulroney in his diary wrote that he was going to follow Pierre Trudeau's approach to China. So it was essentially just more of the same. The thing that was happening on the Chinese side during this period was the rise and consolidation of Xi Jinping's power. Yep.

And the more overtly confrontational style that has been manifested in a bunch of different ways. Do you see Xi Jinping as a new era in China's vision of itself in the world and its action in the world? Or as mostly continuity with previous regimes? Oh, I think, I mean, in the modern context, it's new. There's no doubt about that. He has created an imperial power. And to that extent, of course, it's a reversion to the Middle Kingdom. I mean, these are cliches and get bandied about a lot. But he has a Middle Kingdom view of China as the essential civilization in the world. And everything else is a vassal state. The other thing, of course, that was happening, which was very crucial at the time you mentioned around 2015, was the intensification of the suppression of the desire for political reform in Hong Kong.

And that's really important for Canada because Hong Kong is a Canadian city. I mean, we are the largest minority in Hong Kong by a long shot. I got hold when I was just before the handover in 1997, I got hold of a copy of the disaster scenario report that the Canadians had put together in case the People's Liberation Army came over the border guns blazing on July the 1st, 1997. Canadian government would be responsible for the evacuation of at least 500,000 people who had Canadian ties in Hong Kong. Now, at the time, the population of Hong Kong was 6 million. So that would have been one in 12. You walk down the street in Hong Kong in those days, you go, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 Canadian. I don't think there are as many now, many have left, but still Hong Kong is a Canadian city. And so what happened in the repression of dissent and the destruction of the whole one country, two nations principles that had governed the handover, that affected Canada. It meant that many Canadians had been working in Hong Kong, came back, but it also, it was an affront to Canada. And indeed, I mean,

I think to their credit, the federal government, the Justin Trudeau government at that time did join with other countries with particular interests in Hong Kong in a very strongly worded statement. But I mean, that's it. There's nothing much else you can do about it. Beijing and Xi Jinping had decided that the promises of political reform were over, that one country, two systems was dead. And that was it. There's nothing much you can do about it, except wile and gnash your teeth. This is part of Xi Jinping's demonstration to the world that Beijing is no longer biding its time and hiding its intentions as Deng Xiaoping suggested. It is now being very blatant in its ambitions. Now, during this period, say from 2010, 2015 onward, what's happening to members of the Chinese diaspora in Canada who are seen to be too vocal in their opposition or too heterodox in any number of ways?

The nature of the diaspora in Canada has changed dramatically over the last few years and over that sort of 10 years that you're talking about. so that sort of 10 years that you're talking about, before, say, 2015, and even perhaps going a bit further back than that, the major channel of immigration into Canada was from Hong Kong. This is a profound difference that is important because since then, the major influx has been from mainland China. Now, the difference is a very strong cultural one. The people coming from Hong Kong were coming from a place with, because of both our colonial heritages, very similar understandings of the relationship between the citizen and the government, the citizen and the administration. The people coming from mainland China who have dominated Chinese immigration into Canada since then don't come with that. For them, Canada is a very alien place.

The relationships between citizens and the government and citizens and authority generally are not so easy to understand. And the Chinese Communist Party, using what it's called its political warfare organization, the United Front Work Department, has stepped into that gap in assimilation and has essentially treated modern immigrants to Canada from China as continuing to be subject to the rule of the Chinese Communist Party. Now, you asked about the dissidents, most of whom are from Hong Kong, not all, but most are from Hong Kong. They have been subjected to a whole variety of intimidations over the years. I mean, we're going back now 30 years or more. And it's usually pressure on their relatives. The phone will go in the middle of the night, and it'll be somebody's mother who has been taken from our home, taken to a city three or four hours away, and put on the phone by the Ministry of State Security or some other secret police

operation in China and is begging her son or her daughter to please stop their political activity because it is causing problems for their family at home. That's the common one. That's the bigger. There are others. There are people here who have lost their jobs because they happen to work for a company that one way or another the communist party can influence or control and the communist party passed a law a few years ago now which requires all chinese companies to have communist party cells including

ones operating abroad and including any foreign companies operating in China. And I've seen there's an interesting study that shows that the result of this is that even though they may not have a formal position, the Chinese communist party cells actually manage the companies because their people rise to the top. So there's, those are the two main things, loss of job or threats of repercussions on your family. There are some others, but those are the main ones. After the break, Jonathan Manthorpe will tell me why he thinks the Hogue Commission into election interference is asking the wrong question. is asking the wrong question.

I'd like to tell you about a podcast called Higher Ed Spotlight, hosted by veteran journalist and higher education policy expert, Ben Woldawski. In each episode, Ben engages the brilliant minds of the people shaping the future of academia. It's now in its third season, which features guests such as New York Times bestselling author, Ethan Mollick, and the vice chancellor of Australian National University, Genevieve Bell. Whether you're an academic, student, parent, or policymaker, if you care about higher education, this show is for you. It's sponsored by Chegg's Center for Digital Learning. Subscribe to Higher Ed Spotlight anywhere you get podcasts. This is the portrait that your book,

Claws of the Panda, paints right up to the end, really, of its first edition in 2019. Five years later, there's a new edition. Obviously, more stuff has happened and actually quite a bit more high-profile stuff in the Canadian political context. But has there been a change in the relationship or a change in Canada's side of it that makes an update worth writing? Absolutely. The first edition of Clause of the Panda came out just a couple of weeks after the chief financial officer of Huawei Technologies, Meng Wanzhou, had been detained at Vancouver Airport, December 1st, 2018. As an author, you must have been kicking yourself because your news hook came out after your copy deadline.

Well, that's right. Just. came out after your copy deadline. Well, that's right, just. On the other hand, what the book does and did and continues to do was to provide the context for what happened after the detention of Meng Wanzhou. We couldn't have hoped as a publisher for better publicity than that, because people were asking, well, what the hell has happened here? Aren't we meant to be best friends with the Chinese Communist Party? How has this happened? Now, I think that whole thing is a fascinating story from a number of points of view. I think that this was a really definitive moment in the relationship between Canada and the Chinese Communist Party, particularly at this point so far as canadian people are concerned as distinct from the canadian establishments because canadian people understood immediately you cannot have a normal relationship

with a regime whose first instinct when there is a problem in the relationship when their first instinct is to take hostages. And the first instinct of the Chinese Communist Party was to detain the two Michaels and held them for nearly three years, subjected them to secret trials. They were charged with espionage and so forth, total fanciful charges. The Canadian people understood that. And if you look at the polls of people's regard for the Beijing regime, it just plummeted. Now, what didn't change was the view, the self-delusion amongst the Canadian establishments that they really love us. We must be able to get this back on track somehow. When the message I would have thought was clear, that when push comes

to shove, the Chinese Communist Party has absolutely no regard for the interests of Canada at all. That's the message. But even now, you know, we've got, what was it just the other day that Melanie Jolie, the Minister of Global Affairs, either her or her department were off to China trying to improve relations. My view is that for the foreseeable future, we can have nothing but a simple transactional relationship with Beijing. We share no civic values. That's the clear message of the Huawei affair. We've poured, for example, we poured $12 billion in the 1980s and 90s. We put into training Chinese judges and lawyers in the rule of law and the role of the rule of law in a democratic society. $12 billion of Canadian taxpayers' money. One or two of those

lawyers were foolish enough to actually believe the Chinese Communist Party might accept the rule of law and the whole concept of the state being subject to the law. And most of those guys are in prison now because they defended people that the Chinese Communist Party was determined to bang up and lock away. And so in order to silence the lawyers, they charged them with tax fraud or whatever, anything to get rid of them. So the whole notion that the Chinese Communist Party was going to accept the rule of law, was going to accept essentially 1215 Magna Carta, the sovereign is subject to the law. The Chinese Communist Party is not and never

will accept that. You read the Tiananmen Papers, the accounts of their meetings after the Tiananmen massacre. And the lesson they got from that was we don't give an inch on reform, because if we allow any reform movement to take hold across the nation, we will lose power. the nation, we will lose power. And so that's just one example of the naivety that we went into these things. But on the Huawei affair, I think that the government got lots of plaudits at the time for sticking by Canada's belief in the rule of law. I don't believe that that was what was motivating the government at all. I think that they came up against the hard fact that they had to choose between the United States and China and remember the Justin Trudeau government had just been through a grueling renegotiation of the NAFTA the North American Free Trade Agreement precipitated by Trump that Trump despised Justin Trudeau thought he was a weakling and untrustworthy, and faced with the pressures from Washington or from Beijing, there was absolutely no doubt which

side Canada had to come down. It had to support Trump. It had to support Washington. To do anything else would have been suicidal. Although there were people close to Trudeau early in the Trump presidency who said the Trump presidency was a symptom of America's decline. Yes. And that China was the stronger horse and that hope that better get well with China because it's not looking great to Canada's South. And then it all turned, I mean, I think it was highly misguided from the outset, but it all turned to vinegar so soon after that there was no room for that hope, even in Trudeau's

entourage. I think that's an entirely plausible scenario, Paul. Absolutely. No, I do. And there were many other acts of sort of desperation, trying to revive the delusion of the special relationship with China. You know, you had John Manley running around, urging the release of Meng Wanzhou. You had Jean Chrétien leaning on business leaders in the run-up to, I guess, the 2019 election, saying, look, warn Trudeau to release Meng Wanzhou, or the inference being that the business leaders would not support the Liberal Party in the election. And then, of course, there was a half-secret mission arranged by Gordon Holden, who I know very well when he was a diplomat in

Hong Kong. He now heads Asia Center at University of Alberta. He's a very interesting man and a very sound man, but he put together a team of Canadians to go to talk to the Chinese. to go to talk to the Chinese. And it included people like Alan Rock and some former diplomats and a few business people and both liberals and conservatives, a couple of MPs. And John Baird was in that. And it was interesting because, you know, coming back to something we talked about

just at the beginning of this, the Chinese decided to hold the first meetings in Chengdu, which was the center of Canadian United Church missionary efforts in the 1940s. But those meetings did not go well. They met very senior Chinese officials. And it took all day, the first day of the meetings, to get the Chinese to admit that actually, yes, the two Michaels were being held hostage. That there was a link between the detention of Meng Wanzhou and the detention of the two Michaels. And then they moved to Beijing and had meetings with senior officials there. And what was clear was that the Chinese officials had read Canadian law very closely and understood that under the extradition treaty, it was essentially that it was a political decision in the end. Whatever the court decided could be overruled by the federal government. the court decided could be overruled by the federal government. And it put the Canadians in a difficult position because they understood this as well. So, I mean, I think that that was when it became clear to everybody, if they hadn't realized this at that time, that Canada had had

to make a choice between Washington and Beijing and had made the choice with Beijing. It was at that moment when the Chinese confronted them with the reality that it was a political decision. Your updated story concludes with the striking of the Hogue Commission into foreign election interference. Boy, it took a long time to get to this commission. And I think a lot of Canadians are not paying close attention to what's coming out of it. You view the commission too as a healthy development? It's irrelevant. Oh, really?

I mean, I've watched it, but it's the wrong question. I mean, actually, it makes me quite angry because, you know, here we have had the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. Here we have had the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. We've had Canadians of Chinese and Tibetan and Uyghur heritage for decades, decades. I mean, the first public paper from CSIS that I've come across is in the late 1990s, warning about influence and intimidation here. So we've had over three decades of public knowledge about what Beijing was doing here. And the first time the members of parliament get up on their hind legs and start

screaming is when it involves allegations of election interfering. Well, pardon me, I've got another book coming out next month, which is about the state of Canadian democracy. Canadian parliamentarians and Canadian political parties have done more to denigrate the state of Canadian democracy in the last 30, 40 years. Let's say take the patrician of the Constitution. They've done more to denigrate the state of Canadian democracy in the last 40 years than the Chinese Communist Party could ever hope to do. And certainly not by busing a few students to some nomination meetings, which is disgusting enough. But honestly, there are three things they should be looking at. One, they should be looking at the intimidation of Canadians of Chinese heritage. We've seen the police stations, we've seen the control of Chinese language media here by the Chinese Communist Party. We've seen the takeover by agents of the United Front Work Department, the political warfare organization, the takeover of

all the old cooperative welfare organizations that were set up in Chinese Canadian communities before the Chinese were given full citizenship in this country after the Second World War. That ought to be top of the list, the security of Canadians in Canada. And they should expel every identifiable agent of the United Front Work Department. This is not a benign organization. Its motto is using foreigners to serve China. It's a vile organization. So that's number one, is the protection of Canadians, which ought to be the first duty of government. Number two, our universities. As I've already said, the useful technology has been pillaged from our universities since 1970, since the diplomatic relations were established.

But what is happening now is Beijing is sending military scientists masquerading as graduate students to pilfer or else engage in research here using Canadian facilities and technologies and know-how, weapons technology. We are one of the most important centers. There was a study done recently by an operation in Spain, and Canada is one of the biggest targets for this program by the People's Liberation Army. Over the last few years, scores of military scientists have come clandestinely to Canada, masquerading as just graduate students to pinch military technology. And a lot of that technology can seem quite innocent. For example, using drones to gauge the health of forests. That sounds innocent enough, except of course, the same kind of technology and algorithms used in that can be used to judge your opponents on a battlefield. So I think there are around 50 of these PLA weapons scientists have been identified in Canadian universities in the

last few years. That needs to be dealt with. It needs to be stomped on from a great height. Canada should have no history in what amounts to weapons proliferation. Good heavens, we should be up in arms about this, but we're not. And the third thing, and this is far more difficult, far more ephemeral, and that is how do we change the culture amongst our captured elite, amongst our establishments in academia, captured elite amongst our establishments in academia, in business, in officialdom, and in politics, to see that we need to totally rethink and scrub the board and rewrite the real possibilities of our relationship with Beijing, which at the moment, I would suggest, are simply transactional. We sell them wheat and meat, which is what we did when we started trading with them in 1960. Alvin Hamilton, John Diefenbaker's

agriculture minister, was one of the first great agents of influence of Beijing, not only here, but in the United States. But also, we need to clean up our internal act on other things, too. A lot of the information we get out of our officialdom about China is just not true. For example, one of the things that Beijing did after Meng Wanzhou was detained was that they essentially sanctioned the importation of Canadian pork. And a lot of pork producers started running around like chickens with their heads cut off saying, China is our largest pork market. And this was backed up by Ottawa. China is our largest pork market. Well, that is true, but it is also not true. It is true that we sell more pork by weight to China, and it's about $500 million a year, which is a lot of hamburger. But in terms of value, we sell two and a half times that amount, $1.3 billion worth of pork to Japan. Japan is by far our most important foreign market for pork. And yet it comes up

again. China is our second largest trading partner. It is not. The figures I've used, I get from the World Bank and from the OECD, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. So I don't trust the Canadian numbers on this stuff anymore. Just take our exports to China. This is supposedly our second largest trading hub. Between about 5%, 6%, 7% of our exports go to China. And it's the same things that it was in 1960. We sell three or four times that amount to the European Union. European Union is by way a more important market for us than China. Now, we buy a lot of cheap junk from China. And I've talked to importers, particularly of electronic goods, who say between 30% and 50% of it doesn't work as soon as it comes out of the

container. So we're buying about 60, well, half of that, say $30 billion worth of landfill from them every year. That doesn't make a decent trade relationship. So, you know, it's just another figure, just because it's an important one. About two years ago, The Economist magazine, its intelligence unit, which is its research arm, they did a survey of countries around the world, and they ranked them in terms of the importance of their exports to China to their national economies. importance of their exports to China to their national economies. Canada's 47th on the list, 47th. We could lose our exports to China, actually, and we could be over it by Canada Day. China is not that important to us. It is not. But we get all this stuff out of Ottawa and out of officialdom, second largest trading partner, blah, blah, blah.

It is just not true. So it sounds like you're saying we've got essentially nothing to gain from close relations with China and also less than people think to lose if we step back. Absolutely. That's it. The purpose of whole indoctrination and creation of delusion over the last 50, 60 years has been to create an illusion of the importance of the relationship. And it is not there when you look closely at it. It is a fabrication. And we have to get beyond it. to get beyond it. And I mean, I still believe that the Huawei affair is going to be the definitive moment in the end when, you know, maybe we will get another public, I'm not a great fan of public

inquiries, but they're often a way, as I'm sure you may have similar feelings, they're often a way of shelving things or diluting questions so that they just sort of waft off into the future. things or diluting questions so that they just sort of waft off into the future. But the question that's being asked of the Hogue Inquirer is not the right one. It's not the right one. On that note, I think we'll wrap it up. Thank you. Jonathan Manthorpe, the book is called Claws of the Panda.

It is out in a new, substantially expanded edition. And we can read that while we're waiting for your next book about Canadian democracy. Thanks very much. Thank you, Paul. My pleasure. Thanks for listening to The Paul Wells Show. The Paul Wells Show is produced by Antica in partnership with the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. Our producer is Kevin Sexton. Our executive producers are Laura Reguerre and Stuart Cox. Our opening theme music is by Kevin Bright.

And our closing theme music is by Andy Milne. Kevin Bright. And our closing theme music is by Andy Milne. Go to paulwells.substack.com to subscribe to my newsletter. You'll also get a premium version of this show with bonus content. We'll be back next Wednesday.