Session 1: China
and Canada
Opening remarks by
Session Moderator Brian Lee Crowley
Ladies and
Gentlemen,
A hundred
years ago, Sir Wilfrid Laurier was declaiming that Canada is free
and freedom is our nationality.
He saw us
in competition with the United States,
and thought that the 20th century would belong to Canada.
What he did not perhaps fully appreciate was the extent to which Canada’s
freedom, the very essence of what he thought Canada was, was in fact the gift
of one country— Great Britain— to a community of nations around the world AND
what he clearly did not foresee was the extent to which that moral leadership
in the community of free peoples would pass from the old country to the United
States. And yet all that has come to pass. We in both Canada and the US are
free in any way that matters, not because of international borders, or national
sovereignty or an ability to make our own foreign policy independently of this
country or that, but because we are inheritors of a moral tradition and that
tradition is possible because more powerful nations than our own have taken it
as their vocation to ensure that that freedom shall not pass from the earth.
How is
that relevant to a panel about China
and Canada?
Because there is a great irony here. China is a
great country that has accomplished much, but it does not stand in our
tradition of freedom. We are not bound to China by ties of affection and by
the sustenance we draw from shared history and philosophy. It is increasingly a
wealthy country, but one that uses its wealth unambiguously to promote an
international stance and agenda that are if not inimical to our own, certainly
at loggerheads with it.
Yet we
shrink from saying to China
and the Chinese what is in our minds. We hesitate to give voice to the great
moral tradition we have inherited when we see China propping up some of the
nastiest regimes on the planet and doing everything in its power to prevent the
international community from acting to protect and defend the weakest and most
vulnerable on the planet. We fear to offend and so, by and large, keep silent,
preferring to trade with the Chinese and keep our principles to ourselves. I
hasten to note that the Government of Canada would probably object to this
description, protesting that they raise these issues in private with Chinese
authorities, and I am sure that they do so, in our Boy Scout-ish Canadian way. Does that matter? Of course I and many of
my friends in the think tank community used to have earnest behind-closed-doors
conversations with our friendly neighbourhood bank
presidents about the dangers of the asset-backed commercial paper asset bubble
— I suspect with about the same effect as the Government of Canada’s
interventions with Chinese authorities.
How unlike
our relationship with the United States, where a former US Secretary of State
once referred to us in an essay on Canada-US relations as “the stern daughter
of the voice of God” for the way in which we made free with every
sanctimonious opinion we have (and we have many) about their manifest failings,
weaknesses, inadequacies and mistakes. We send them over 80 percent of all our
exports, yet we think nothing of ridiculing their president, dismissing their
political establishment and condescending toward their popular culture.
I am not
saying that we should kow-tow to the US; only that
the way we conduct these two relationships speaks volumes about what we really
think about these two great nations. We know that China is a dangerous nation that
will not shrink from using its power to harm its enemies, and it is a nation
that recognises no moral constraints on its power –
only practical and utilitarian ones. America we know, on the other hand,
is a friend and we come to our relationship from such a deep awareness of
shared values that we can afford to speak our minds knowing that America’s
consciousness of its narrow interests is always constrained by the moral
mission that history has laid pre-eminently on their shoulders: to be the chief
keepers of the flame of freedom in our time.
Canada’s dilemma in our relations with China is that
we are both a commercial people and a people conscious of the moral quality of
relations between nations. We are drawn to the commercial opportunities China represents, but we cannot but be aware of
the very dark side of China,
both in its relations with its own people and in its behaviour
in the wider world. This panel will, I expect, give us some useful sustenance
with which to feed our commercial and our moral imaginations as we
ponder how to manage our relationship with the dragon in the years to come.