[A slightly longer version of my column appearing in today's Sun Media papers]
Who will speak truth to power when it comes to China?
Once, not so long ago, Stephen Harper and Michael Ignatieff did but no longer. For Harper, “the almighty dollar” he once vowed wouldn’t sway him is now shaping his diplomatic approach to China.
Ignatieff, in China this week, appears also to have changed his tone and now counsels against “megaphone diplomacy” when it comes to criticizing China on its appalling human rights record.
In 2006, both the newly minted prime minister and the newly minted Liberal MP were advocating an approach to China that differed from former prime minister Jean Chretien.
On his way to the 2006 APEC summit in Vietnam, Harper learned that a planned meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao had been abruptly cancelled, a move Harper’s aides chalked up to Harper’s determination to confront the Chinese leader on his country’s human rights record.
“I think Canadians want us to promote our trade relations worldwide, and we do that, but I don't think Canadians want us to sell out important Canadian values — our belief in democracy, freedom, human rights,” Harper said at the time. “They don't want us to sell that out to the almighty dollar.'
Earlier that year, in August, Ignatieff had told a reporter with the Vancouver independent weekly, The Georgia Straight, that were he to ever become prime minister, he would ask the Chinese leadership: “Do you really want to build your prosperity on slavery?”
Those are some tough words that have now been replaced by the polite blandishments of diplomatic pablum.
“We must be ready to speak plainly with one another about human rights, always understanding that neither of our countries has a flawless past or present, and always conscious of the vast differences in our respective histories, societies, and political cultures,” Ignatieff said this week in a speech at a university in Beijing. “Canada can contribute more to the development of human rights in China and to strengthening the rule of law through this array of people-to-people interactions, than by megaphone diplomacy.”
Harper, when I interviewed him last month ahead of President Hu’s state visit to Canada, had this to say: “There’s been a bit of an adjustment. This government took somewhat of a broader view of our relationship with China that a range of issues had to be considered, including some of the concerns that Canada has about aspects of China’s policies. We’ve made that transition and I think this will be a very productive relationship with the country going forward.”
Those were sweet words to lobby groups like the Canada China Business Council and the Canadian Council of Chief Executives which worried that without a change in tone, Canada would miss out cashing in on the world’s fastest growing economy. But they were bitter words to the likes of Amnesty International and other campaigners for better treatment of China’s ethnic minorities, the Falun Gong and political prisoners.
And yet, the statistics show no cause-and-effect relationship between investment and standing up against China on human rights.
In 2007, before Harper’s “bit of an adjustment”, two-way trade between the two countries was up 13 per cent. In 2008, two-way trade was up 11 per cent. In the first six months of 2009, two-way trade grew by 3 per cent — despite a recession.
Would recent deals with China to get that country to accept Canadian beef exports and for this country to be able to exploit China’s tourism market have happened without that adjustment? The government might say no. But then we have oil in Alberta and lumber in B.C., the raw materials that China must have to grow. Perhaps we should do more to leverage the quid we have for the Chinese quo.
Ignatieff, in his speech this week in Beijing, was quite right that Canada, too, has had its own issues with human rights. The treatment of aboriginal children at residential schools, for example, will always be a blemish on our human rights record.
But our prime minister – in the one act that, so far at least, has earned Harper an enduring place in the histories of Canada that will be written over the next century – formally apologized for that.
When President Hu – or any other Chinese leader – does the same and publicly acknowledges (let alone apologizes for) its own government’s sins against its citizens, then Canada should be ready to treat that country with the deference and respect it seems to so crave.