Mark Carney heads to China today, marking the first visit there by a Canadian Prime Minister in nearly a decade.
However, experts are urging caution as Carney seeks to rebuild fractured relations with the world’s second largest economy.
Breakfast Television spoke to Michael Kovrig, a former Canadian diplomat who was detained by China for more than 1,000 days.
Kovrig says he is supportive of Ottawa’s efforts to rebuild relations with China, but says it comes with a lot of caveats.
“The whole crux of this visit is how can he (Carney) keep Canadians safe while increasing trade with China given that it is such a great security threat,” Kovrig said.
Is it possible for Canada to carve out a bigger role for Beijing in our economy uh while preserving our our national security?
It’s possible, but it’s risky and it requires a whole of government, and a whole of society response. It requires much greater levels of expertise and education on China. And it requires Canadians as a whole just as Canadians are currently having to adjust to an increasingly fraud and dangerous geopolitical environment with a resurgent and aggressive Russia, and with an increasingly difficult to deal with United States and also with challenges from China. Canadians need to do more to educate themselves to understand those challenges and figure out how to strengthen Canadian society to the ties that bind us together as a nation to defend ourselves from those challenges.
Step one is understanding the challenges. Step two is taking real concrete measures to protect them. So one of the key measures of success from Prime Minister Carney’s trip is not just what gets said in the meetings or announced at the press conferences. It’s looking at what happens afterwards and how does Canada balance increased trade and investment with stepped up protections. Canadians should not be looking for a reset. We shouldn’t look for that or expect it or want that. This is a recalibration in relations and success here should be modest, concrete and reversible, not focused on atmospherics.
What you would say to the premiers and to Canadians who are impacted by agricultural industries who may be looking to this trip for some sort of resolution?
What you need to do is acknowledge that look, some people are being hurt by China’s current tariffs, right? Canola farmers, other farmers, seafood producers are suffering because that’s what China does. Anytime it wants to change Canadian policy or it’s angry with China, it looks for the vulnerable points and it presses on them. So the key over the long term is to find ways to reduce those vulnerabilities. Diversify trade. Don’t sell 90 per cent of any one crop or sector to China. Diversify so that if China cuts you off again, you can manage it and it’s not going to hurt so much. And then on the short term, I think we need to spread the pain around the Canadian economy. So, we can’t drop tariffs on electric vehicles outright because that would risk hollowing out the automotive sector and all the related industrial supply chains that keep Canada an advanced industrial economy. It would be devastating for workers and for the economy of Ontario and other parts. At the same time, prairie farmers shouldn’t have to pay that price by themselves.
And so, what we need to do is spread the pain around the economy so that we all help each other. I mean, the reality is we’re in a world where great powers are trying to subvert and divide Canadians against each other. The only way we’re going to survive is for every province and premier together with the federal government to band together to keep the nation strong and defend its interests, and Prime Minister Carney has opportunities to do that in China. First, simply by restoring direct leader level communication with China’s highly centralized system, having reliable channels at the top, being able to speak face to face with General Secretary Xi Jinping can reduce the risk of sudden crisis and miscalculation. But that’s a baseline achievement, not a breakthrough.
How do you feel on a personal level after what you endured, and how do you reconcile especially given that there are still Canadians detained in China?
I have mixed feelings about that kind of interaction, but at the end of the day, the challenge is China is so big and systemic that Canada has to be able to talk to China. It’s a question of what our leaders try to do through those talks and whether they don’t suffer from historical amnesia. They don’t recognize that look, China hasn’t changed. What changed is that Xi Jinping decided because China’s economy is suffering and struggling with rivalry with the United States that it’s in China’s interest to start talking to Canada again. The Canadian government has been trying to talk to China all along. And if the two countries had just maintained normal diplomatic relations, we would never have had China taking hostages or taking our canola sector hostage back in 2018.
We need to have those high level contacts to manage these problems, but it depends on what we do with them. So success has to focus on narrow tangible outcomes like lifting punitive tariffs and making progress on consular cases.
One of the key reasons why I support Prime Minister Carney going to China and talking to Chinese leaders is that it’s only through dialogue like that that there’s a possibility to advocate for better treatment for all the other nearly a hundred probably Canadian prisoners in China and to advocate for better conditions for them and for their release, and to advocate for the release or clemency for political prisoners like Jimmy Lai, the Hong Kong publisher who this week is going through mitigation hearings.
Prime Minister Carney needs to fight both for Canadian economic interests, defend Canadian national security and push for better human rights respects in China. He needs to do all of those things and that’s a challenge for him, but I think that’s why he needs to be going there and talking to the Chinese.
