China as Canada's No. 1 trade partner? Not likely

By Richard Gwyn
Toronto Star
18-Oct-2005

One of the first things China will do once it becomes a major customer for Canada's oil — as apparently is Prime Minister Paul Martin's policy — is to tell us to get lost when we next suggest that Beijing join the Kyoto Protocol to combat global warming.

The same answer will come winging across the Pacific should we complain about China's treatment of its democracy activists.

On these issues and many more like them, we will, if not actually get lost, then go silent as soon as China starts importing the rumoured 400,000 barrels a day of Alberta tar sands oil.

There's no argument whatever that Martin is absolutely right to go toe-to-toe with President George Bush and his administration over American failure to abide by the NAFTA panel ruling against it on the softwood lumber issue. The panel decision was unanimous. Three other panels have ruled the same way on the same issue.

Even The Wall Street Journal, usually a cheerleader for Bush, believes Washington should pay back the $5 billion it has collected in special charges on our lumber.

In economic terms, the lumber issue isn't that big a deal. Despite the discriminatory treatment, we're still selling a lot of the stuff across the border. But ignoring international law and thereby putting the NAFTA trade pact at risk is a very big deal indeed.

The best measure of how big a deal this is is that Americans, themselves, are getting nervous about their own behaviour.

On a trip to London last week, the State Department's legal counsel John Bellinger told reporters, "We are very interested in countering this perception that the U.S. doesn't have regard for international law." Earlier, Bellinger had said the same thing to the judges of the International Court of Justice at the Hague.

Bellinger's problem — and that of the U.S. in terms of its image around the world — is that "perception" is reality.

Thus, in Sunday's New York Times, columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote that, "The Bush administration's campaign to bully a poor country (by cutting off some aid) over the (International Criminal) court is cultivating more ill will toward the U.S. than extremists ever could have."

Bellinger himself had a hard time in London coming up with any significant current examples of the U.S. implementing the spirit and letter of international agreements. But, and this is a big but, "U.S. Bad" doesn't mean "China Good."

Of course, we should sell our logs and rocks to China, or to anybody. With the tar sands, though, there is the embarrassing fact that digging out the oil from it does more to heat the globe than any other oil project, by far.

But the notion of China as an alternative trade partner to the U.S. is pure fantasy. In fact, a double fantasy.

As trade partners go, China would make the U.S. look like a patsy.

Brazil, which entered into a much-touted, special trade agreement with China, is now going through an agonizing rethink because so few of the agreed return benefits (investments, infrastructure projects) have come through.

Also, for whatever we would get, we'd find ourselves paying a political surcharge. The surcharge of silence about China's repressive, authoritarian regime.

There'd be more than silence in the equation. The Chinese industrial and commercial system remains comprehensively corrupt. Bribes paid over there — as they have to be to get almost anything done — will come back here, in one way or another.

In the immortal words of the otherwise forgotten Social Credit leader Robert Thompson, "The Americans remain our best friends, whether we like it or not."

It would help, though, if they tried a bit harder to be a bit friendlier.