Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Thursday, April 19, 2012

Canada’s entanglement with China has a long history

With Prime Minister Stephen Harper falling all over himself to collaborate with the ravenously oil-hungry Chinese dictatorship to turn Canada into a global “energy superpower,” a long-overdue reckoning with Ottawa’s Beijing-friendly foreign policy establishment may soon be at hand. A cynic might say it’s all about optics. Cynics say a lot of things.

Quite apart from whether it’s utter folly to entwine Canada’s prosperity with the survival strategies of an ugly police state in the first place — and to have Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver jettison a whole slew of federal environmental-review laws to that purpose, as he announced this week, just for openers — Harper’s cabinet and his caucus are faced with a more immediate question, and a nasty problem.

Here’s the question: By hitching the horses of Chinese capital and Chinese markets to the harnesses of Harper’s plans for the supercharged development of Canada’s oil, gas and coal reserves, will it be even remotely possible for Canada to effectively assert the global democratic principles for which this country claims to stand?

The prime minister claims he can pull it off. Good luck to him. But here’s his nasty problem.

For decades, Ottawa’s foreign policy elite has been wholly unencumbered by scruple in its intimacies with Beijing. All you have to do is look at who’s sitting on the boards of the Canada-China Business Council, the Asia-Pacific Foundation of Canada, the Canadian investment-law firms that do business in Beijing, or the Chinese investment conglomerates that do business in Canada.

There ought to be a law, you might say. There’s lots of law. There’s the 2004 Conflict of Interest Code for Members of the House of Commons, the 2006 Conflict of Interest and Post-Employment Code for Public Office Holders, and the 2007 Conflict of Interest Act, for starters. Here’s the wording from the 2006 code: “Public office holders shall not act, after they leave public office, in such a manner as to take improper advantage of their previous public office.”

None of this has made a dent in the custom of Canadian ministers and mandarins alike striking off into a lucrative Beijing-Ottawa circuit of revolving doors, post-employment sinecures, appreciative board appointments and second-career retirement paths. It’s simply how things are done, old boy.

Not to be too cynical, but let’s just say you’re a principled foreign-affairs adviser with a reputation for keeping your minister up to speed on Chinese corporate espionage and you’re known to bang on about Beijing’s contempt for workers’ rights and its savage oppression of Tibetans and Uyghurs. No jackpot for you.

There’s a chafing around the cabinet table to do something about this. It’s not just about former ministers, and it’s not just about the optics. “The fact is that senior Department of Foreign Affairs people are head over heels in love with China. It’s ingrained, and it’s been that way for decades. We’re trying to get out from under that,” a senior Conservative told me the other day. Don’t be surprised if the Office of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner ends up involved.

It’s gotten so that the Prime Minister’s Office can barely trust the advice on offer from the China hands at the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. As likely as not, they’re biding their time in the full expectation of more profitable careers with China’s corporate lobby.

Try to imagine yourself working in the PMO. There were hundreds of submissions to the Competition Policy Review Panel sparked by Beijing’s close-call acquisition of the Canadian mining and smelter giants Noranda and Falconbridge. For some reason, the 2009 Investment Canada Act regulations ended up deliberately omitting a proposed definition of “national security” in foreign takeover reviews. Also explicitly rejected were recommendations to draw clear regulatory distinctions between Beijing’s state-owned corporate acquisitions arms and run-of-the mill foreign investors.

You want to know how and why that happened, exactly. Who do you ask at DFAIT?

You could always call outside. David Emerson is a smart guy, he knows the Chinese business lobby like the back of his hand, and in the lead-up to the 2009 regulations he was trade minister. What’s he doing now? He’s serving on the international advisory board of the $300-billion China Investment Corporation, that’s what. The CIC just opened up its first overseas office, in Toronto. How handy. Not even a long-distance call.

Then how about Stockwell Day? He was a Minister for “Asia Pacific Gateway,” Treasury Board president and minister for international trade. Now he’s on the board of the law firm McMillan LLP and they do a roaring business in China. He’s also a “distinguished fellow” with the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada.

Well then, there’s always Peter Harder. He was deputy minister at DFAIT for years, and nobody knew more about China than him. Oh look. He’s now president of the Canada China Business Council.

On and on it goes, but don’t hold your breath for Bob Rae to get up in the House of Commons to get cheeky about any of this. He may be a fine fellow, but try to imagine the response from the government benches. Mr. Speaker, isn’t it true that the Honourable Member’s dear friend and Jean Chrétien’s son-in-law André Desmarais is the president of that Liberal money-trough Power Corporation? And don’t they do billions of dollars of business in China? And didn’t Chrétien jet off to Beijing to lobby for Power Corp. within a few weeks of saying goodbye to this House?

It’s also worth remembering that when Canada’s spy chief Richard Fadden talked out loud about Beijing’s financing of political activism in Canada it was the New Democratic Party that threw him under the bus. “Repeating discredited statements, innuendo and accusations heightens paranoia and is destructive to an open and democratic society,” the NDP’s Olivia Chow said at the time, and fair enough.

But if you want an open and democratic society you also need politicians and civil servants who answer to one master and stay that way, long after they’re no longer on the public payroll.

It’s not just about the optics.

Original Article
Source: ottawa citizen
Author: Terry Glavin

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