TORONTO — Canada’s foreign minister said Wednesday that China is an increasingly disruptive global power and has warned companies against deepening ties, saying there are “geopolitical risks”.
Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly made the remarks at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs before her government presents an Indo-Pacific strategy next month.
“The China of 1970 is not the China of today. China is an increasingly disruptive global power,” Joly said. “It seeks to shape the global environment into one more permissive for interests and values that increasingly diverge from our own.”
Joly said Canada has serious concerns that Beijing is undermining global security, trade and peace. Part of this includes “credible accounts of human rights abuses and crimes against humanity” in the Xinjiang region against the Muslim minority known as the Uyghur.
“What I would like to say to Canadians doing business in China and with China: you have to be lucid. The decisions you make as entrepreneurs are yours. As Canada’s top diplomat, my job is to tell you that there are geopolitical risks involved in doing business with the country,” Joly said.
Joly said Canada will deepen its economic ties with Taiwan and continue to uphold free speech and press freedom in Hong Kong. She said Canada will challenge China when it has to and cooperate when it has to.
The remarks represent a pivot for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals, who have generally tried to avoid stoking tensions with Beijing.
China had previously embraced Trudeau in part because of his father, former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, who in 1970 became one of the first Western leaders to establish diplomatic relations with communist China.
China has taken an increasingly hard line in its foreign relations, and ties with Canada crumbled after China, the United States and Canada completed what was effectively a high-stakes prisoner swap. raised last year involving a senior executive at Chinese tech giant Huawei who was charged with fraud. by the United States
China jailed two Canadians shortly after Canada arrested Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of Huawei Technologies and daughter of the company’s founder, on a US extradition request. They were returned to Canada in September, the same day Meng returned to China after reaching an agreement with US authorities in her case.
Many countries called China’s action a “hostage policy,” while China described the charges against Huawei and Meng as a politically motivated attempt to curb China’s economic and technological development.
Canada has banned mobile carriers from installing Huawei equipment in its high-speed 5G networks, joining allies in avoiding the company which has close ties to the ruling Communist Party and its military wing. People’s Liberation Army.
Canada also ordered three Chinese companies to sell lithium mining assets to Canada after imposing limits on foreign participation in the supply of “critical minerals” used in batteries and high-tech products.
Canada’s former ambassador to China, Guy Saint-Jacques, called the new strategy a major shift and said Beijing would not be happy. He said Washington would be.
“China will say it’s a confirmation that Canada is the lapdog of the Americans, but my answer would be that you left us no choice,” Saint-Jacques said.
Saint-Jacques said it took the Trudeau government a while to see China as it is now.
“Justin Trudeau lived with his father’s legacy,” he said. “But having opened diplomatic relations with China, we have invested in the relationship in good faith. We thought China would open up with freedom of speech and basic human rights, but since Xi Jinping came to power 10 years ago, China has become a very authoritarian regime.
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