We Don't Have to Trade With China

How has it benefitted us?:

J. Michael Cole, a senior fellow at the Macdonald Laurier Institute, who is based in Taipei, said the government’s cautious tone creates a false moral equivalence.

“One wishes that Ottawa would have the clearness of mind to acknowledge that only one side threatens war, and only one side engages in highly dangerous brinkmanship, and that it is that regime, not both of them, which needs to be singled out and called upon to de-escalate,” he said.

Canada is not unable to condemn China; it is unwilling.

Big difference.

**

One comment was similar to a threat Tohti had faced. A comment posted on her Instagram: “your mom is dead.”

She said she immediately called her mother, checking in during the middle of her mom’s workday to see whether she was alright. She was fine, although Lhamo said she was a bit confused about why her daughter was asking.

“Those were the moments where… I realized how much of a threat the Chinese government can still be,” Lhamo said.

“That’s just a peek into the life that I had to live because of the Chinese state influence, despite being born in India and raised in Toronto.”

**

Andrea Chun, a host with Toronto-based Chinese-language radio station A-1, confirmed that she interviewed Bill Yee on March 30 in Cantonese about Canada-China relations and Uyghurs in Xinjiang.

In the interview, Yee denied that genocide was being committed against Uyghurs by the Chinese government.

**

Two years later, in June 2020, Bo Fan, 41, arrived at the Peace Arch Hospital in Surrey, British Columbia, in the hands of her brother, Justin Peng Fan. She was badly beaten; she had numerous serious injuries and even her femur was broken. The femur is the thickest bone in the human body. The only witness to anything was her brother. According to him, he did not see or know who had beaten his sister. She called him from the side of the road outside a gated clubhouse, rather than call the police or an ambulance, to be taken to the hospital. She told him she had been left there on the side of the road by whoever had beaten her so badly.

Bo Fan died of her injuries on June 17, 2020. She was a Chinese citizen. Any murder in Surrey, a suburb of Vancouver stands out. The homicide rate in nearby Vancouver ticked up during 2020 as it did across Canada and the United States, but it is still low by comparison to major U.S. cities. There were just 14 murders in Vancouver, a city of 2.6 million, in all of 2020. Vancouver may be Canada’s most multicultural city, with 50% of its population Asian and an Indo/Middle Eastern population of over 500,000. It’s home to the world’s largest post-Shah Iranian diaspora population. It is not violent, and a murder in its suburbs is unusual. 

Bo Fan’s brutal murder sparked a flurry of media reports as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) took charge of the investigation and offered updates. The Integrated Homicide Investigative Team (IHIT) appealed for leads from the public and suggested Fan’s murder had something to do with her job. Global News, CTV News, the CBC, and the South China Morning Post all published stories about Fan’s murder within days. Some of these outlets noted and reported on Fan’s connection to a group called Create Abundance. The group, founded in 2014 in China, is also known as Golden Touch, and rebranded itself in 2018 as The Global Spiritualists Association (TGSA). 

They’re all different names for the same thing, which at first blush appears to be a combination self-help cult and multi-level marketing outfit based in China and operating internationally. In Surrey, its acolytes live in a community with a posh gated clubhouse with numerous high-end cars such as Bentleys and Maseratis parked outside the luxurious homes. Fan was evidently murdered there; Peace Arch Hospital, to which her brother drove her as she struggled for life, is just a few minutes drive away, as is the Canada-U.S. border.

Within a couple of weeks of Fan’s death, the media interest just…stopped. Canadian media and the South China Morning Post stopped reporting about it. But that’s hardly the end of the story.

**

Natural Resources Canada points out that while Canada doesn’t produce any rare earth elements (with a few exploratory projects in early-stages), we have some of the largest reserves in the world:

While not a current producer of REEs, Canada is host to a number of advanced exploration projects and some of the largest reserves and resources (measured and indicated) of these metals, estimated at almost 15 million tonnes of rare earth oxides.

REEs are categorized as being either “light” or “heavy”:

• Light REEs (lanthanum, cerium, praseodymium, neodymium, promethium, samarium, europium, gadolinium and scandium) are produced in global abundance and are in surplus supply
• Heavy REEs (terbium, dysprosium, holmium, erbium, thulium, ytterbium, lutetium and yttrium) are produced mainly in China and are in limited supply. Global efforts to bring new resources to the marketplace continue.

Many of Canada’s most advanced REEs exploration projects contain high concentrations of the globally valued heavy REEs used in high-technology and clean-energy applications.

And we are expected visit a craphole like China with its polluted air, communism and arrogance?