We Don't Have to Trade With China

The demand for cheap, shoddily-made goods has created a juggernaut:

The watchdog set up by the federal government to probe corporate wrongdoing abroad is slow, ineffective and has created a process bogged down in bureaucracy, say two of the groups whose complaints sparked the office’s first active cases.

(Sidebar: please see here .)

The complaints, all filed in April, 2022, alleged that 12 companies in the clothing industry in Canada sold products made in whole or in part with forced labour in China, and that two mining companies also in China had operations linked with forced labour. A coalition of 28 advocacy groups filed the complaints to the Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise – known as the CORE – an office tasked with looking into human-rights abuse allegations linked to Canadian companies operating outside its borders.

Mehmet Tohti, executive director of the Ottawa-based Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project, who is one of the lead complainants in these cases, says the process has been hampered by “unnecessary” confidentiality rules, along with a failure so far to conduct an investigation into the issues raised.

“I am full of anger and frustration with the CORE, to be honest. As you can see, it is almost a year. And I didn’t hear anything from CORE in terms of a tangible result – it is a lot of bureaucratic processes,” he said in an interview.

 

If the government was serious, it would stop trade with China.

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Senator Victor Oh and former Ontario cabinet minister Michael Chan were signatories among those who signed a 2020 letter from an Ontario-based Chinese-Canadian business association to a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official saying the association has been promoting China’s image in fighting COVID-19 and pledges continuing support of the “great motherland.”

The correspondence was in response to a letter issued by the CCP official to Jiang Rui, president of Richmond Hill-based Jiangsu Commerce Council of Canada (JCCC), as reported in April 2020 by the Chinese-language media ccmedia.news, and first reported in English by the Found in Translation newsletter on Substack. The ccmedia.news website includes copies of the two letters.

The March 27, 2020, letter by the CCP official, Lou Qinjian, former secretary of the Jiangsu provincial committee, bears the letterhead of the Jiangsu Provincial Committee of the CCP. It is addressed directly to Jiang as well as all overseas Chinese from Jiangsu in Canada. It is co-signed by another CCP official, Wu Zhenglong, then-governor of Jiangsu. Jiangsu is a province on China’s east coast, north of Shanghai.

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China's military simulated precision strikes against Taiwan in a second day of drills around the island on Sunday, with the island's defence ministry reporting multiple air force sorties and that it was monitoring China's missile forces.