We Don't Have to Trade With China

Yet we do.

Pourquoi?:

Canada continues to provide millions in foreign aid to communist China despite a deteriorating bilateral relationship and calls from MPs to cut financial support to the regime.

According to the most recent Statistical Report on International Assistance presented to Parliament, Canada allocated a total of $7.59 million to China during the fiscal year 2021-2022, with Global Affairs Canada contributing the majority at $5.6 million, as first reported by Blacklock’s Reporter.

The Conservatives have long advocated for terminating all foreign aid to China. In an April 2020 press conference, former Conservative leader Andrew Scheer said he didn’t think Canadian taxpayers “should be sending any money to China,” which he categorized as a “Communist dictatorial government.”

“We’re talking about a Communist dictatorial government that abuses human rights, quashes freedoms, violates rights of its citizens, and has a very aggressive foreign policy all throughout the region,” Mr. Scheer said at the time, highlighting Beijing’s arbitrary detention of Canadian citizens Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor. The detention of the two Canadians was widely regarded as a retaliation for Ottawa’s arrest of Meng Wanzhou, senior executive of the Chinese telecom giant Huawei, on a U.S. extradition warrant.

While the incident strained the Canada-China relationship, subsequent contentious issues further deepened the rift. These included the global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, revelations about China operating secret police stations in Canada and around the world, as well as numerous cases of Beijing’s alleged espionage and intimidation campaigns targeting Canadian citizens and politicians.

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Three years ago, Wang Zhongwei had never dreamed of defying the Chinese regime. At just shy of 30 years old, he had his hands full running an apparel export business in Wenzhou, China, with dozens of employees under him.

When his brother repeatedly called him from California, warning him about an emerging contagion in Wuhan in Hubei Province, Mr. Wang dismissed it vehemently. He told his brother that he believed in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and that China’s leaders would never cover up such a global risk.

Mr. Wang’s eyes were opened soon enough. Lockdowns turned his city into a “prison,” and he began to understand what the Party was willing to do for the sake of power.

If the regime could lie about matters of life and death, he wondered, what would become of him if he died of COVID-19?

“You are so insignificant that even if you die, nobody would know,” Mr. Wang told The Epoch Times.

If COVID-19 marked an inflection point for people such as Mr. Wang, the past year has just added to the regime’s disfavor.

Three years of unceasing lockdowns shuttered hundreds of thousands of private enterprises, including Mr. Wang’s, and decimated a sector that employs about 80 percent of the Chinese workforce at a time when the young and educated have been struggling to find jobs.

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Chinese weaponry including assault rifles and grenade launchers is being used by Hamas to wage war in Gaza, Israeli investigations have revealed.

Stockpiles of hi-tech supplies uncovered by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) contained telescopic sights for rifles and cartridges for M16s as well as an array of communications equipment such as listening devices and tactical military radios.

Israeli investigators are now working to determine how the equipment made it into Hamas’s hands amid concerns Beijing may have been directly involved.

“This has come as a big surprise as before the war, relations were very good, but we have found massive amounts of Chinese weaponry and the question is, did it come directly from China to Hamas or not?” an Israeli intelligence source told The Telegraph.

“This is top-grade weaponry and communications technology, stuff that Hamas didn’t have before, with very sophisticated explosives which have never been found before and especially on such a large scale.”

QBZ assault rifles and QLZ87 automatic grenade launchers were among the haul uncovered by the IDF.

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The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation paid out or approved for future payment roughly $23 million in grants to Chinese government organizations during its 2022 reporting period, tax documents show.

The nonprofit listed grants to over 20 different Chinese entities, including Chinese government agencies, labeled as “foreign government” on its 2022 tax forms. The majority of the grants were for projects related to public health research and analysis, including several projects involving diseases and vaccine delivery.

Recipients included the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Chinese National Health Commission and the Ministry of Science and Technology of the People’s Republic of China, among others. These government entities cumulatively received $11.3 million from the Gates Foundation. (RELATED: Bill Gates Calls For ‘Toning Down The Rhetoric’ About Conflict With China)

Several of the entities funded by the Gates Foundation report to the China’s State Council, the “executive body of the supreme organ of state power,” according to the Chinese government. The State Council is largely composed of members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Moreover, the Gates Foundation funded Chinese universities that regularly perform defense work for the Chinese military.

 

 

Vaguely related:

The Victims of Communism memorial to be unveiled in Ottawa sometime this year has a high degree of focus on Vietnam, potentially setting the stage for a strong negative reaction from that nation, Canadian diplomats have warned.

Vietnam is Canada’s largest trading partner in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and as one of the world’s fastest growing economies it will play a key role in Canada’s Indo-Pacific Strategy, according to Global Affairs Canada.

But Vietnam is also a key focus of the Victims of Communism memorial when it comes to the list of events to be displayed, a situation that could prove to be controversial.

“While there could be good reasons as to why Vietnam would appear more frequently on this list, omitting to highlight other countries or events where there were many victims due to communism would risk an even stronger reaction from Vietnam,” Canadian diplomats warned in a 2021 analysis. The records, released under the Access to Information law, were obtained by this newspaper.

The monument is supposed to be a memorial to those who suffered under communism and includes a wall of remembrance to list names of individuals, groups and key events. But the memorial could also cause political and diplomatic headaches for Canada, federal officials have warned.

“Highlighting events and names from countries where there were an important number of victims of communism will likely attract a negative reaction from counties cited,” the diplomats noted. “This will need to be a political decision.”

The memorial is already facing scrutiny after concerns were raised that alleged Nazi collaborators who participated in the Holocaust would be honoured on the memorial. Canadian government officials have warned in internal documents obtained by this newspaper that honouring such individuals has the potential to damage Canada’s reputation and cause tensions with foreign governments.

Jewish groups have already warned the memorial is being used to whitewash the history of Nazi collaborators from eastern Europe who took an active part in the Holocaust.

(Sidebar: the House of Commons already did that.)

Canadian government officials have identified some individuals who served with the Waffen SS among the names submitted for the memorial, according to the federal documents. Other alleged Nazi collaborators associated with the memorial have also been identified by the Department of Canadian Heritage, but the exact number is censored from the records.

The Canadian government quietly postponed the planned November 2023 unveiling of the $7.5-million Memorial to the Victims of Communism, now essentially completed at a fenced-off site along Wellington Street in downtown Ottawa.