Terry Glavin: Carney recruiting Dominic Barton will please Xi Jinping

Dominic Barton, on Wednesday, May 6, 2026. Photo by Philip Gostelow /Bloomberg

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There has been no greater gift to the Liberal Party’s powerful pro-Beijing comprador caste than U.S. President Donald Trump’s exasperating bellicosity and exhausting trade-relations vandalism. Even after nearly a decade of scandals involving China’s Uyghur slave camps, its “hostage diplomacy,” mass espionage, intellectual property theft, forced corporate co-ventures and clandestine election-interference operations, by this summer the Pew Research Centre found that Canadians had come to view China more favorably than the United States.

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You could say the American president can be thanked for that.

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In the crude calculus of political advantage, by the time China’s former favorite Justin Trudeau was obliged to walk the plank and resign as prime minister in January last year, a deep reservoir of favorable ratings had become available to any Canadian politician who could be convincingly prescribed as a therapeutic remedy to the pestilence of Trumpism. No matter what your own promiscuous record in Xi Jinping’s corporate circles might be, you can get away with almost anything.

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If there is a better explanation for Prime Minister Mark Carney’s choice of Dominic Barton as the Liberals’ spirit guide in their “new world order” project to radically expand foreign direct investment in Canada and pull the country out of the American economic orbit, it is not immediately obvious.

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In a surprise move this week, Carney named Barton as the new board chair of a reconfigured Invest in Canada initiative, which will be hosting a Davos-like summit bringing together “the world’s largest investors, including top CEOs, entrepreneurs, and prominent global business leaders” in Toronto later this month. There’s no evidence that any distinction will be drawn between foreign direct investment from democracies and dirty money from torture states.

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A key element in the Invest in Canada mandate is to double Canadian exports to non-American markets over the next decade. The project itself was one of the key proposals that arose a decade ago from Barton’s time as chair of Justin Trudeau’s inaugural Advisory Council on Economic Growth, an operation within Bill Morneau’s finance ministry run by McKinsey and Company, the multinational management consultancy Barton was serving at the time as global managing partner.

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Another proposal from Barton’s council that was adopted by the Trudeau government: the catastrophic idea of doubling immigration to 500,000 people annually by 2025. It isn’t entirely clear that the Carney government has abandoned the “demographic deficit” thinking of its predecessors.

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Barton came to the inner chambers of the Trudeau government after bringing McKinsey’s heft to Trudeau’s bid for the Liberal Party leadership in 2012. Trudeau’s manifesto proposed that deepening trade relationships with China would “build middle-class wealth in Canada.” As for Beijing’s convention-defying trade practices: “China, for one, sets its own rules and will continue to do so because it can. China has a game plan. There is nothing inherently sinister about that.”