Terry Glavin: Trump’s rule-breaking belligerence lowers the bar everywhere

Article content

Carney made specific references to Beijing’s interference operations in this country, China’s growing presence in the Arctic, Xi Jinping’s bankrolling of Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine and China’s geopolitical belligerence throughout Asia, especially its military encirclement of Taiwan. No worries now, apparently.

Article content

By January, the proportion of Canadians who told Angus Reid’s pollsters that China should be treated as an enemy or a threat had been reduced from 62 per cent to 23 per cent, and the proportion of Canadians who once wanted Canada to engage China cautiously had doubled from 26 to 51 per cent. A few weeks later a Politico poll showed that 57 per cent of Canadians said they’d prefer to depend on China than the United States, and 60 per cent of respondents said Donald Trump was the reason.

Article content

Among other things, this has allowed the Carney government to get away with capitulating to Beijing in allowing a big chunk of China’s catastrophic overproduction of electric vehicles to be dumped into the Canadian automotive market. It was less than two years ago that Canada joined Europe and the United States in imposing tariff barriers of up to 100 per cent on Chinese electric vehicles to wall off what former deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland called “China’s intentional, state-directed policy of overcapacity and oversupply.”

Article content

Article content

Since 2009, China has poured more than $230 billion into electrical-vehicle subsidies in a frenzy that has saturated its domestic market and forced its EV industry to offload more and more of its production overseas in the hope of creating dependencies in western markets. Of 120 Chinese EV manufacturers, only a fraction are financially viable on their own. Thirty firms have gone bankrupt in recent years.

Article content

The deal Carney struck in Beijing in January abolishes the previous tariffs and allows China to export 49,000 electric vehicles into Canada annually, growing to 70,000 within five years. Auto industry leaders say the deal poses a mortal threat to an industry already disrupted by Trump’s tariffs, and security experts consistently warn that Chinese EVs pose software threats ranging from spying and illicit data collection to remote manipulations from China.

Article content

The Chinese EV industry has also been implicated in forced labour practices in China, and even Chinese plants in Hungary and Brazil have been found to engage in slave labour practices.

Article content

While Europe has generally held the line against China’s vast economic reach, Prime Minister Carney has a soulmate in Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who last week signed his own “strategic partnership” deals in Beijing.

Article content

Article content

Sanchez has consistently ventriloquized Carney’s comments about the American disruption of the rules-based trading order. With the resounding April 12 electoral defeat of the far-right Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán — the most actively disruptive saboteur within the European Union for both the Trump administration and Russia’s Putin — the ostensibly “left-wing” Sanchez is now China’s best friend in the EU.

Article content

Xi Jinping has praised Sanchez as being “on the right side of history” and has nominated Sanchez as his EU interlocutor. Beijing has invested massively in Spain in recent years, and Sanchez has welcomed Chinese EV manufacturers to set up shop as an end-run around EU tariffs. He’s also broken with Germany, France and the United Kingdom on firewalls against Chinese investment in emerging technologies.

Article content

Meanwhile, as the Trump White House persists in alienating Latin America with a national security strategy that revives the Americans’ hemisphere-subjugating 1823 Monroe Doctrine, a legacy of resentment to Yanqui bullying has been mainstreamed, giving force and effect to China’s Latin American expansion. China has entirely eclipsed American economic influence throughout the South American continent by a combination of building and often outright owning a great portion of the region’s port, rail and road infrastructure.