Monday, February 26, 2024

Canada and other U.S. allies tensely envision Trump 2.0: Charles Burton in the Toronto Star

Canada and other U.S. allies tensely envision Trump 2.0: Charles Burton in the Toronto Star

https://macdonaldlaurier.ca/canada-and-other-u-s-allies-tensely-envision-trump-2-0-charles-burton-in-the-globe-and-mail/

If he regains the presidency, Trump’s plan to make America great again includes 10 per cent tariffs on all imports. Canada — America’s third-largest supplier — wouldn’t be getting a bye.

Replacing reciprocal free trade with a protectionist wall would inflict pain in all directions, including for American consumers, who end up paying more for many goods. For Canada’s export-driven economy, the fallout could mean unemployment for thousands of households, devalued stock markets (including the nest eggs of millions of retirees), and internal regional infighting that makes the 2022 truckers’ convoy look like a high school debate.

Concerns about Trump go beyond fiscal. With the world’s second-largest land mass but a small tax base (just over one-tenth the population of the U.S.) Canada cannot realistically defend its massive territory without the collaborative assurance of a united NATO. Losing America’s resources and leadership would be devastating to the alliance’s ability to defend its member nations.
 

 

Friday, January 19, 2024

Burton: Taiwan’s election results don’t ease the sense of looming tragedy

Taiwan’s election results don’t ease the sense of looming tragedy

 

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-taiwans-election-results-dont-ease-the-sense-of-looming-tragedy/

China’s hostility was deepened by the fact that democratic elections were held at all. On China’s heavily censored social media, searches for “Taiwan election” yield a notice reading “According to relevant laws, regulations and policies, the content of this topic is not displayed.”

But what makes Beijing even more concerned is that Taiwan’s new President Lai Ching-te, earlier in his political career, was an unabashed advocate for Taiwan making a unilateral declaration of independence. Mr. Lai toned this down in his recent campaign speeches, professing to continue his predecessor’s less confrontational line with Beijing. But a very plausible danger from this week’s election result stems from China’s conviction that, under Mr. Lai, there will be no “return of Taiwan to the embrace of the motherland” through peaceful negotiation. And China will not stand idly by if it perceives Mr. Lai as manoeuvering internationally to bring about de jure affirmation of the reality that Taiwan is de facto an independent state that is being denied sovereign national rights under international law.


Monday, January 08, 2024

Burton and Seaboyer: China's meddling in Taiwan is an alarming warning for Canada

China's meddling in Taiwan is an alarming warning for Canada  
 


Beijing openly wants the DPP displaced and the KMT returned to power. Last month a senior Chinese Communist Party official chaired a meeting of Chinese state and party agencies to support this end. The upshot so far: lifelike, computer-fabricated videos depicting candidates saying things they never said, or carefully edited clips of politicians saying things in unguarded moments they wish they hadn’t said.

China has also created a network of “Trojan horse” fake social media groups, purporting to support one party or another, that spew fake scandals and conspiracy theories to discredit the DPP. There is also evidence of individual citizens being tracked. For instance, if someone buys an ebook on Taiwanese politics, AI detects not only when the purchase was made but when the person is actually reading it. They are then micro-targeted with AI-generated messaging that undermines what they have just read.

Canada's turn is coming, and we must likewise tolerate no foreign interference in electing governments that guide the country on the world stage. Canada’s election outcomes should be determined by Canadians alone.

 

Friday, January 05, 2024

Institut pro politiku a společnost: Interview with Charles Burton, Canadian expert on China policy

 

Charles Burton on Bill C-34: Testimony to the Commons Standing Committee on Industry and Technology

 

CDN response to Chinese interference? Pathetic and ineffective. / Charles Burton, MLI in Parliament

 

The China Problem - CNAPS panel discussion featuring Charles Burton, Miles Yu at Hudson Institute

 

Burton: Canada must face the facts: China is now closed for business

 

Canada must face the facts: China is now closed for business
 
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-canada-must-face-the-facts-china-is-now-closed-for-business/
 
To mute domestic disgruntlement over the economy, Mr. Xi might play the nationalism card through military engagement in the South China Sea and Taiwan as soon as 2027. As well, the regime has been reaffirming its Leninist core through renewed predominance of state-controlled enterprise over successful capitalists, to the extent that large Chinese companies have developed PR plans to respond to sudden “disappearances” of their chief executives.

Foreign businesspeople embroiled in arbitrary commercial disputes are increasingly denied exit from China until they comply with demands from Chinese state counterparts. And there are ever more controls and restrictions on security of business data, including bans on foreign businesses in China sending information to servers outside the country.

Then there are growing concerns about China’s political stability, as evidenced by the purge in 2023 of the Foreign Minister, the Minister of Defence and a range of senior military figures. This can’t be good.

Burton: China likely to escape scot-free in persecution of two Canadians

 China likely to escape scot-free in persecution of two Canadians

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/china-likely-to-escape-scot-free-in-persecution-of-two-canadians/article_644384da-7778-5830-b3a6-56483b4a07f8.html

While few specifics are known about Spavor’s claims, media reports depict a connection to Kovrig’s former job at Canada’s embassy in Beijing, and later with the International Crisis Group think tank, roles in which he would allegedly meet with people in China, engage them in his fluent Mandarin, and mine the conversations for nuggets of insight into China’s political or economic affairs.

Chinese authorities, of course, don’t like such activities. One expects that Kovrig and his superiors, both in government and the ICG, would have been well aware that this type of work would irritate Beijing, thus the danger of arbitrary detention on trumped-up charges was always there whenever he visited China without the protection of a diplomatic passport. And so it was.

One particularly troubling aspect of this sort of activity is the risk it presents to people who might unknowingly be sources for these information-gathering practices. Apparently Spavor and Kovrig routinely got together for drinks and sessions of good-humoured conversation. But friendships with diplomats imply that observations shared in a bar can end up the next morning in a report to Ottawa, and on to the Five Eyes. Was this possibility lost on Spavor? Was Kovrig perhaps not as forthcoming as he could have been about the full dimensions of their chats?

Monday, October 30, 2023

Burton: Sapped of both hard and soft power, Canada needs action to keep up in a dangerous world

Sapped of both hard and soft power, Canada needs action to keep up in a dangerous world

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-sapped-of-both-hard-and-soft-power-canada-needs-action-to-keep-up-in-a/ 


Speaking to an international crowd of leaders, ministers and other representatives who had gathered earlier this month in Beijing for a forum that marked 10 years of China’s Belt and Road Initiative global infrastructure program, Chinese leader Xi Jinping declared that “changes of the world, of our times, and of historical significance are unfolding like never before.”

Quite right. Will the Russian invasion of Ukraine be resolved without war with NATO? Will armed conflict in the Middle East, fomented by Iran, spiral into a regional war? Would China open a third front by invading Taiwan? If the atrocious provocations to war by Iran, Russia and China develop simultaneously on three fronts – setting off a world war in Asia, the Middle East and Indo-Pacific – where will Canada stand?

Monday, September 11, 2023

Burton: For the foreign-interference inquiry to be effective, Justice Hogue needs the right tools

For the foreign-interference inquiry to be effective, Justice Hogue needs the right tools

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-for-the-foreign-interference-inquiry-to-be-effective-justice-hogue/

 

For Canadians, the crucial outcomes of this whole exercise could be captured in a few questions: Will any more Chinese diplomats involved in election interference be expelled from Canada? Will their proxies working here be held to account and see their day in court? Will we end up getting an effective foreign influence transparency registry to gain insight around any persons of influence in our Canadian democracy who have conflicts of interest by receiving benefits from a foreign state or its representatives (e.g. agents of the United Front Work Department of the Chinese Communist Party)? Will we get more clarity on why the government projected such an indifferent response to alarming reports of foreign malign, including activities detailed in a large number of federal government intelligence assessments?

Mr. LeBlanc said Justice Hogue will bring “fresh eyes” to topics that she otherwise has no demonstrated credentials to address. She is a respected and capable jurist, but will clearly need a lot of support, including leading experts with deep knowledge in the field, in order to fulfil this critical mission. If not, she could fall into the trap that evidently bedevilled her special-rapporteur predecessor David Johnston, who had to rely on “curated access” to top-secret documents and less-than-thorough debriefings from senior bureaucrats and politicians who might be worried that their denials of any evident ineffectiveness in countering Chinese interference in Canada’s democracy will not stand up to scrutiny.

 

Monday, August 28, 2023

Burton: China’s growing economic angst is another political threat for Xi

China’s growing economic angst is another political threat for Xi

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-chinas-growing-economic-angst-is-another-political-threat-for-xi/

 

The end of the economic boom threatens China’s “post-Tiananmen bargain” in which citizens tolerate marginalized civic freedoms and rule of law in return for continuously improving living standards. Suddenly, Mr. Xi seems politically vulnerable. His rule has been markedly more repressive than those of his recent predecessors – reversing Deng Xiaoping’s 1980s initiatives of “opening and reform” and exhortations to “liberate thought” against Maoist dogma – and because Mr. Xi has purged all his political rivals over the past 10 years, when things go wrong in this era, the buck stops with him.

If Mr. Xi has indeed compromised in his ability to weather political damage because of his handling of the economy, his mishandling of COVID, or sudden disappearances of his senior officials, then these will only add to longer-term grievances that have quietly accumulated during his rule: the persecution of #MeToo protesters, China’s growing income gap, the economic privileging of “red nobility” elites, the unfair and corrupt legal system, pervasive state surveillance and strict censorship of social media.

Against this backdrop, unemployed youth who feel resentful and badly done by could, as Chairman Mao put it in quite a different context, be the spark that sets off the prairie fire. There is much precedent for this in Chinese history.