Stephen Harper knew the Chinese would be upset when he didn’t immediately race over to visit them upon becoming Prime Minister. He also knows that the Chinese play with their elbows up, and my advice to our government when I was a Minister was to be as tough with them as they are with us, and trust me they are, bar none, our toughest trading partner.
Of course the Chinese weren’t happy, and they told him so, but if you skip the rhetoric and look at the actual numbers you’ll see that the Chinese have been very happy to trade with us during the entire time that the Harper government has been in power. In fact according to the Asia Pacific Foundation trade is up sharply over the time that the previous government was in power. According to my back of the napkin calculation our exports to China had jumped almost 40% from the beginning of 2006 to the end of 2008.
My point is that Canada and China rely on each others markets and resources. Secondly, China has obligations to respect human rights and the rules of trade, and maybe we make that point best when we don’t go running over to China simply because we’re afraid of offending them.
