As tensions rise, what comes next for China-Canada relations?

CLIP You are listening to a Frequency Podcast network production.

Jordan Heath Rawlings You can be forgiven if you haven’t quite been able to keep up with all the various twists and turns in the Canada-China relationship over the past few years. From hostile takeovers of resource companies to arrests, first of a Huawei executive, and then of course two Canadians. Two retaliatory trade actions, two allegations of election interference, leaked security documents, questions of what our government knew and when, and then last week a diplomatic spat.

CLIP China announced its expelling Canadian diplomat, Jennifer Lynn Lalonde alone declaring her persona non grata, and ordering the console who’s based in Shanghai to leave China by May 13th. Beijing defending the expulsion as just and necessary after Ottawa expelled a Chinese diplomat on Monday over allegations of foreign interference.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Now taken on its own. Sure, trading expelled diplomats is a spat, but Canada and China have literally been at this for years now. And every time things seem to be calming down, tensions escalate all over again. So what does this latest spat, or whatever you want to call it, tell us about the relationship as a whole? And where it might be headed? How worried should Canada be about further retaliation from Beijing? What do we know now about Chinese election interference that we didn’t know when the headlines first broke? And in an ideal world, what would our government be doing to protect itself and us from attempts to undermine Canada’s democracy?

I am Jordan Heath Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Stephanie Carvin is a former national security analyst and associate professor at the Norman Patterson School of International Affairs, and the author of “Stand On Guard, Reassessing Threats to Canada’s National Security.” And Stephanie, I guess we call you when, Canada gets up to foreign policy trouble.

Stephanie Carvin Yeah. You know, maybe, maybe one day if we have like a fluffy bunny emergency. I could do that too. But yeah, it always seems to be, when we’re looking at hard national security questions.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Okay, well maybe you can explain this to me right off the top because, you know, I’m doing research for this episode and I keep seeing it referred to as a China Canada diplomatic spat. What is a diplomatic spat in this context and why are we using that word?

Stephanie Carvin You know, that’s so funny that you say that because we do tend to use that word. If you think of back a few years ago when, Saudi Arabia abruptly halted its relations with Canada, we called it the Saudi spat, right? And now we’re having a Canada-China spat.

Jordan Heath Rawlings A spat, sounds not very serious.

Stephanie Carvin Yeah, it’s funny that you say that. I would agree it’s not a crisis, right? Like when we, when we start using the word crisis, it, it sounds like it’s something more prolonged and difficult and multifaceted to solve. In this particular case, I think when we use the word spat, we’re talking about a sharp short incident, right? That is kind of like a short burst of tension, which then kind of dissipates over time. And so it’s funny that we’re using this term because I feel like 90% of the time, I’m on your podcast, we’re talking about China, right? This seems to have been, an issue that we’ve talked about for a long time, but maybe in this particular case, we’re referring to a short burst of tension within this longer period of reevaluating our relationship with what’s now the world’s second largest nation.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Well, that’s the thing. I think the first time we ever had you on this podcast, we were talking about, hostile takeovers of Canadian businesses by China. We obviously had you on a couple of times during the whole Meng Wanzhou and the two Michaels incident. I don’t know what we call that. And we’ll talk about that in a minute too. And then of course, the past few months have been filled with allegations of election interference and who knew what and when. We can talk about that too, but first maybe what just actually happened officially between Canada and China over the past maybe week, week and a half.

Stephanie Carvin Right. Well, out of allegations and some leaked information that’s been given to The Globe and Mail, there seems to have been a diplomat by the name of Zhao Wei who was basically looking at ways to retaliate against Michael Chung and was, potentially looking at targeting his family for, Michael Cho’s, support of the Uyghurs. And some votes in parliament that had taken place. And when this became public, you know, a diplomat’s not supposed to be plotting against someone’s family, right? Like this is not your standard diplomatic activities. We’re kind of now crossing over into something far more malicious and covert and, and not great. So under pressure, the government has essentially declared Zhao Wei as a persona, non grata, which is to effectively declare, you know, revoke his diplomatic status in the country. Persona non grata literally means, not welcome person. And so, we have to remember diplomats aren’t here because other countries just send them. They’re here because, we let them come here, right? Like we, we say, yes, you’re here as a diplomat. And we, you know, you’re given certain rights in, in accordance with international law. And Canada has never revoked that status. And in response, China has also retaliated by declaring a diplomat by the name of Jennifer Lalonde as persona non grata. And she has had to leave, Shanghai, I believe.

Jordan Heath Rawlings What actually happens when someone is declared persona non grata? Does anything happen to them? You mentioned they lose their diplomat status. What does that mean?

Stephanie Carvin Well, it’s effectively, again, like, you know, people, government sends, you know, their diplomats here, to perform certain diplomatic functions. But when that crosses over into something else or a diplomat may be accused of being involved in, in illegal activity, we can basically say, they’re no longer welcome to be in our country, and we effectively give them usually about five days to leave. Right? So they have five days to kind of pack up their things, sort out their business, and then leave. And there’s a whole range of reasons why we might do this. You actually don’t need a reason. I mean, ideally there should be a good cause because it can cause. You know, as we just discussed, a spat. But, you want it to be, for a good reason. So, you know, if you think back a few years ago, there was a mass expulsion of Russian diplomats around the world, out of western countries, right? This was because of the, Salisbury poisoning, a whole other topic of conversation, but basically Russia had been involved in using chemical weapons against people in the UK. And you know, this was seen as really above and beyond the, the pale and a number of countries decided to simultaneously expel, Russian diplomats by declaring them persona non grata. And I think they lost something like 200 diplomats at the same time. And of course, they retaliated, Canada expelled four Canadian diplomats were expelled, likewise. Declared persona non grata. And so, I mean, this is the thing, it just becomes kind of a tit for tat kind of exercise where you say, oh, well you’re expelling our diplomat. Well, we’re expelling your diplomat. It’s just kind of how these things work.

Jordan Heath Rawlings So this all relates though to the allegations of election interference, as you mentioned, and as we were talking about it, what I wanna understand is how did we get from there to here? And I’m trying to understand if this is like a significant escalation of the tensions between the two countries or what this means kind of in the grand scheme of the progression of these allegations in the investigations around them, if that makes sense.

Stephanie Carvin Yeah, no, it’s a great question and it’s, it’s interesting because. You know, like I said, like we were talking about this as a spat, right? This kind of short burst of tension between the two countries. But we’re talking about this in the wake of the release of the two Michaels. I don’t think that relations between Canada and China are that much better. I mean, they’re not, you know, we still do have a number of Canadians who are in, in Chinese jails and we should not forget those individuals. But, you know, the fact that the two Michaels have released, I don’t think has really set relations back on a smooth course. Canada now has also developed a rather sharp Indi-Pacific foreign policy. I mean, whether or not we actually fulfill everything in that foreign policies is, you know, another idea for a podcast if you want, Jordan. But the fact is Canada is clearly taking a sharper look at China. And is definitely acting more in line with countries like Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, it’s five ice partners as well as other, you know, western countries that are kind of trying to reevaluate.

Okay, well, you know, China seems to be, on this idea that it has to confront the west in order to rise. So what does that mean for our relations with China? We still need to work with them on certain issues like climate change and managing the world economy. But, you know, there’s other issues like the, south Pacific Sea, Taiwan, human rights where, you know, there, there are substantial tensions. So, yeah, I mean, I don’t. You know, if we look at this within, like, the short framework of say 2023, yeah, this is kind of a short incident, but to me this just seems to be the next, in a rolling line of sharp moments, tensions that have really kind of, you know, turned Canada 180 in terms of how it looks at China, how it engages with China, and it, it kind of suggests that we’re still largely going to be looking at a rocky road ahead for, for the, at least the coming years.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Is this now just the new normal of how Canada and maybe, the West as a whole engage with China? Now it’s, it’s no longer strictly on an economic basis, but there’s some significant tension that’s just gonna be present now.

Stephanie Carvin Right. I mean, in the last year we’ve, you know, heard some new terms like friend shoring. In other words, we wanna build more things within Western countries to our friends, in order to, because we’re worried about supply chains in particular, we’re worried about China. We’re seeing deals like AUKUS being made and, and recently it was announced that Canada may be joining, which is the Australia, United Kingdom, United States pact. That’s looking at building and sharing, military technologies that may be beneficial in confronting states like China, particularly in the Pacific. We’re seeing the quad go ahead. So, you know, I think if we’re looking at this, we’re not alone, but at the same time we are seeing European countries, like France in particular, reaching out an arm to China. We are seeing China, just in the past week or so, look at, you know, reaching back out to Europe as a way perhaps to prevent a cohesive west from solidifying against it. But also, seeking to be involved in perhaps providing a solution to the Ukraine crisis. But I mean, China is not gonna go gently into that good night, right? They gonna try and keep some kind of relations going with the west, whether or not they’re giving up on Canada. I think remains to be seen, but there’s, there’s a lot of different pieces at play here.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Well, let’s talk about the election interference and the leaks from CSIS. You and I spoke a while ago, and you know, one of the things that you said then was you’d really love to learn more about where these leaks came from, what they mean, what we can tell by them. It’s been several weeks now. What do we know now about alleged election interference that we didn’t know when the big screaming headlines first dropped?

Stephanie Carvin So when the big screaming headlines first dropped a lot of the information is what I would call raw reporting, right? It was basically saying, that, you know, so-and-so had a conversation with so-and-so, and this is what was said, but there was no analysis given. Right. It was just kind of the basic reporting. But the kind of information we’re seeing come out now is assessed information. Especially the one on foreign interference and targeting Michael Chung. This was assessed information. It would’ve gone through several layers of approval. I may even have gone up to the assistant director level at CSIS, which is a pretty high level in order to get approved to go out the building. So this is information that the service had a lot of confidence in order to make it into a report like this. So, when I say I’d like to know a bit more about where this is coming from, I can tell just by the document that has been released that this is true.

This is not some kind of random conversation. This was something that the service at least believed and had grounds to believe what was true. So it’s a little bit more solid and it is interesting because, you know, not to plug my book too much, but you announced it at the beginning of the podcast. But I remember when I first set out to write the book in 2015, 2016, and I thought, oh, how am I ever gonna explain foreign interference to Canadians? You know? This is such a sudden issue and yeah. I mean, it does, what we have learned is that there does seem to be a campaign that, you know, in some ways we, we still don’t know about everything that’s been reported. And we have a number of committees, the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians, the National Security Intelligence Review Agency, and now David Johnson doing a, a third report, as to what the government knew and when it knew it and who was briefed on that information. But you know, it does also seem to be clear that China was not just targeting our elections, they were targeting our democratic institutions, in particular MPs that were seen as anti-China, that were supporting the rights of Uyghurs. And this is, not okay. Right. This is. You know, democracy is a sacred institution in in Canada, and whether you’re happy or not with the government, I mean, this is the way you get to express yourself and do things. And if there is this sustained campaign to, you know, target those institutions.

This is not something that we can take lightly and it kind of throws into, I guess, I worry that it, at the end of the day, that, you know, if Canadians don’t have faith in these institutions because they believe that they’re being targeted, then that will also hurt our elections down the road, faith in our democracy parliament, and these kinds of things. So it is a fairly serious, and I guess the only other thing I would add to this is that, you know, we, we’ve learned this. About Michael Chong, and it is very serious. But at the same time, I would also note that this is something that Chinese Canadians and Asian Canadians have been dealing with for very long periods of time, but they’re not members of Parliament. They haven’t gotten the same attention, but I think through that Michael Chong’s story. They’ve at least now had a chance to say, see, you know, this, this is what we are dealing with too. Like our families are being targeted, we’re getting harassing calls and this kind of stuff. So I, I just hope it’s, you know, between the foreign interference, which is not just against democratic institutions, but also against Canadian communities. We’re getting a better understanding of how this actually works.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Without getting into the partisan aspect of this, which again could be, an entire other podcast. I do wanna ask about like the political ramifications and maybe just you as somebody who’s been in an analyst role and kind of understands the way these organizations disseminate information. Have you been surprised by what you’ve learned about what actions the government did or didn’t take and when?

Stephanie Carvin This is a good question. I mean, it’s interesting if you read, you know, a few weeks ago, the per one of the leakers, I suspect there’s probably somewhere between four to six leakers obviously at this point. But I think one of the leakers wrote an editorial in The Globe and Mail and said, you know, they didn’t want this to become a partisan issue, that they didn’t want this to become a political issue. They just wanted Canada to understand. And to know that this was a problem and like, I’m sorry, this was incredibly naive. The idea that this wouldn’t become a political issue is just kind of barmy and, this person, I think very much misjudged how this information would be received, especially to a public who’s not used to thinking about foreign interference and things like this. So, I wanna push back on this idea that, you know, that just looking at this politically is bad. I mean, at the end of the day, one of the things we have learned is how badly intelligence is handled in the government of Canada.

And I can say as an analyst, it was, it’s deeply frustrating to, you know, pour your heart and soul into writing an assessment and, you know, appreciate that this is kind of going into a black hole. It, you know, it’s gonna go into some secure cyber systems that people may or may not read. It’s hard, you know, people are reading things all the time. There’s so much material to consume, that it’s hard for them to go into secure facilities without their phone, without any kind of contact to sit down and read intelligence. Right? But we need, so we need to improve our intelligence distribution systems. There’s no question. Right? But at the same time, government, after government, after government has failed to fix this problem. And at some point, that’s a political problem, right? It’s not like there haven’t been people who have been saying for years, that we need to fix this issue. And you know, Trudeau’s been in power now for, you know, quite a number of years. He’s been warned that the Canadian government needed to take national security more seriously. So, you know, if there is political ramifications, it’s because he made certain political decisions about whether or not to address national security. And fix some of these longstanding problems.

Jordan Heath Rawlings What is the fallout that we could see from this spat slash long simmering tensions? I guess, I’ve seen a bunch of headlines about Canadian businesses in China, maybe suffering. You mentioned individual Chinese Canadians who have dealt with this for some time. What comes next here?

Stephanie Carvin So when this first happened, and I think this brings us back to the persona non grata issue, I thought China was gonna hit back harder. If you recall, when Zhao was arrested, China retaliated by arresting two Canadians for the one individual that we had arrested. Right? And so I kind of thought, okay, well maybe this will be more than one individual that is sent out. But actually if you look at it, it’s a pretty even match. The person who was expelled, Zhao Wei, he was not the ambassador. He was just a senior official in the Toronto Consulate. Right. And, the person who was expelled from China, Jennifer Lalonde, was a senior person in basically the Canadian consulate in Shanghai.

So it’s kind of actually relatively even, there’s no escalation on the part of China. However, in its statement, China said that, you know, we reserve the right to do more. And so one of the things I think we may see, and this is where I think the Canadian businesses come in, is that Canadian businesses and exports may be targeted for further retaliation, right? So one of the things we always see is canola oil being targeted. Suddenly there’ll be some kind of health scare with Canadian canola. You know, there’ll be reports of some kind of fungus and China will halt all exports of canola, which basically really does hurt our farmers out west. And then alternatively, it has targeted pork in the past, right? It has said, oh, you’re not filling out the paperwork correctly. We’re stopping pork exports. That definitely happened also in the wake of the hou arrest. So we may see this kind of retaliation, but also, You know, I think I’ve discussed on this podcast before, China has some very strict national security laws, right, which compel Chinese companies to help the Chinese government if they are ever asked to do so. And that’s always been a point of concern, I believe, for the West, right?

Are Chinese companies going to spy on the West, on behalf of the government? But these laws have now been expanded even further, right? So that Western companies exporting data to the West for whatever reason, can also now, fall under charges. And we’ve seen a number of Western companies that have been targeted for these reasons. And these laws are very vague and in the end, they serve the purposes of the Chinese Communist Party. So it wouldn’t surprise me if, a Canadian company was somehow targeted for violating these new national security laws about exporting data and seeing a company, maybe even like Canada Goose, which is symbolic of Canada being targeted with some kind of retaliation as well.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Last question and just quickly, if you could know the answer to one thing that you don’t know right now that would give you more clarity about what’s really going on here, what would it be?

Stephanie Carvin That’s such a good question. In some ways, I’m almost more interested domestically, like what? You know, we talked about the fact that intelligence is not often brought into policy making in Canada. Right. Often this intelligence is produced and it kind of goes into a black hole. And what we learned was that, you know, there was a turnover of three national security intelligence advisors and this information never made it up the chain to the Prime Minister. And it’s kind of mind boggling that a threat like this would not make it up the chain. Right. So, what are the conversations right now in our government about, you know, you know, if, if this tension with China is going to increase, are we going to improve the way intelligence informs policymaking? And if so, how are we gonna do that? Now, that’s a super nerdy question, right? That’s the kind of thing that I like to, to dive in on. But I think the broader question is, you know, we are facing these new national security challenges.

Are we going to be putting the resources onto them? Are we going to create the legislation and legislative changes that we need in order to address this already? The government has basically said it’s creating a foreign agent registry act, but also there’s other resourcing issues. I mean so much of dealing with foreign interference in our democratic institutions, isn’t a national security question, it’s about strengthening our democracy, strengthening our democratic institutions, which can mean things like, critical thinking skills, improving the way we investigate electoral fraud, and all those kinds of things. Those aren’t national security questions. Those are our democratic institution questions. So, If we strengthen ourselves, if we strengthen our own democracy, I think a lot of these challenges in the future will hopefully go away. So that’s not really a question, but I guess so much is a wish. But will we do that? I’ll end it on a question with a question mark. Right.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Stephanie, thank you so much for this as always. And maybe sometime we will do National Security Week featuring Stephanie Carvin.

Stephanie Carvin Oh my goodness. Thanks.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Stephanie Carvin, one of our favourite guests, and as she mentioned, you should read her book, “Stand On Guard: Reassessing Threats to Canada’s National Security.” That was The Big Story for more, including the episode we did a couple of months ago with Steph. You can head to TheBigStorypodcast.ca. You can always find us on Twitter @thebigstoryfpn. You can email us hello@TheBigStorypodcast.ca. And you can call and leave a voicemail 416-935-5935. The Big Story is available in every single podcast player in the world, and it is available on your smart speaker if you ask it to play The Big Story podcast. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.