In the last paragraph of Lament
for a Nation, 1965, George Grant sums up his contempt for the elites that would
sell Canada out to the dazzling American juggernaut. He concentrated his fire
on their vapid insistence that what’s next must be for the better.
“Beyond courage, it is also
possible to live in the ancient faith, which asserts that changes in the world,
even if the be recognized more as a loss than a gain, take place within an
eternal order that is not affected by their taking place. Whatever the
difficulty of philosophy, the religious man has ben told that process is not
all. ‘Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris
amore.’”
(Virgi, Aeneid, Book V1: “They
were holding their arms outstretched in love toward the further shore.”)
Grant believed that American liberalism, in practice, was
inferior to the British conservative ideals that young men of his time mimicked
in Upper Canada and English-speaking Montreal. He was too hard on America; it’s
still the essential champion of Western conservative and liberal values.
Nevertheless, if Grant was alive today, imagine the wonderfully
cruel things he would say about today’s leaders who argue that we have the
finesse, the leverage, and the treasure to turn China into Canada’s 21st-century elixir.
Certainly, he’d feast on yesterday’s National Post. There, conveniently on one page, was a position
paper by leadership candidate Justin Trudeau
and a London speech by Vice-Chairman of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce Jim Prentice—both endorsing a $15-billion acquisition of a private Canadian energy company
by CNOOC, an energy giant owned almost entirely by the Government of China.
Prentice asserted the commercial banking half and Trudeau
asserted the can-do government half. Together, these two strategic thinkers took
a very tricky issue about how to do business with a giant company owned by a superpower operating outside of Canada’s alliances and valves, and made the
issue bigger and simpler at the same time.
Being squeamish about China is silly, even dangerous; after
all, it’s the future.
Trudeau declared, without any elaboration, that the CNOOC
offer is good for Canada because it’s a “foreign investment” and that “foreign
investment raises productivity, and hence the living standards of Canadian
families.”
Having logically disposed of the need for the foreign investment "net benefits" test, originally introduced by his father, he enthused that
relations with the world’s second-biggest economy should be deepened, not
tested, certainly, nor feared.
“We
deceive ourselves by thinking that trade with Asia can be squeezed into the
20th-century mold. 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. They have needs and the world has resources to meet those needs. We
Canadians have more of those resources — and therefore more leverage — than any
nation on Earth.”
Trudeau writes like one of those WestPoint generals that
knows how to seduce politicians into undertaking terrible risks: above all,
sound incredibly tough.
Prentice doesn’t bother to sound tough. Instead, he finds
comfort in the semantic possibilities of getting SOEs to sign protocols to promise
to act like ordinary commercial business. He can’t resist, however, warning his
old boss, Stephen Harper, that turning down CNOOC would cause offense.
“The fundamental point is that the Canadian government should not be –
and, in my view, won’t be – concerned about the so-called “ethnicity of money.”
We can’t and shouldn’t try to force China or other countries to be like us.
Closing doors to investment is no way to open minds.”
Canadian nationalist politicians and deal-hungry
commercial bankers wear the same blinkers.
They’re loathe to think about the power of their
friendly neighbor or the power of China. Doing business with the SOE of a
superpower can’t be "squeezed" into a business model might work for publically
owned investors from technically competent and politically harmless countries
like, say, France and South Korea.
No wonder Harper is taking so long.
No comments:
Post a Comment