Expert: Canadians Missing the Point in Canada-China Trade Debate

Posted by david on Nov 21, 2012 in Blog | 0 comments

Canadians are missing the point in their debate over increased trade with China, according to one Canadian foreign policy expert.

“The debate that Canadians need to have, and the debate we’re really not having,” according to Kim Nossal, director of Queen’s University’s Centre for International and Defence Policy, is on where we will fit as relations between the U.S. and China change.

The proposed $15.1 billion US bid by state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corp. (CNOOC) for Calgary-based Nexen and Enbridge’s bid to build a pipeline to carry Alberta oilsands crude to the west coast has led to much discussion about the bilateral relationship.

But what we should be talking about, Nossal says, are “the implications for us, as a small country that has relations with both the United States and with the People’s Republic of China, as the relations between those two great powers begin to shift and change in the next decade or so.”

Nossal has a unique perspective, having being born in Australia and spent time in Beijing and Hong Kong beginning in the 1960s.

He continues to do research on Australia’s foreign and defence policy. And he’s watched the surge in China’s trade with Australia –an economy very similar to Canada’s in terms of its weighting in commodity exports — especially in the last decade.

The two-way merchandise trade between China and Australia has soared from $113 million Australian dollars in 1973, just after the two opened diplomatic relations, to $78.2 billion in 2009, making China Australia’s largest trading partner.

Add in services, and the total trade in 2009 was worth $85.1 billion, up 15.1 per cent over the year earlier.

In 2010, Canada’s bilateral merchandise trade with China totalled $57.7 billion.

– CBC.ca