David Krayden: Guilbeault’s Trip to China Is a Betrayal of Canada’s Vital Interests

Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault speaks during a news conference in Longueuil, Que., on Aug. 8, 2023. (The Canadian Press/Graham Hughes)

Commentary

So Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault is going to Beijing from Aug. 26–31 to cuddle up to the Chinese Communist Party.

If you think that is too strong a contention, consider how Guilbeault is executive vice chairperson on the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development (CCICED).

He represents the cowardice and duplicity of Canada’s inept and delusional federal government. No one from that government should be liaising with the CCICED right now—especially someone who sits on the board. At the very least this is a conflict of interest; at worst, it is a betrayal of Canada’s vital interests.

The head honcho of this supposed environmental advisory council is Ding Xuexiang, who is number six in the Chinese Communist Party (CPP) Politburo and one of the most feared men in the country who was once chief of staff to Chinese dictator Xi Jinping.

He’s one of the men who put Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor in jail and organized Beijing’s interference in Canadian elections, spying on a prominent Member of Parliament and intimidating Chinese Canadians.

The Liberal government can’t get a public inquiry into China’s brazen interference into our elections together but it can send its emissary to assure China that Canada is really on-side with their reckless, authoritarian policies and not prepared to do anything about them.

The Conservative Party of Canada says Guilbeault should at least resign his seat on the CCICED.

Meanwhile, the federal government is demanding that fossil fuel-producing provinces like Alberta and Saskatchewan achieve a “net zero” electricity grid at astronomical cost to their citizens. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith estimates that cost at $400 billion. When was the last time you heard Ottawa take China to task for completely disregarding the environmental principles that the Trudeau government repeatedly whines about?

There’s the “basic dictatorship” Prime Minister Trudeau said can turn things “around on a dime” at work again, transforming reality with the same ease.

China produces 33 percent of the greenhouse gasses in the world today. And it is incessantly building more coal-fired power plants, blithely moving forward with more than 50 gigawatts of new coal power in the first half of 2023, with another 106 gigawatts on the way.

Canada produces less than 1.5 percent of greenhouse gasses. So even by bankrupting Canadians with the economic terrorism of a carbon tax and imagining “net zero” emissions by 2035—when we could all be living without the energy to heat our caves—it will all have virtually zero impact on the global carbon footprint that Liberals love to carp about.

And the CCICED is really a sham environmental organization anyway. Its mission includes the promotion of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a foreign-investment scam that puts vulnerable nations in debt so China can buy up its infrastructure.

“Not only has China wrongfully detained our citizens and meddled in our democracy but it’s now using our good name to burnish its reputation on the environment,” Conservative foreign affairs critic and victim of Beijing’s intimidation Michael Chong said Aug. 17.

“We need to engage with China. We need to indicate our point of view to them,” he told The Globe and Mail. “But a Canadian minister of the Crown should not be sitting as executive vice-chairperson and giving it the prestige of Canada’s good name on environmental issues while at the same time China is massively increasing construction of coal-fired plants.”

Chong is quite correct. This arrangement is not just untenable, it is the worst sort of hypocrisy from a government that would be a bad joke if it weren’t such a real threat to so many Canadians.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.