ANALYSIS: How Public Opinion Has Long Swayed Ottawa’s China Policy

Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly speaks to reporters in the foyer of the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on March 27, 2023. The Canadian Press/Sean Kilpatrick

Given Canadians’ mistrust of China, Ottawa-Beijing relations cannot be “reset,” Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly said this week. This follows a historical trend of public concerns restraining leaders from courting Beijing, despite the push from some quarters to do so.

Similar sentiments as those of Ms. Joly’s have been expressed by other Canadian leaders in the past, although less candidly.

Toward the end of his term in 1993, former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney held a private dinner with China’s vice president in Ottawa. Only a few years had passed since the Tiananmen Square massacre, when Chinese police opened fire on pro-democracy student demonstrators, and many democracies shunned the communist regime at the time.

The dinner was a “signal” to Beijing, Mr. Mulroney said in his 2007 book, “Memoirs.” The Chinese-Canadian business community was telling him that China was on its way to becoming a “key economic player,” he said.

The signal was that “Canada would be prepared to fully engage with China in the years ahead—cautiously, of course, in light of our appropriate human rights concerns,” Mr. Mulroney wrote.

Author and journalist Jonathan Manthorpe’s interpretation of the need to proceed “cautiously” was that it stemmed from “domestic political reasons” as Canadians were concerned about China’s human rights abuses, he wrote in his seminal 2019 book “Claws of the Panda.”

A look at historic polling data and key periods in Canada’s relations with China shows that at times when polls have shown less public concern about China, leaders have struck key deals and pursued closer ties with Beijing. And at times when polls showed greater concern, leaders have held back.

Joly’s Trip

This week, after making the first official visit by a Canadian foreign affairs minister to China in seven years and following the souring Ottawa-Beijing relations due to the Meng Wanzhou affair, Ms. Joly said it’s Canadians’ negative view of China that stands in the way of a “formal reset” in bilateral relations.

Police patrol outside the Canadian embassy in Beijing, China, on Jan. 15, 2019. Greg Baker/Getty Images

“It’s not the government. It’s more Canadian perceptions toward China, which are negative right now. And it’s important for China to understand that,” she told The Globe and Mail following her July 18–21 visit.

The minister’s post-trip comments were interpreted by her political rivals as meaning that her government is being prevented from pursuing ever warmer relations with China due to concern at the polls.

“She actually said that despite their interference in our elections, despite their threats against a sitting Canadian MP and his family, despite operating illegal police stations on our soil, despite kidnapping 2 of our citizens, despite the ongoing human rights abuses, and despite the increased military aggression,” Conservative Senator Leo Housakos said on the X platform on July 22.

“[S]he wanted to make it crystal clear that none of this would be enough to stop her government from doing business as usual with Beijing’s communist thugs but for those pesky polling numbers showing it’s not an electoral winner.”

Another way the comments can be interpreted is that Ms. Joly wanted to emphasize that the government needs to follow the will of the people.

If there is a correct way to interpret the comments, the minister’s department is not saying.

“I will let the Minister’s comments speak for themselves. We have nothing further to add,” John Babcock, a spokesperson for Global Affairs Canada, said in an email.

Regardless of what one may deduce from the minister’s words, they come at a time when Canadians’ perception of the Chinese regime is at an all-time low.

Since Beijing’s arrest of two Canadians and blocking of some Canadian exports in apparent retaliation for the arrest of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou in late 2018, public opinion of China in Canada has continued to decline sharply. The downward trend didn’t change even after the two Canadians were freed following Ms. Meng’s release in 2021 and the subsequent thawing of Ottawa-Beijing relations.

The perception has only become more negative in recent months as intelligence reports revealed China’s extensive interference in Canadas’ affairs. That includes election interference, harassment of the Chinese diaspora community, and even threats against the family of Canadian lawmakers who take a hard line on China’s rights abuses.

A survey by the Pew Research Center last year showed that only 14 percent of Canadians have a favourable or somewhat favourable view of China. Historic data from the organization show that the declining trend in Canadians’ perception of China has been more or less consistent over the past two decades, as China has shown itself to be more aggressive on the world stage and continued its rights abuses at home.

The trend line changed significantly after 2018, coinciding with Canada’s arrest of Ms. Meng and Beijing’s retaliatory actions against Canada. According to Pew data, just prior to that episode, the proportion of Canadians holding unfavourable views toward China went up from 40 percent in 2017 to 45 percent in 2018, a change of 13 percent. By 2019, as China waged its retaliatory tactics against Canada, the proportion of those holding unfavourable views had jumped to 67 percent—a 49 percent change compared to the year prior.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau walks with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Dec. 4, 2017. Fred Doufour/AFP/Getty Images

The proportion of unfavourable views grew to 73 percent by the summer of 2020. It was in that year that the Trudeau government made its tone relatively more assertive toward Beijing, with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau making comments such as saying that China was engaging in “coercive diplomacy” and that his government will not stop standing up for human rights in China.

Key Episodes and Public Perception

The notion that public perception has been influencing Canada’s China policy has been cited by other Canadian leaders as well.

Prime Minister Lester Pearson in 1968 outlined his reasons for not pursuing relations with communist China in an interview with the United Church Observer publication. Besides saying that Canada’s number one ally, the United States, wasn’t keen on its neighbour to the north being cozy with a communist regime, Mr. Pearson also pointed to the lack of public support.

“When you have a division of public opinion inside your own country and there is no great impelling urgency, morally or politically, to take action, then your relations with your neighbour, with the United States, become important in respect to that issue,” Mr. Pearson said, as recounted in the 2014 book “Engaging China” by University of British Columbia professor emeritus Paul Evans.

But the reverse has been true as well.

Though Canadians’ views of the Chinese communist regime have been generally negative throughout history—the two countries even fought on opposite sides during the Korea War of the 1950s—the key episodes of warming relations have come about at times when public views were less negative.

Just before the start of China’s intervention in the Korean War in 1950, only 38 percent of Canadians supported diplomatic recognition of the communist regime, and 39 percent were opposed, according to the 1985 publication “Canadian Public Opinion on Relations with China” by Mr. Evans and academic Daphne Taras. The support declined further after the war, with 32 percent supportive by 1959 and 44 percent opposed.

Although still not an overtly popular sentiment, the support had ticked up to 52 percent (with 28 percent opposed) in 1969, just ahead of when the newly minted Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau fully recognized the People’s Republic of China in 1970.

Historic data from Pew show the negative perception toward China being as low as 27 percent in 2005, on the tail end of the governments of Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin pursuing major trade engagements with Beijing and bringing the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) out of isolation after the Tiananmen Square massacre.

An upward tilt in the otherwise declining view of Canadians’ opinion of China over the past two decades came in the mid-2010s, coinciding with the time that the newly elected Liberal government of Justin Trudeau began pursuing closer ties with Beijing.

United States Marines infantrymen, taking cover behind large boulders, shoot at North Korean forces during a battle on a snow-covered mountain in the Korean War, Korea, on Dec. 6, 1950. The Marines won the battle, backed by close air support. Hulton Archive/Getty Images

According to Pew data, 48 percent of Canadians held an unfavourable view of China in 2015. That number dropped to 40 percent in 2016 and 2017—during which time Canada pursued free trade talks with China and even pondered an extradition treaty. Unfavourable views steadily climbed thereafter to 45 percent in 2018 and accelerated toward 67 percent in 2019 in the midst of the Meng affair.

“Due to the CCP’s arrest of the two Michaels and its deep interference in and attempts to manipulate Canada’s two federal elections, more and more Canadians have come to realize the harm the CCP has done to Canada,” Sheng Xue, a Toronto-area based China affairs writer, told The Epoch Times.

“More and more people are monitoring and demanding that the Canadian government remain vigilant and keep its distance from the CCP.”

However, she says there is concern that China’s elite capture tactics may once again succeed in allowing for warming between Ottawa and the communist regime of China, as eventually happened following the relation freezes of the Korea War and the Tiananmen Square massacre.

“In the late 1950s and early 1960s, when at least 45 million people starved to death in China, the CCP still spent huge sums of money to buy off any possible supporters in the international community,” Ms. Sheng said.

She added that Canada’s formal recognition of the CCP in 1970 helped it become stronger, which was to the detriment of Taiwan and the free world. She said Canadians should be careful to not let their guards down and allow such episodes to recur.

“I hope that such a historical nightmare will never happen again,” Ms. Sheng said.