Foreign Minister Joly in China in First High-Level Meeting in Years

Minister of Foreign Affairs Melanie Joly responds to a question from a reporter about the situation in Haiti, in Ottawa, on March 25, 2024. (The Canadian Press/Adrian Wyld)

Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly is conducting an official visit to China this week in a bid to reinforce bilateral ties.

The visit was first announced by China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which said Ms. Joly would be visiting from July 18 to 20.

Global Affairs Canada (GAC) later confirmed the visit in a statement, saying the minister would be in Beijing on July 19 “to discuss Canada-China relations as well as complex global and regional security issues.”

Ottawa also seeks to discuss avenues of collaboration and to enhance “already deep ties between the people of Canada and China,” said the statement.

GAC had announced on July 16 that Ms. Joly was travelling to South Korea on July 18, but there was no indication she would also be travelling to China.

Beijing and Ottawa both say Ms. Joly was invited to China by Wang Yi, China’s director of the Office of the Central Commission for Foreign Affairs and minister of foreign affairs.

“As the world faces increasingly complex and intersecting global issues, Canada is committed to engaging pragmatically with a wide range of countries to advance our national interests and uphold our values,” Ms. Joly said in a statement regarding the trip.

The minister said the visit is in line with objectives of her government’s Indo-Pacific Strategy, released in 2022.

“We must maintain open lines of communication and use diplomacy to challenge where we ought to, while seeking cooperation in areas that matter most to Canadians,” said Ms. Joly.

The meeting in China between Ms. Joly and Wang Yi follows previous meetings between the two earlier this year. The ministers met on the margins of the Munich Security Conference in February and spoke remotely in January.

Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs David Morrison quietly visited Beijing in April, ahead of Ms. Joly.

The official visit comes amid heightened concerns about foreign interference in Canada, with the Chinese regime being identified as the main culprit.

The views of various Canadian security bodies on the matter have been publicized in recent months through the Foreign Interference Commission, with intelligence and assessments on broad trends and specific events coming to light.

“The intelligence collected by Canada indicates that the People’s Republic of China (“PRC”) stands out as a main perpetrator of foreign interference against Canada,” wrote Commissioner Marie-Josée Hogue in her interim report released in May.

Ms. Joly’s visit will be the first time a cabinet minister has travelled to China since Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault visited in August 2023.

For that trip, the federal government had initially not officially announced the visit and had instead used select media interviews to make public Mr. Guilbeault’s trip. That visit was the first from a minister since 2018.

Relations between Ottawa and Beijing soured at the end of 2018 after the arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wangzhou on a U.S. extradition warrant, with Beijing arbitrarily detaining Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor in apparent retaliation.

Mr. Guilbeault was attending the annual meeting of the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development, a Chinese regime-led body, on which he serves as an executive by virtue of role as environment minister.

The Canadian government has long said it considers climate change a key area to cooperate with China.