Here is an Invidious link for a video (34min) and the original YT link.
Beijing is seeking to court Canadians with trade deals. But it is simultaneously punishing Canada for adopting anti-Chinese trade laws, which – as the Chinese are quick to point out – were implemented by Canada in response to American pressure to crack down on unfair Chinese trade practices.
Now, we’re seeing growing numbers of Canadians twisting the logic of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” They’re taking this to mean that the enemy of Canada is the United States, and by that logic, the People’s Republic of China must be Canada's friend.
To offer his perspective on how Canadians should view these developments, Dr. Stephen Nagy joins Inside Policy Talks. Nagy is a professor at Tokyo’s International Christian University, and a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. He’s studied and written extensively about China and its influence operations in the West.
On the podcast, he tells Jamie Tronnes, executive director of the Center for North American Prosperity and Security (CNAPS), that the Chinese government has "invested very heavily" in a strategy of "elite capture" focused on political and business leaders, "giving them preferred access to the Chinese market."
"This is to lock them into a kind of dependent relationship," says Nagy. "And I think that this has made Canada have tremendous challenges in terms of confronting a country that really wants to change the global order in a way that is contrary to Canadian interests."
Among Dr. Nagy's analyses is, As US-Canada ties unravel, Beijing pulls the threads:
While current Canada-US tensions create immediate policy challenges, the documented pattern of Chinese influence operations reveals a systematic effort to exploit these frictions for long-term strategic advantage.
Our elites are already captured by others. The reality is, there is no nationalism among elites in the global order with which we're familiar. There are only interests, and the more elite you become the more your interests become independent of national interests. If your interests are tied to the nation, it's because your material conditions are sufficiently limiting that you are confined in that box. So, any analysis of this can only make sense wrt how much a change would benefit the interests of different sub- national groups, not the nation as a whole. It's a fantasy to think "Canada's interests" represent the interests of all Canadians.
It's still worth trying to break down and understand how different governments and non- government actors are trying to influrnce or change systems that affect us, but national interests as a unifying frame for all Canadians is misleading no matter who's doing the influencing.