What Canada can learn from Australia
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’sbid to build a pipeline to carry Alberta oilsands crude to the west coasthas 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.