There are many good reasons the Canadian government didn’t want to pick a new quarrel with China by stopping a Chinese company from buying up a Canadian gold mine.
But as it turns out, the arguments were even more compelling for blocking the takeover of an important natural resource in a strategically sensitive part of this country.
It’s obvious that even without this latest provocation, relations between the two countries have cooled to the point of being glacial. China’s authoritarian rulers are still furious Canada arrested one of their country’s top telecommunications executives, Huawei Technology’s Meng Wanzhou, who is wanted in the United States on fraud charges.
China continues to imprison Canadians Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, whom it incarcerated in almost certain retaliation for what happened to Meng. And Beijing is still smarting from a decision by the federal Liberals in 2018 ago to block another state-backed Chinese buyer from scooping up Toronto-based construction giant Aecon Group Inc.
Maybe Prime Minister Justin Trudeau should have punted the gold-mine decision into the next year, and at least some observers will think so.
For the rest of this column: https://www.thespec.com/opinion/editorials/2020/12/28/chinese-takeover-bid-had-to-be-stopped.html