Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney meets with Chinese Premier Li Qiang on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney met with Chinese Premier Li Qiang on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly (UNGA) in New York City on Tuesday.
Carney and Li discussed repairing relations between the two countries, which have been strained ever since Canada arrested Chinese Communist Party aristocrat Meng Wanzhou in 2018.
China took several Canadians hostage and was ultimately able to pressure Canada, and President Joe Biden, into releasing Meng and dropping the fraud and sanctions-evasions charges brought by the United States against her.
Li said after meeting with Carney that China is “willing to make more active and practical efforts with Canada to promote further improvement of bilateral relations,” as reported by Chinese state media.
“The Chinese premier said that China hopes the Canadian side can adopt a correct perception of China, and respect each other’s core interests and major concerns to cement the political foundation for the development of bilateral cooperation and ties,” said China’s state Xinhua news service.
Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday that Carney seeks to rebuild relations with China that grew worse under his predecessor Justin Trudeau, in part because “U.S. protectionism has brought Canada’s need to diversify trading relationships into sharp focus.”
Carney’s resistance to Chinese influence also crumbled under China’s punitive tariffs on canola, pork, and seafood, which Beijing imposed after Canada joined the United States in using levies to thwart Chinese product dumping.
Canada imposed 100 percent levies on Chinese electric vehicles (EVs) and 25 percent on steel and aluminum. Bloomberg suggested removing those tariffs now could “threaten delicate trade talks with the U.S., ahead of an upcoming review of U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement.”
Chinese Academy of Social Sciences research fellow Lu Xiang sneered to Chinese Communist Party paper Global Times on Wednesday that Canada must “resist third-party interference and avoid undermining China-Canada relations to appease another country,” a reference to the Trump administration’s desire for Canada to stand with the United States against Chinese product dumping.
