The Sopranos, With "Chinese Characteristics."

[The following also appears in the National Post and the Ottawa Citizen].

. . . The final thing you need to know about the Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement is its specific function. It’s to elevate Canada’s China-trade business executives from their hitherto mostly supine position as accomplices of Beijing’s gangland regime to a more formalized and official status as willing accessories to the beggaring of the Chinese people and the plundering of their wealth.

Protection is precisely what FIPPA’s Canadian beneficiaries will be very much wanting one day when all their trade agreements, their exquisitely-phrased contracts and their joint-venture undertakings are ablaze in bonfires from Guangdong to Xinjiang. Protection is what they will want, and they will deserve no such thing.

That's from my column in today's Ottawa Citizen.

I see Thomas Mulcair has suggested that he may (or may not) repeal the thing when (or if) he gets to be prime minister. Please try to stay awake as you read his statement: "The same way the Conservatives were able to withdraw Canada from the Kyoto accord, we will keep that option open if on close analysis on what will then be three years’ experience, it confirms our feeling that there are lots of things in there that will be problematic, not just for Canada as a nation-state, but indeed for our system of government because there’s a lot in there that interferes with the provinces and the provinces have never been consulted on this either."

This is milquetoast equivocation smothered by spin, suffocated with caveats about whether events may "confirm" the NDP's "feelings," then drowned in ambiguities about what the NDP may or may not decide to find "problematic" about a document that is what anyone with a lick of sense can see is a cheap sweetheart deal trussed up as a treaty.

But at least Mulcair has said something that approaches what almost resembles a "position" on the subject. Just as a reminder, here's what the subject is: It's the sudden emergence of the most powerful criminal enterprise in world history suddenly establishing itself as the most powerful capitalist entity in Canada by securing its place as the critical and irreplaceable component of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's sole economic strategy, which is to transform Canada into an "energy superpower."

I would have wanted a rather more robust response, but the NDP doesn't yet have an opinion on the subject. None of their MPs can even muster the gumption to offer the opinion that the Beijing regime is "authoritarian," so Mulcair's whingeing is all we've got. As for the Liberals, they can only blush whenever the subject comes up because of their own deep complicity in pioneering the Canadian preoccupation with securing heaps of Beijing money to grease various political wheels.

To be clear about what we're up against here, it's worth remembering some things about CNOOC, Petro-China and Sinopec. These are the three primary deployments Beijing has initiated on the Canadian energy-sector front (recall too that their presence here arises from the "zouchuqu" strategy of overseas acquisitions that the Chinese Communist Party's central committee adopted back in 2000). CNOOC's $15.1 billion pending bid for Calgary's Nexen Inc. is the largest-ever overseas acquisition move by a Chinese state-owned enterprise. Petro-China now pumps more oil than Exxon-Mobil. And Sinopec's annual revenues exceed the entire sum of the annual federal tax revenues of the Government of Canada.

Green Party leader Elizabeth May has been pretty well alone in making any useful noise about this squalid state of affairs, so fair play to her. She deserves every vote she will bleed from the NDP as a consequence, and it will serve the New Democrats right for being such cowards. But May's statement today about the looming ratification of the Canada-China investment arrangement, that if ratified "there will be no turning back for Canada – for decades," strikes me as ill considered, if not just plain wrong. 

It's not the treaty's provisions that will encumber Parliament in the years ahead. It is the money power involved, which Beijing will wield in its customary, thuggish and corrupting fashion, and Beijing will behave this way as regards Parliament and everything else, FIPPA or no FIPPA. May's assertion also makes it impossible for her to point out the only thing worth noticing about Mulcair's position, which is that it is a wholly meaningless equivocation.

It's not that I propose to know better, and on the intimately related subject of how the hell Canada is going to extricate itself from this catastrophe, in truth I am not at all certain that I can even imagine what it will take, in the political class embedded in Ottawa on both sides of the House of Commons and in the media and in the state bureaucracy, for the penny to drop. But what gives me cause to be my usual cheery self is that regardless of the idiocies that infest the Canadian political class on this subject, a clear majority of Canadians get it, across the political spectrum, and are not stupid about any of it.