Get Ready for China
by Eugene Lang
Vice President, Bluesky Strategy Group; co-founder, Canada 2020: Canada’s Progressive Centre.
- First Posted: Mar 02 2010 02:54 AM
- Updated: over 1 year ago
The China Century is already here, yet Canada's political class has no plan for how to adapt to it.
The global economic centre of gravity is inexorably shifting from the U.S. to China. Yet this has elicited no serious debate, much less policy, in this country. It is time for action.
Twenty years ago we tethered our economic future to the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, later superseded by NAFTA. These were visionary policies, anticipating and seeking to take advantage of U.S. economic dominance in the final decades of what Henry Luce famously termed “The American Century."
But the U.S. economy is now in a period of relative, secular decline. China will assume the mantle of the world’s largest economy sometime in the next two decades.
In the old days Ottawa would strike a Royal Commission—such as the MacDonald Commission of the early 1980s-- to help chart Canada’s economic course and build consensus for the policy agenda needed to respond to such big challenges. Yet our political class has shown an appalling lack of foresight to engage Canadians seriously on the implications of the China Century. It is incumbent on the thinking class to force the issue.
The business community, labour unions and civil society organizations need a forum outside government to develop ideas, engage citizens and build consensus around a new Canadian economic agenda aimed at carving out a place for Canada that ensures our prosperity in the China century.
Our economic future is too important to leave in the hands of politicians, most of whom evidently have their heads in the sand.
Comments
Re:Marks
“ We should move on solving the problem. Canadian civil society should work to discover ways to orient Canada's economy more toward Asia and less toward the US. Perhaps we should also try to understand why the government has failed to lead this change. Why would the government put so much effort into becoming a part of Buy America when the money for that program is already allocated and put no effort into trade missions to China? Why does the government give American companies the right to bid on contracts let by local governments - yield more of our sovereignty to the US - and not try and negotiate a similar agreement with China? If the idea is good, why only have one such partner? Is the government so focused on the US that it cannot see any other country - a weird tunnel vision? Is the government so distrustful of China that even when it looks it sees nothing - a self-imposed blindness? It did take Harper 3 years to find the time to visit China. Some combination of both? In any case, we have a government with vision problems. Time to start asking more of our federal government.
Brent Beach
“ Seems to me that China if China is to become capable of managing its own growing appetite it will very soon need to begin downloading large swaths of its population - 100s of millions of Chinese will need to move off the mainland and dispersed throughout the world. Otherwise China will grown impossibly ravenous in which case the clash with the US is inevitable. But Canadians love the Chinese immigration. And Canada also has huge territories that could easily and sometimes not so easily made fit for people. Would we not be doing both ourselves and the Americans and the world a great service it we open our doors to China? D.
David Berlin