Most Canadians say China can't be trusted on human rights, rule of law: poll
Credit to Author: Matt Robinson| Date: Wed, 11 Dec 2019 11:00:34 +0000
The proportion of Canadians who look unfavourably on China has swelled over the course of a year that featured the arrest in Vancouver of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, the retaliatory detentions in China of Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, and icy government and trade relations.
About nine-in-10 Canadians now believe China can’t be trusted on human rights or the rule of law.
Those are among the major findings of a new poll from the Angus Reid Institute on Sino-Canadian relations, released today.
Two-in-three Canadians now hold an unfavourable view of Canada’s second-largest trading partner, up from around half in 2018, the poll found. The picture is more stark in B.C., where three-in-four residents have an unfavourable view of China.
Meng was arrested early last December on an extradition request from the United States. Spavor and Kovrig were detained in China less than two weeks later and formally arrested several months afterward. Canadian officials have called those arrests “arbitrary.” Their cases were referred to prosecutors on Tuesday, exactly a year after they were first detained.
Shachi Kurl, the executive director of the Angus Reid Institute, said that while respondents were not specifically asked whether those political developments were responsible for their declining views on China, she “would be hard-pressed to find any other reason.”
“Broadly, these data do reveal a wariness, if not outright hostility toward China,” Kurl said.
Canadians are now evenly split on whether the country should have arrested Meng at all. Nearly half of respondents believed the Canadian government should apply political pressure to get her out of the legal system rather than leave it to the courts.
The majority of Canadians don’t want to see stronger trade with China, the results suggest. The percentage of Canadians who pointed to China as a country that we should develop closer trade ties with halved over the last four years to just one-in-five.
Earlier this year, China banned pork and beef imports, costing Canadian farmers some $100 million before the ban on pork was lifted. Canadian canola imports are also still suspended in China.
Canola
An increasing number — about seven-in-10, up from six-in-10 in February — of Canadians now believe the principles of human rights and the rule of law should be more important than trade and investment opportunities, the poll found. But respondents in the Prairies, as well as those who supported the Conservative Party, were less likely to prioritize those principles than were those in B.C. and Central and Eastern Canada, as well as those who backed the Liberals, Bloc or NDP.
“For many Canadians, this continues to be a complicated, complex, fractured relationship whereby Canadians are incredibly wary and incredibly circumspect toward the country of China, yet at the same time … they cannot entirely turn their back on the economic imperative to work with China,” Kurl said.
The changing opinion of Canadians on trade with China appeared to be in keeping with a broader trend. Canadians were also much less likely in 2019 than they were in 2015 to want stronger trade ties with the European Union, U.S., India, South and Central America, or Southeast Asia.
“I would say over the last several decades, we’ve gone from being a little bit trade resistant if you go back to the 1980s … to being quite trade embracing, or pro-trade in the 1990s, to being a little more trade skeptical,” Kurl said.
After having gone through several recent trade negotiations, “Canadians are alive to the fact that there have been concessions,” Kurl suggested.
“I think you have a country that is feeling a little bruised, a little smacked as a result,” she said.
The poll was conducted Nov. 16-20, with a random sample of 1,499 Canadian members of the Angus Reid Forum. The margin of error is plus or minus 2.5 per cent, 19 times out of 20.