Canadian domestic politics have helped magnify the most recent dispute between Beijing and Ottawa into a full blown tit-for-tat expulsion of diplomats.
While some experts who track relations between China and Canada play the spat down — one called it “pretty trivial” — it’s one more crack contributing to a far more dangerous long-term rupture.
Labelled “global fragmentation,” the issue was raised at a recent International Monetary Fund meeting in Washington, D.C. The current Canadian dispute may represent a further fracturing of the world into competing trade blocs that will not only make us all poorer, but impede crucial talks on shared global threats, including climate change and artificial intelligence.
After being pressed by Tory Leader Pierre Poilievre, Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly cited China’s “interference in our internal affairs” in declaring Chinese diplomat Zhao Wei persona non grata. As expected, in reply China expelled a Canadian diplomat, Jennifer Lynn Lalonde.
While far less significant than previous disputes with Beijing that in the past led to the long-term imprisonment of innocent Canadians and may have contributed to persistent trade sanctions, the latest Canada-China spat is only one sign of hostility between the world’s free-market democracies and what appears to be an emerging alternative bloc.
Conservative foreign affairs critic Michael Chong has pressed the government for action after his relatives were threatened by China, leading to tit-for-tat expulsions by Canada and China. (Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press)
Just this week, China vowed retaliation against European sanctions on Chinese companies accused of aiding Russia’s war in Ukraine. Also this week, the U.S. government announced it had arrested Litang Liang, an American citizen accused of pointing out to China its friends and enemies within the United States.
“Even as we need more international co-operation on multiple fronts, we are facing the spectre of a new Cold War that could see the world fragment into rival economic blocs,” warned IMF boss Kristalina Georgieva earlier this year. “This would be a collective policy mistake that would leave everyone poorer and less secure.”
Bank of Canada governor Tiff Macklem raised the issue in testimony to the Senate standing committee on banking, commerce and the economy last month after discussions in Washington.
‘Cost to global growth’
“The reality is we have all benefited tremendously from an increasingly integrated global trade and investment system and if that goes in reverse, that will certainly have a cost to global growth,” Macklem told senators.
As an open trading economy, said Danielle Goldfarb, vice-president of global affairs, economics and public policy at the Toronto-based research company RIWI, a decline in global trade could hit Canada hard.
“From Canada’s perspective, as a small open economy and a democracy, we always have had an interest in this rules-based multilateral international order, basically, and that’s kind of an imperative for us,” said Goldfarb in a phone conversation this week.
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China-Canada relations are on ice, but trade between the two countries is hotter than ever. After all, what’s a little hostage-taking among friends? Paul Haavardsrud breaks down our current trading relationship and asks if it’s possible to boycott the second biggest economy in the world.
Goldfarb, who is also a fellow with the Vancouver-based Asia Pacific Foundation, said that until a few years ago, Canadian policy on China by both the current governing Liberals and the Conservatives before them assumed that welcoming the growing giant into global networks would make rules-based trade stronger.
“But we’re seeing something different now,” said Goldfarb.
As Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland outlined in a Washington speech last year, the failure of autocracies like Russia and China to follow what western countries considered free and fair trade rules means democracies must reshape their strategies.
The danger of “decoupling”
“You can’t simply disengage from the second largest economy in the world,” she said, pointing out that China is already beginning to develop policy in the important area of generative artificial intelligence that others, including Canadian AI leader Geoffrey Hinton, say demands global co-operation.
Canada and its allies know it is essential to keep the door open on “global public goods” including AI policy, climate change and avoiding nuclear conflict, said economist Dane Rowlands at Carleton University’s Patterson School of International Affairs in Ottawa. But he said relations with China have never been so bad.
Canada braces for retaliation over Chinese diplomat’s expulsion
China expelled Jennifer Lynn Lalonde, a Canadian diplomat in Shanghai, just hours after Canada named Chinese diplomat Zhao Wei persona non grata over allegations he tried to intimidate a Conservative MP’s family. Government sources say China could make further retaliatory moves involving trade or security.
“I think it is at a nadir right now; it’s at a low point,” said Rowlands. “I think the diplomatic fighting is something that’s just kind of accompanying the more general bad blood that seems to be out there between different groups of countries in the world.”
At the heart of the growing conflict is the expanding clout of China as an economic and military power that inevitably destabilizes the status quo as it challenges the dominance of the United States and its allies.
“It’s not that the United States has shrunk dramatically in terms of its share of the global economy,” said Rowlands. But the U.S. bloc is no longer able to dictate in world affairs, he added.
Feeling their growing power
“When they set a policy … they wouldn’t really have to care how much other countries bought into the idea,” he said of the U.S. But in their reaction to sanctions on Russia, he said that China and India have shown they can now frustrate U.S. and European policy. That is relatively new and a source of friction.
Goldfarb, Rowlands and many others have said that Canada’s ultimate goal must be to use any influence it has to prevent the conflict between China and the U.S. from escalating into war.
But as the IMF’s Georgieva has described, disruptions short of war could have a serious effect on the world economy.
It is a position Rowlands accepts even if there little proof of an immediate economic impact, but he thinks the IMF’s interests may be different from Canada’s.
“The IMF’s view is that globalization is great,” said Rowlands. “We should just let industries go to wherever they’re going to be more efficient.”
Responding to what some see as Chinese bullying in the Chong case may be one way of pushing back on the diplomatic front.
But Rowlands said that as security concerns grow and China threatens to block essential goods such as rare earth minerals, which it has done, it becomes imperative for Canada and its allies to become more self-sufficient, even if that makes us a little poorer in the short run.
“I think it’s a fair argument to make that by importing goods from overseas and letting them do all the production, that we are losing certain advantages economically, as well as as I mentioned, strategically in terms of security.”
NEW YORK (AP) — Teen smoking hit an all-time low in the U.S. this year, part of a big drop in the youth use of tobacco overall, the government reported Thursday.
There was a 20% drop in the estimated number of middle and high school students who recently used at least one tobacco product, including cigarettes, electronic cigarettes, nicotine pouches and hookahs. The number went from 2.8 million last year to 2.25 million this year — the lowest since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s key survey began in 1999.
“Reaching a 25-year low for youth tobacco product use is an extraordinary milestone for public health,” said Deirdre Lawrence Kittner, director of CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health, in a statement. However, “our mission is far from complete.”
A previously reported drop in vaping largely explains the overall decline in tobacco use from 10% to about 8% of students, health officials said.
The youth e-cigarette rate fell to under 6% this year, down from 7.7% last year — the lowest at any point in the last decade. E-cigarettes are the most commonly used tobacco products among teens, followed by nicotine pouches.
Use of other products has been dropping, too.
Twenty-five years ago, nearly 30% of high school students smoked. This year, it was just 1.7%, down from the 1.9%. That one-year decline is so small it is not considered statistically significant, but marks the lowest since the survey began 25 years ago. The middle school rate also is at its lowest mark.
Recent use of hookahs also dropped, from 1.1% to 0.7%.
The results come from an annual CDC survey, which included nearly 30,000 middle and high school students at 283 schools. The response rate this year was about 33%.
Officials attribute the declines to a number of measures, ranging from price increases and public health education campaigns to age restrictions and more aggressive enforcement against retailers and manufacturers selling products to kids.
Among high school students, use of any tobacco product dropped to 10%, from nearly 13% and e-cigarette use dipped under 8%, from 10%. But there was no change reported for middle school students, who less commonly vape or smoke or use other products,
Current use of tobacco fell among girls and Hispanic students, but rose among American Indian or Alaska Native students. And current use of nicotine pouches increased among white kids.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
WASHINGTON (AP) — An Alabama man was arrested Thursday for his alleged role in the January hack of a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission social media account that led the price of bitcoin to spike, the Justice Department said.
Eric Council Jr., 25, of Athens, is accused of helping to break into the SEC’s account on X, formerly known as Twitter, allowing the hackers to prematurely announce the approval of long-awaited bitcoin exchange-traded funds.
The price of bitcoin briefly spiked more than $1,000 after the post claimed “The SEC grants approval for #Bitcoin ETFs for listing on all registered national securities exchanges.”
But soon after the initial post appeared, SEC Chairman Gary Gensler said on his personal account that the SEC’s account was compromised. “The SEC has not approved the listing and trading of spot bitcoin exchange-traded products,” Gensler wrote, calling the post unauthorized without providing further explanation.
Authorities say Council carried out what’s known as a “SIM swap,” using a fake ID to impersonate someone with access to the SEC’s X account and convince a cellphone store to give him a SIM card linked to the person’s phone. Council was able to take over the person’s cellphone number and get access codes to the SEC’s X account, which he shared with others who broke into the account and sent the post, the Justice Department says.
Prosecutors say after Council returned the iPhone he used for the SIM swap, his online searches included: “What are the signs that you are under investigation by law enforcement or the FBI even if you have not been contacted by them.”
An email seeking comment was sent Thursday to an attorney for Council, who is charged in Washington’s federal court with conspiracy to commit aggravated identity theft and access device fraud.
The price of bitcoin swung from about $46,730 to just below $48,000 after the unauthorized post hit on Jan. 9 and then dropped to around $45,200 after the SEC’s denial. The SEC officially approved the first exchange-traded funds that hold bitcoin the following day.
Google, Meta and TikTok have removed social media accounts belonging to an industrial plant in Russia’s Tatarstan region aimed at recruiting young foreign women to make drones for Moscow’s war in Ukraine.
Posts on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok were taken down following an investigation by The Associated Press published Oct. 10 that detailed working conditions in the drone factory in the Alabuga Special Economic Zone, which is under U.S. and British sanctions.
Videos and other posts on the social media platforms promised the young women, who are largely from Africa, a free plane ticket to Russia and a salary of more than $500 a month following their recruitment via the program called “Alabuga Start.”
But instead of a work-study program in areas like hospitality and catering, some of them said they learned only arriving in the Tatarstan region that they would be toiling in a factory to make weapons of war, assembling thousands of Iranian-designed attack drones to be launched into Ukraine.
In interviews with AP, some of the women who worked in the complex complained of long hours under constant surveillance, of broken promises about wages and areas of study, and of working with caustic chemicals that left their skin pockmarked and itching. AP did not identify them by name or nationality out of concern for their safety.
The tech companies also removed accounts for Alabuga Polytechnic, a vocational boarding school for Russians aged 16-18 and Central Asians aged 18-22 that bills its graduates as experts in drone production.
The accounts collectively had at least 158,344 followers while one page on TikTok had more than a million likes.
In a statement, YouTube said its parent company Google is committed to sanctions and trade compliance and “after review and consistent with our policies, we terminated channels associated with Alabuga Special Economic Zone.”
Meta said it removed accounts on Facebook and Instagram that “violate our policies.” The company said it was committed to complying with sanctions laws and said it recognized that human exploitation is a serious problem which required a multifaceted approach, including at Meta.
It said it had teams dedicated to anti-trafficking efforts and aimed to remove those seeking to abuse its platforms.
TikTok said it removed videos and accounts which violated its community guidelines, which state it does not allow content that is used for the recruitment of victims, coordination of their transport, and their exploitation using force, fraud, coercion, or deception.
The women aged 18-22 were recruited to fill an urgent labor shortage in wartime Russia. They are from places like Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, South Sudan, Sierra Leone and Nigeria, as well as the South Asian country of Sri Lanka. The drive also is expanding to elsewhere in Asia as well as Latin America.
Accounts affiliated to Alabuga with tens of thousands of followers are still accessible on Telegram, which did not reply to a request for comment. The plant’s management also did not respond to AP.
The Alabuga Start recruiting drive used a robust social media campaign of slickly edited videos with upbeat music that show African women smiling while cleaning floors, wearing hard hats while directing cranes, and donning protective equipment to apply paint or chemicals.
Videos also showed them enjoying Tatarstan’s cultural sites or playing sports. None of the videos made it clear the women would be working in a drone manufacturing complex.
Online, Alabuga promoted visits to the industrial area by foreign dignitaries, including some from Brazil, Sri Lanka and Burkina Faso.
In a since-deleted Instagram post, a Turkish diplomat who visited the plant had compared Alabuga Polytechnic to colleges in Turkey and pronounced it “much more developed and high-tech.”
According to Russian investigative outlets Protokol and Razvorot, some pupils at Alabuga Polytechnic are as young as 15 and have complained of poor working conditions.
Videos previously on the platforms showed the vocational school students in team-building exercises such as “military-patriotic” paintball matches and recreating historic Soviet battles while wearing camouflage.
Last month, Alabuga Start said on Telegram its “audience has grown significantly!”
That could be due to its hiring of influencers, who promoted the site on TikTok and Instagram as an easy way for young women to make money after leaving school.
TikTok removed two videos promoting Alabuga after publication of the AP investigation.
Experts told AP that about 90% of the women recruited via the Alabuga Start program work in drone manufacturing.
