News item: Canada starts a trade war with Brazil by banning imports of Brazilian beef due to a suspicion of a theoretical risk of mad cow disease. There are no confirmed cases of BSE in Brazil. Outraged Brazilians and even some Health Canada scientists have denounced the ban as imaginary.
News item: Bombardier Corporation, a Montreal company with very solid links to the Liberal Party, and Brazil’s Embraer are locked in a multibillion dollar race for airplane orders.
News item: Chrétien gently deflects comments about serious human rights abuses in China after a damning report from Amnesty International. He and several provincial premiers and captains of industry are in China on a Team Canada trade mission to accelerate the flow of goods and capital with that country.
In the House of Commons, outgoing NDP international trade critic Bill Blaikie cogently speculates on what China would have to do to Bombardier to get Chrétien to take any action on human rights abuses.
You’re absolutely right. We ought to suspend all trade with China, and force other nations to do the same. After all, isn’t that the same policy that made Cuba into the paradise it is today?
I agree, Nimune. Hey, I may have a soft spot for China being a Chinese major and all, but I don’t think the way to bring China up to our (North Americans’) standards is to bully and isolate them. Not that I’m knowledgeable enough to have a big debate on the subject, but that’s how I feel.
All I know is he’s willing to start a trade war about the theory of the possibility of a risk, but he’s not willing to make a peep over human rights abuses exhaustively documented…
And if he did make a peep about it, what good would it do?
The Chinese government does not give a shit what we think about their human rights record; they are an utterly amoral Communist dictatorship and have no more care or concern for our opinions on human rights than on how many goals Mario Lemieux has scored.
Let’s be honest; about the only thing Canada can do in this case is get what it can out of China and hope for the best. Isolationism isn’t a solution to anything, and bitching about China’s human rights record will accomplish squat.
We can push around Nigeria, South Africa or Brazil a little. China’s too big and run by too inhuman and evil a government to be worth the effort. The Brazilian fiasco is an entirely separate matter, and has less to do with Brazil than it does with the government’s love for giving your tax dollars to friends of the Liberal Party.
I’m with Jean on this. I think it behooves us to be far more tollerant to a country that gave us the Brazillian Bikini Wax and the thong bikini. In contrast, China gave the world what? Gunpowder and cheap fried food filled with MSG… (ummm…pass the honey spare ribs, will ya…)
When exactly is Brazil planning to follow through with an internation ruling telling them to stop funding Embraer as they compete with Bombardier? Oh wait, I believe they said never!!!
This is no doubt true, but I’d rather the government bitch about them ineffectively than crawl all over them like a cat in heat.
You’ll get no argument from me there. It was more or less what I was arguing.
What’s more funny is that we were able to circulate a petition to hold a referendum on changing the leader of the opposition, Stockwell Day’s, first name to Doris.
