Terry Glavin: Trudeau Liberals too eager to buy into China’s green ‘co-operation’

As at least 10,000 delegates and observers from more than 190 countries gather in Montreal for the Convention of the Parties’ biodiversity summit this week, it’s difficult not to be dreary about the summit’s prospects for reversing the alarming trends that continue to push the earth’s animal and plant species over extinction’s cliff edge.

It’s not all bad news. But it’s pretty bad. And with Beijing as the co-host with Canada, it’s hard not to be at least a bit cynical about the whole thing.

The conference in Montreal was supposed to be convened two years ago in Kunming, China, but COVID-19 got in the way, so now the event is being held in Canada owing to the Trudeau government’s decision to oblige the Chinese. In the lead-up to Kunming, the United Nations’ Global Biodiversity Outlook prepared a report card on how the world had progressed by then on the 20 biodiversity targets set 10 years earlier when the parties met in Aichi, Japan. It’s pretty grim reading.

Of the 20 Aichi targets, none were met. Of the 60 “elements” within the targets, only seven were achieved and 13 registered no progress at all. The UN couldn’t figure out what was going on with a couple elements, but there was progress in 38 elements.

Numerical analyses don’t illuminate much on a global scale, but that’s the scale the COP15 gathering in Montreal is dealing with. The rate of global deforestation had slowed by a third over that decade, but overfishing has accelerated, and wetlands continued to vanish. Still, harmful invasive species were eradicated from islands in 200 projects. Also to the good: 44 per cent of the critical areas of the world identified as particularly rich in species diversity ended up with some degree of protection, up from 29 per cent identified at the Aichi gathering.

It doesn’t help to be cynical about these things but Beijing is, after all, in the wheelhouse here.

The hollowest banality you’ll hear when it comes to China is the one about how, sure, the Chinese Communist Party might be a world-devouring rogue state that we have to protect ourselves from, but gosh, we do have to get along with Chinese strongman Xi Jinping when it comes to big-picture challenges like the impact of climate change on human well-being and global biodiversity.

The way that platitude is put in Ottawa’s recently-unveiled Indo-Pacific Strategy: China may well be “an increasingly disruptive global power,” but “China’s sheer size and influence makes co-operation necessary to address some of the world’s existential pressures, such as climate change and biodiversity loss, global health and nuclear proliferation.”

And fair enough. It makes sense. But the thing is, we’ve been co-operating like crazy already, all along. No country has co-operated with China on environmental issues more enthusiastically and obsequiously than Canada. How’s that been working out? For all its much-lauded investments in electric cars and solar panels, China had given the green light to 8.63 gigawatts (GW) of coal-fired power in the first quarter of this year. China now emits more greenhouse gases than the entire developed-world output, combined.

Hindsight is 20/20, as they say, but it’s hard to put your finger on a folly more obvious now than the 1981 decision by Pierre Trudeau’s government to rejig the Canadian International Development Agency’s eligibility requirements so as to allow China to qualify as a foreign-aid recipient. Within a year, CIDA’s role in China was fashioned to suit the purposes of the trade lobby, and that’s how CIDA was run in China until the agency was folded into Global Affairs in 2013.

China has used its “developing country” pretensions to evade a variety of the multilateral environmental and climate change obligations that burden “First World” countries. The result has been that in the existential challenge of global warming, you’d never know it but the greenhouse gas output from Europe and North America have pretty much flatlined over the past quarter of a century, while China’s output has quadrupled.

China has been at the forefront of assertions that it is the developed economies’ job to bear the greater costs of climate change mitigation, owing to the legacy of the Industrial Revolution. There’s a case to be made for that, but according to the University of Oxford’s Our World in Data project, the volume of carbon dioxide China has pumped into the atmosphere over the past eight years exceeds the two-century output of the United Kingdom, where the Industrial Revolution began.

So perhaps, yes, “China’s sheer size and influence makes co-operation necessary,” but Canada has never shied away from co-operating. Canada never stopped co-operating, in just the way Beijing wanted, long after CIDA was folded up.

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The China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development is one of China’s key exercises in “co-operation,” from the days when too many liberal democracies imagined that if the democracies played nice then eventually the Chinese Communist Party would embrace human rights and other such obligations of a civilized UN member state.

It’s a relic from the CIDA days in China, like a surviving specimen of a long-extinct species. Established in 1992, the China Council was one of CIDA’s big accomplishments. It still exists, and it still doesn’t even pay for itself. Canada is still the leading international donor to the China Council — more than $8 million last year. The Council’s secretariat support was located for years at Simon Fraser University. It’s now based at the Institute for Sustainable Development in Winnipeg.

According to Filip Jirouš, a researcher with the Department of Sinology at Charles University in Prague, the Council may be all well and good, but there’s much to be skeptical about. The China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation, for instance, is clearly a function of Xi Jinping’s influence-peddling United Front operations, and the China Council — with Canada’s Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson as its vice-chair — may be no better.

“These activities are somewhat reminiscent of the USSR’s exploitation of the world peace movement during the Cold War, through which Moscow sought to demilitarize its enemies by encouraging them to pursue a generally, worthy goal,” Jirouš concludes. “While their methods are similar, the focus of the CCP’s ‘green co-operation’ efforts appear to be mainly to support its propaganda and political goals.”

One would hope there’s a lot more going on in Montreal than that, but with Beijing’s heavy hand on the tiller, it’s hard not to be a bit cynical.

National Post