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PM’S recruitment of Barton will please China’s Xi Jinping

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PM’S recruitment of Barton will please China’s Xi Jinping

THE ANTIDOTE FOR TRUMPISM IS NOT LIKELY TO BE FOUND IN BARTON, WHO HAD A HAND IN SO MANY PRO-BEIJING POLICIES

  • National Post – (Latest Edition)
  • 3 Sep 2026
  • TERRY GLAVIN
In a surprise move this week, Prime Minister Mark Carney named Dominic Barton, Canada’s former ambassador to China, as the new board chair of a reconfigured Invest in Canada initiative, which will be hosting a Davos-like summit bringing together “the world’s largest investors, including top CEOS, entrepreneurs, and prominent global business leaders” in Toronto later this month, Terry Glavin writes.

There has been no greater gift to the Liberal party’s powerful pro-beijing comprador caste than U.S. President Donald Trump’s exasperating bellicosity and exhausting trade-relations vandalism. Even after nearly a decade of scandals involving China’s Uyghur slave camps, its “hostage diplomacy,” mass espionage, intellectual property theft, forced corporate co-ventures and clandestine election-interference operations, by this summer the Pew Research Centre found that Canadians had come to view China more favourably than the United States.

You could say the American president can be thanked for that.

In the crude calculus of political advantage, by the time China’s former favourite Justin Trudeau was obliged to walk the plank and resign as prime minister in January last year, a deep reservoir of favourable ratings had become available to any Canadian politician who could be convincingly prescribed as a therapeutic remedy to the pestilence of Trumpism. No matter what your own promiscuous record in Xi Jinping’s corporate circles might be, you can get away with almost anything.

If there is a better explanation for Prime Minister Mark Carney’s choice of Dominic Barton as the Liberals’ spirit guide in their “new world order” project to radically expand foreign direct investment in Canada and pull the country out of the American economic orbit, it is not immediately obvious.

In a surprise move this week, Carney named Barton as the new board chair of a reconfigured Invest in Canada initiative, which will be hosting a Davos-like summit bringing together “the world’s largest investors, including top CEOS, entrepreneurs, and prominent global business leaders” in Toronto later this month. There’s no evidence that any distinction will be drawn between foreign direct investment from democracies and dirty money from torture states.

A key element in the Invest in Canada mandate is to double Canadian exports to non-american markets over the next decade. The project itself was one of the key proposals that arose a decade ago from Barton’s time as chair of Justin Trudeau’s inaugural Advisory Council on Economic Growth, an operation within Bill Morneau’s finance ministry run by Mckinsey and Company, the multinational management consultancy Barton was serving at the time as global managing partner.

Another proposal from Barton’s council that was adopted by the Trudeau government: the catastrophic idea of doubling immigration to 500,000 people annually by 2025. It isn’t entirely clear that the Carney government has abandoned the “demographic deficit” thinking of its predecessors.

Barton came to the inner chambers of the Trudeau government after bringing Mckinsey’s heft to Trudeau’s bid for the Liberal party leadership in 2012. Trudeau’s manifesto proposed that deepening trade relationships with China would “build middle-class wealth in Canada.” As for Beijing’s convention-defying trade practices: “China, for one, sets its own rules and will continue to do so because it can. China has a game plan. There is nothing inherently sinister about that.”

There was no rationale involving Trumpist vulgarity available to the Liberals back then, and as it turned out there’s quite a lot that’s proved to be sinister about Beijing’s own rules. Its “game plan” has involved hollowing out western economies by flooding markets with its subsidized industrial overproduction, financing Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine, funding the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps by the purchase of 90 per cent of Iran’s oil via the Khomeinists’ sanctions-evading “ghost fleet” and ensnaring developing countries in its Belt and Road debt traps.

As recently as four years ago, the folly of the Trudeau-barton approach to foreign trade was so obvious that Ottawa had shifted to enthusiastically following U.S. president Joe Biden’s lead by rapidly reducing Canada’s exposure to Chinese economic strong-arming. “What we want is certainly a decoupling: certainly from China,” Industry Minister François-philippe Champagne said at the time.

But by January of this year it was back to the Trudeau-barton approach and to the opposite of decoupling when Prime Minister Carney struck a multi-faceted trade, law enforcement and cultural “strategic partnership” with Beijing, declaring his embrace of China’s “new world order.” It’s not certain that the current American president can be blamed for this. Barton’s Advisory Council on Economic Growth was succeeded by the Liberals’ Leaders’ Task Force on Economic Growth, which Mark Carney took over as chair in 2024, and here we are.

A key element in the Invest in Canada mandate is to double Canadian exports to non-american markets over the next decade.

Barton is best known to most Canadians as the ambassador to China from 2019 to 2021, and for his Mckinsey and Company having unaccountably ended up with more than $200 million in rules-flouting federal contracts after Trudeau came to office in 2015. Barton had been picked as ambassador to replace John Mccallum, the hapless former Liberal cabinet minister and China enthusiast who had to be fired by Chrystia Freeland, who was foreign affairs minister at the time.

Mccallum had more or less taken the side of Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou during her house detention in Vancouver while the courts deliberated on a U.S. Justice Department sanctions-evasion warrant for her arrest. Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor were held hostage in China for the duration — 1,019 days.

But elsewhere, and especially in the United States, Barton is known for having doubled Mckinsey’s annual earnings to $10 billion during his decade as the firm’s global managing director by means that are an indelicate subject in Liberal circles. Mckinsey’s notoriety didn’t come just from its lucrative habit of providing business services to the legions of kleptocrats and strongmen from the United Nations’ torture-state bloc, which has been growing in number, in power and influence for the past 25 years.

That phenomenon all by itself goes a long way to explain the collapse of the “rules-based international order,” and it preceded Trumpism. The story is set out meticulously by The New York Times investigative reporters Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsyth in their book When Mckinsey Comes To Town: The Hidden Influence of the World’s Most Powerful Consulting Firm.

During Barton’s years as the firm’s Global Managing Partner from 2009 to 2018, Mckinsey’s consultants had also embedded themselves at the senior levels of almost all of the world’s largest corporations, playing their part in raising the income of a typical CEO from 20 times a worker’s wages to 300 times as much. It’s another story that helps explain the rise of Trumpism, and it’s well told in the Atlantic magazine’s How Mckinsey Destroyed the Middle Class.

During Barton’s time at the top of the company, and during his term as the firm’s Asia chair from 2004 to 2009, while he was based in Shanghai, Mckinsey’s client list came to include 26 of Beijing’s 96 stateowned enterprises — weapons manufacturers, agri-food empires, telecommunications giants, oil companies and steel companies.

Meanwhile, during his years in the executive suite of Brookfield Asset Management from 2020 to 2025, Carney went out of his way to praise Xi Jinping. During his several visits to China, he congratulated the regime for its application of Artificial Intelligence technologies. Brookfield owns millions of square metres of Chinese real estate and holds sensitive investments in Chinese stateowned enterprises.

Back in 2025, during the federal election campaign, Charles Burton, the eminent China scholar and senior fellow with the China-focused think-tank Sinopsis, based in Prague, raised an interesting point. “I’m really wondering whether, if Carney becomes the prime minister, it’ll be like if Dominic Barton became the prime minister,” Burton told me. “I worry that ultimately, Carney’s plan is to out-barton Dominic Barton.”

Article Name:PM’S recruitment of Barton will please China’s Xi Jinping

Publication:National Post – (Latest Edition)

Section:FRONT PAGE

Author:TERRY GLAVIN

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Opinion: Why did Canada increase immigration targets?

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Opinion: Why did Canada increase immigration targets?

 

“So how do politicians get away with making immigration policies that ADVANCE THEIR OWN INTERESTS AT THE EXPENSE OF THE GENERAL PUBLIC?”

“The Liberals just showed us how to do it: Appoint a commission of experts with a fancy name like Advisory Council on Economic Growth, staff it with people YOU KNOW TO BE IN FAVOUR of vastly more immigration, publicize the council’s recommendation, and wait for some Libertarians like Terrance Corcoran and Andrew Coyne to SUPPORT IT ENTHUSIASTICALLY in the mass media.”

Brad: This man gets it…how entirely refreshing.

“Then have the Minister of Immigration APPEAR MODERATE and wise by announcing an increase in immigration by only 15.4 per cent, from 260,000 to 300,000, rather than the 73 per cent to 450,000 recommended by the council.”

Brad: Immutably correct…Prof. Grubel truly understands the wily ways of the Liberal propaganda machine. 

“How does mass immigration serve the interests of political parties? It brings financial and electoral support from employers who profit from being able to employ low-skilled and high-skilled labour at wages that are lower than what they would have to pay for Canadian workers.”

” Electoral support also comes from the owners of real estate, developers and brokers, construction workers and mortgage brokers who gain much from the increased business immigrants bring.”

Brad: Beautifully articulated. Now, let’s ask another pertinent question…“How does mass immigration serve the interests of Canadian-born citizens?

Answer: It doesn’t.

“Parties also gain support from immigrant communities who expect to gain political and economic clout, enjoy having family members join them, and benefit from larger markets for ethnic products and media. Support also comes from the large “immigration industry” of social workers, lawyers and language teachers who are paid by the government.”

Brad: More brilliance. The Liberals have understood for decades that immigrant families tend to vote collectively for the same party, and particularly the ruling government at the time these families enter the country.

“Immigration Industry”…exactly. What began as a policy is now an industry. Ditto for Multicultural Policy. 

“These groups benefiting from mass immigration lobby the government effectively, while the general public is unorganized and does not.”

Brad: Let us add one vital point here…much of the reason the general public is unorganized is because when representative organizations such as Cultural Action Party attempt to emulate the successful organization of immigrant and multicultural communities, we are labelled as RACIST, BIGOTED AND XENOPHOBIC.

Considering the present-day demographics of our nation–largely ruled by mass immigration from the third world– this is hypocrisy at its apex— a politically correct, illogical and oppressive force denying ALL communities the right to freedom of speech, assembly, and related civil rights as outlined in Canada’s Charter of Rights And Freedoms.

“The success of this shielding was revealed on the occasion of a recent Munk debate at the University of Toronto, which pitted advocates in favour against advocates against admitting more refugee claimants.”

” In a poll taken before the debate, 75 per cent of the audience wanted more refugees. After the debate and the presentation of facts by the con-side, only 55 per cent of the audience still held that view, a figure likely to become even smaller as the audience digests the facts more fully.

Brad: A great point, which suggests what common-sense Canadians already understand: the more public awareness of the true reality of immigration and multicult, the LESS PUBLIC SUPPORT.

This is one reason why Justin and his minions LOVE LOW INFORMATION VOTERS…and a primary reasons why they promoted the legalization of marijuana. 

“Information about many negative effects of mass immigration is kept from the public. For example, recent immigrants, even after many years in Canada, have lower incomes and pay lower taxes while they absorb the same government services as Canadians.”

“As result, immigrants impose a fiscal burden of $30 billion a year on taxpayers, which will grow all the time with the arrival of new immigrants.”

Canadians suffer from the effects immigrants have on the cost of housing and the levels of congestion, pollution and overcrowding in schools, universities and hospitals, the latter especially as the many parents and grandparents of immigrants near the end of their lives and add to the ever-growing wait lists for medical treatment experienced by all Canadians.

Brad: Here, the article alludes to the Family Reunification Immigration Program…the most economically unsound migration policy in the history of our nation…or perhaps, any western nation.

“Immigrants increase Canada’s cultural diversity, but the benefits from it have reached diminishing returns and the development of ethnic enclaves threatens national harmony and security.”

Brad: Firstly, the Liberals LOVE ethnic enclaves. Pourquoi? Because once again, they understand that ethnic enclaves VOTE IN BLOCKS.

Secondly, cultural diversity equates with the diminishment and erosion of traditional elements of Canadian heritage– language, religion, English/French culture, and the like.

Unlike Trudeau and his sunny gang of globalists, millions of Canadians actually VALUE THESE TRADITIONS.

“Unfortunately, governments and the beneficiaries of mass immigration have prevented these facts from reaching wide audiences and allowing political parties to continue to use mass immigration policies for their narrow self-interest.”

Brad: Again, wonderfully articulated. Prof. Grubel has written perhaps the finest article of Canadian immigration in recent history. Too bad the logic, facts and data contained within will be entirely ignored by our government, multicult organizations , immigration benefactors and all the rest.

Such is life under our pseudo-democratic, Liberal-Totalitarian regime.

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