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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)

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Author:TERRY GLAVIN

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It’s Time to Take Defence of the Canadian Arctic Seriously — Get the Ships & Planes We Need Now! “China’s intent to dominate the Arctic region of North America is of increasing priority for the Xi Jinping regime.” Charles Burton, Former Canadian Ambassador to Red China

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China to Wage War on America from the Arctic

by Gordon G. Chang

Translations of this item:

  • This month, Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post reported that the Shanghai-based Polar Research Institute of China revealed that “China has completed the field testing and evaluation of an underwater listening device that will be deployed on a large scale in the Arctic Ocean.”
  • The innocuous-sounding report tells us that China intends to wage war against the United States and Canada from the Arctic.
  • Other than this buoy, the institute said, China had “never planted a listening device there.”
  • That assertion is not truthful. Last fall, the Canadian military, according to Canada’s Globe and Mail in February, removed buoys placed by China in Canadian waters in the Arctic.
  • “China is now covertly preparing the groundwork for militarization of the largely undefended northern territory and critical Arctic sea routes.” — Charles Burton of the Ottawa-based Macdonald-Laurier Institute, to Gatestone, July 2023.
  • All of this data is needed to listen for submarines, specifically American ones. China wants to track and destroy American subs from the top of the world before they can flood into Asian waters.
  • The U.S.’s generous “engagement” approach to China has resulted in China obtaining observer status in the Arctic Council although no Chinese territory is in or near the Arctic.
  • China already has two permanent research stations in the Arctic, one in Norway and the other in Iceland. That is two too many.
  • [F]or China the Arctic is primarily a military domain. In addition to the buoys they are leaving in the Arctic, the Chinese are surveilling the area by air. The spy balloon that flew over the lower 48 states this year initially crossed into Alaska and Western Canada.
  • China is not only pressing the United States and Canada from the north. In the other direction, China is establishing military bases in South America and the Caribbean and is infiltrating saboteurs across the border with Mexico. The Biden administration is allowing a hostile state to go hard against America from all sides. A menacing China is now everywhere in the Western Hemisphere.
[F]or China the Arctic is primarily a military domain. In addition to the buoys they are leaving in the Arctic, the Chinese are surveilling the area by air. Pictured: The Chinese research vessel and ice-breaker Xuelong arrives in China’s Fujian province on June 27, 2010, in preparation for sailing to the Arctic. (Photo by STR/AFP via Getty Images)

This month, Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post reported that the Shanghai-based Polar Research Institute of China revealed that “China has completed the field testing and evaluation of an underwater listening device that will be deployed on a large scale in the Arctic Ocean.”

The innocuous-sounding report tells us that China intends to wage war against the United States and Canada from the Arctic.

China had installed the “polar subglacial shallow surface acoustic monitoring buoy system” on floating ice in the Arctic on August 9, 2021. Information obtained by the device was uplinked to Chinese satellites.

The research institute, a Chinese central government agency that “plans and coordinates China’s polar activities,” stated that the devices could be used for “subglacial communication, navigation and positioning, target detection, and the reconstruction of marine environmental parameters.” This buoy “can be massively used in the construction of the Arctic Ocean environmental monitoring network.”

Other than this buoy, the institute said, China had “never planted a listening device there.”

That assertion is not truthful. Last fall, the Canadian military, according to Canada’s Globe and Mail in February, removed buoys placed by China in Canadian waters in the Arctic.

Not much is known about the removed Chinese devices. Pierre LeBlanc, a former commander of the Canadian armed forces in the Arctic, told Voice of America that Canada has not revealed the location of the removed buoys or their type, but it is nonetheless apparent the Chinese military placed them in or near Canada’s Northwest Passage without permission.

“China’s intent to dominate the Arctic region of North America is of increasing priority for the Xi Jinping regime,” Charles Burton of the Ottawa-based Macdonald-Laurier Institute told Gatestone. “Moving forward from the illogical assertion that China is a ‘near-Arctic nation’ and Xi’s touting of the ‘Polar Silk Road,’ China is now covertly preparing the groundwork for militarization of the largely undefended northern territory and critical Arctic sea routes.”

Retired Lieutenant-General Michael Day told the Globe and Mail that China’s buoys would likely have been mapping environmental conditions such as seabeds and ice thickness. Buoys can also monitor ice movement, ocean currents, water temperature, and salinity.

All of this data is needed to listen for submarines, specifically American ones. China wants to track and destroy American subs from the top of the world before they can flood into Asian waters.

The frozen Arctic is a hot topic these days, and China is trying to control it. The Polar Research Institute of China attempted to buy an airport in Lapland, Finland, but under U.S. pressure the government there blocked the purchase.

In addition, a Chinese state mining company attempted to buy land close to a facility maintained by the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the joint Canada-U.S. military command that provides early warning. That purchase was also stopped.

“Since the advent of the Cold War, the Arctic has been the domain of two nuclear powers, the United States of America and the Soviet Union, now the Russian Federation,” said James Fanell of the Geneva Centre for Security Policy to this publication. “These two states demonstrated an understanding of the balance of power and observed an uneasy truce within the waters of the Arctic. Since 2017, the People’s Republic of China, led by Xi Jinping, has made it clear it covets access to the Arctic and recognition of its major-power status there.”

China has, Fanell points out, announced three Blue Economic Corridors, one of which includes the Arctic. These corridors are part of Xi’s worldwide Belt and Road Initiative.

Unlike Moscow and Washington, Beijing, with its forays into the Arctic, is upending stability. As Fanell, also a former U.S. Navy captain who served as Director of Intelligence and Information Operations at the U.S. Pacific Fleet, points out, “Beijing arrogantly believes they deserve a place in the Arctic Council to ‘call the shots’ and expand Chinese influence and access to this vital region atop the planet.”

The U.S.’s generous “engagement” approach to China has resulted in China obtaining observer status in the Arctic Council although no Chinese territory is in or near the Arctic.

There are eight states with territory inside the Arctic Circle. With the exceptions of Russia and Sweden, all are NATO members. This year, Sweden should join that alliance.

Moreover, the five Arctic littoral states—the Arctic Five of Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia, and the United States—are all NATO members other than Russia. This gives America the ability to determine outcomes in the Arctic, especially if Washington were to oppose China’s initiatives, as it of course should.

China already has two permanent research stations in the Arctic, one in Norway and the other in Iceland. That is two too many.

The Chinese know the value of the Arctic. Warming temperatures are melting Arctic ice, making drilling and mining in the region more feasible. Moreover, melting ice opens up shorter routes for container ships and other vessels.

Yet for China, the Arctic is primarily a military domain. In addition to the buoys they are leaving in the Arctic, the Chinese are surveilling the area by air. The spy balloon that flew over the lower 48 states this year initially crossed into Alaska and Western Canada.

China is not only pressing the United States and Canada from the north. In the other direction, China is establishing military bases in South America and the Caribbean and is infiltrating saboteurs across the border with Mexico. The Biden administration is allowing a hostile state to go hard against America from all sides. A menacing China is now everywhere in the Western Hemisphere.

Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China, a Gatestone Institute distinguished senior fellow, and a member of its Advisory Board.

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The West should cease trading with China – and yes, there are alternative sources of rare Earths

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The West should cease trading with China – and yes, there are alternative sources of rare Earths  – Don’t Panic about Rare Earth Elements. If that happened the odds are that it would result in the  overthrow of the  CCP.  Anything less than that and China will become ever stronger. RH 

Don’t Panic about Rare Earth ElementsJeremy HsuThe materials used in iPhones and Tesla cars need not become a long-term casualty of a U.S.-China trade war

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16300/china-containment

The Containment of China

by Lawrence A. Franklin
August 4, 2020 at 5:00 am

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The Containment of ChinaLawrence A. FranklinAfter China’s many transgressions over the past 50 years… the military containment of Chinese expansionism and…

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  • After China’s many transgressions over the past 50 years… the military containment of Chinese expansionism and Communist Party Chairman Xi Jinping’s stated goal of world domination needs to be the highest foreign policy priority of the Free World.
  • Countries could also be enjoined to cancel all commercial activity with China. Why fund one’s enemy and make him stronger?
  • China’s walk-in-the-park takeover of Hong Kong — an illegal appropriation — undoubtedly served to whet China’s expansionist appetite.
  • The firm tone of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s July 13 declaration that the U.S. rejects China’s fake claims in the South China Sea as mostly illegal will probably be seen as “just words.” The U.S. might need to convince Beijing that the U.S. and its allies have the political will to implement this containment.
  • China’s leaders are surely hoping that the current U.S. administration’s aversion to war will enable the Communists to pick off new territory with relative ease; the U.S. should not even let them think of such a possibility.
  • The Chinese Communist Party’s narrative is that the U.S. administration is threatening all the people of China. One Chinese state CCTV anchor added that the “U.S. fights for greed and arrogance,” but that “China will fight for a new world.” It certainly will — if we let it.
After China’s many transgressions over the past 50 years, the military containment of Chinese expansionism and Communist Party Chairman Xi Jinping’s stated goal of world domination needs to be the highest foreign policy priority of the Free World. Pictured: China’s Long March 10, a new Jin-class nuclear submarine, participates in a naval parade Shandong province on April 23, 2019. (Photo by Mark Schiefelbein/AFP via Getty Images)

After China’s many transgressions over the past 50 years — including the theft of $600 billion of U.S. intellectual property each year; Beijing’s malignant cover-up of the Covid-19 virus; the Communist regime’s attempts to blind US airmen with lasers; constructing military islands in the South China Sea, and last month sending a massive fleet of 250 Chinese fishing vessels near the Galapagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador, to name but a few — the military containment of Chinese expansionism and Communist Party Chairman Xi Jinping’s stated goal of world domination needs to be the highest foreign policy priority of the Free World.

The ultimate objective of this initiative would be to prevent Communist China’s aggression against the independent states of the Indo-Pacific region and beyond.

China’s walk-in-the-park takeover of Hong Kong — an illegal appropriation — undoubtedly served to whet China’s expansionist appetite.

The first military containment of China could encompass a broad and multi-tiered defense perimeter in an arc extending from Japan’s coastal waters, southeast to the continent of Australia, and northwest to the Himalayan borderlands between China and India, where China has already been attempting a land invasion. Although China’s recent record of malign behavior has drawn the ire of many, China is encouragingly vulnerable. Fourteen states share sections of China’s land borders, and the Chinese already have territorial disputes with 18 countries.

The leaders of China’s Communist Party have been clear about China’s territorial claims, particularly in the South China Sea. China’s claim there, if realized, would include about 85% of the waters off China and most of the island archipelagos within the South China Sea. The United States needs to be unambiguously clear that it will physically block any Chinese effort to realize any baseless assertions of Chinese sovereignty. America’s determination also needs be transparent so that Chinese leaders do not doubt U.S. resolve, in case China might be tempted to check it by staging a violent incident.

The firm tone of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s July 13 declaration that the U.S. rejects China’s fake claims in the South China Sea as mostly illegal will probably be seen as “just words.” The U.S. might need to convince Beijing that America and its allies have the political will to implement this containment. Pompeo also drew a line by asserting that the U.S. will defend the sovereignty of smaller South China Sea states — a conflict with China’s own often-stated claims.

For the U.S. to secure the endorsement of the Archipelago of Southeast Asian states, they first must be certain that the U.S. commitment to defend their sovereignty is unequivocal and permanent.

Many regional countries have been threatened by Chinese military assets and pushed to abandon their sovereign fishing and energy exploratory activities in waters claimed by China. In mid-June, for instance, a Chinese vessel rammed a Vietnamese fishing boat in disputed waters near the Paracel Islands, an archipelago chain claimed by both China and Vietnam. China in 2019-2020 continued to infuriate Indonesia by claiming sovereignty of waters inside Indonesia’s 200-mile economic zone, an area that would give Beijing sovereignty over the Indonesian Natuna Islands. In mid-April of this year, Malaysia was apparently shocked into the reality of China’s aggressive claims when a Chinese vessel, along with several Chinese Coast Guard vessels, boldly entered Malaysian waters clearly within Malaysia’s internationally recognized 200 hundred mile economic zone.

It seems to have been, however, the June 9, 2019 ramming and subsequent sinking of a Philippine fishing boat off Reed Bank in the Philippine Sea that had geopolitical ramifications. The incident happened shortly after Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte reversed himself and decided to keep a military defense pact with the U.S. His turnabout permitted continued U.S. access to Philippine air and naval bases, thus preserving the decades-long defense treaty between the U.S. and the Philippines, an important link in any wall to contain China.

Given the many examples of China’s aggressive behavior toward its neighbors, and with Taiwan now being openly threatened as well, another U.S. option, already undertaken, to lend substance to the military wall against China, was to send more U.S. military ships to the region to seriously increase the protection of the South China Sea, the American island of Guam, Ecuador and whatever else might be challenged.

A diplomatic plan might include a request that Australia — which has not only been unbudgeable despite Chinese pressure, but also has friendly ties with all governments in the area — host a summit of regional state political and military leaders. Representatives from the U.S., Japan, India, and Taiwan could attend, while permitting the host nation, Australia, to elicit the views and, one hopes, the commitment to contain the threat.

Subsequently, the U.S could dispatch policy and military teams to several regional states to discuss bilateral defense arrangements. These bilateral understandings could, in time, be linked up with already existing multinational defense organizations, such as “The Quad“: Japan, Australia, India and the U.S. In September, for the first time, all four members of the Quad will probably participate together in the India-hosted Malabar military exercises. This multinational barrier for containment could be further concretized by continuous regional military exercises, arms sales, military training exchange programs, and operational planning, as well as ports, bases, and airport visitations. Countries could also be enjoined to cancel all commercial activity with China. Why fund one’s enemy and make him stronger? This program functioned well in the Free World’s “Cold War” with the Soviet Union.

For this multinational initiative to survive and evolve into a formidable edifice to frustrate any Chinese territorial aspirations, the U.S. must lead “from the front” by frequent “Freedom of Navigation” operations through contested straits and other sensitive waterways to reinforce the legitimacy of international law on the high seas. Some of these freedom of navigation operations could be conducted in the Formosa (Taiwan) Strait between Taiwan and China. Another exercise could be in the disputed waters of the Tokara and Miyako Straits near Japan and China.

Another U.S. move, in coordination of member states, would be to extend the existing program of the “Five Eyes” (the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) arrangement of intelligence sharing, when it pertains to China, to other allies, perhaps initially India and Japan. The U.S. and its allies should probably be prepared for an attempt by China to initiate provocative action against one or more of the states in the region. In response, they might dispatch combat vessels to confront aggressors or rescue those who might need rescuing.

If China should respond to allied containment activities in a more robust military fashion, the massive naval and air power of the U.S. 7th Fleet, based in Yokouska, Japan, should be sufficient to check any aggressive Chinese moves. The 7th Fleet could also be substantially reinforced by U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, headquartered in Hawaii. Any decision by the U.S. to adopt the military containment of China as a policy must assume that China might retaliate. China’s leaders are surely hoping that the current U.S. administration’s aversion to war will enable the Communists to pick off new territory with relative ease; the U.S. should not even let them think of such a possibility.

Spokespersons for member states should not hesitate to declare that it is the mandatory duty of free states to oppose the universal ambitions of the totalitarian Party-State of the People’s Republic of China and its aim eclipsing the United States. This goal is made abundantly clear in their own publications, such as the May 19, 2019 Chinese Communist Party official organ, People’s Daily and the Xinhua News Agency declaring “People’s War” on America. The Party’s narrative is that the U.S. administration is threatening all the people of China. One Chinese state CCTV anchor added that the “U.S. fights for greed and arrogance,” but that “China will fight for a new world.” It certainly will — if we let it.

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