{"id":5385,"date":"2026-09-13T06:22:33","date_gmt":"2026-09-13T06:22:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadafirst.nfshost.com\/?p=5385"},"modified":"2026-09-13T06:22:33","modified_gmt":"2026-09-13T06:22:33","slug":"pms-recruitment-of-barton-will-please-chinas-xi-jinping","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadafirst.nfshost.com\/?p=5385","title":{"rendered":"PM\u2019S recruitment of Barton will please China\u2019s Xi Jinping"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h1 class=\"wp-block-heading\">PM\u2019S recruitment of Barton will please China\u2019s Xi Jinping<\/h1>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">THE ANTIDOTE FOR TRUMPISM IS NOT LIKELY TO BE FOUND IN BARTON, WHO HAD A HAND IN SO MANY PRO-BEIJING POLICIES<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li>National Post &#8211; (Latest Edition)<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>3 Sep 2026<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>TERRY GLAVIN<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/t.prcdn.co\/img?regionKey=L8TebVrIpAKiyNXS5uXOWw==\" alt=\"\"\/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">In a surprise move this week, Prime Minister Mark Carney named Dominic Barton, Canada\u2019s 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 \u201cthe world\u2019s largest investors, including top CEOS, entrepreneurs, and prominent global business leaders\u201d in Toronto later this month, Terry Glavin writes.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>There has been no greater gift to the Liberal party\u2019s powerful pro-beijing comprador caste than U.S. President Donald Trump\u2019s exasperating bellicosity and exhausting trade-relations vandalism. Even after nearly a decade of scandals involving China\u2019s Uyghur slave camps, its \u201chostage diplomacy,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You could say the American president can be thanked for that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In the crude calculus of political advantage, by the time China\u2019s 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\u2019s corporate circles might be, you can get away with almost anything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If there is a better explanation for Prime Minister Mark Carney\u2019s choice of Dominic Barton as the Liberals\u2019 spirit guide in their \u201cnew world order\u201d project to radically expand foreign direct investment in Canada and pull the country out of the American economic orbit, it is not immediately obvious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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 \u201cthe world\u2019s largest investors, including top CEOS, entrepreneurs, and prominent global business leaders\u201d in Toronto later this month. There\u2019s no evidence that any distinction will be drawn between foreign direct investment from democracies and dirty money from torture states.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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\u2019s time as chair of Justin Trudeau\u2019s inaugural Advisory Council on Economic Growth, an operation within Bill Morneau\u2019s finance ministry run by Mckinsey and Company, the multinational management consultancy Barton was serving at the time as global managing partner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Another proposal from Barton\u2019s council that was adopted by the Trudeau government: the catastrophic idea of doubling immigration to 500,000 people annually by 2025. It isn\u2019t entirely clear that the Carney government has abandoned the \u201cdemographic deficit\u201d thinking of its predecessors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Barton came to the inner chambers of the Trudeau government after bringing Mckinsey\u2019s heft to Trudeau\u2019s bid for the Liberal party leadership in 2012. Trudeau\u2019s manifesto proposed that deepening trade relationships with China would \u201cbuild middle-class wealth in Canada.\u201d As for Beijing\u2019s convention-defying trade practices: \u201cChina, 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There was no rationale involving Trumpist vulgarity available to the Liberals back then, and as it turned out there\u2019s quite a lot that\u2019s proved to be sinister about Beijing\u2019s own rules. Its \u201cgame plan\u201d has involved hollowing out western economies by flooding markets with its subsidized industrial overproduction, financing Vladimir Putin\u2019s war on Ukraine, funding the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps by the purchase of 90 per cent of Iran\u2019s oil via the Khomeinists\u2019 sanctions-evading \u201cghost fleet\u201d and ensnaring developing countries in its Belt and Road debt traps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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\u2019s lead by rapidly reducing Canada\u2019s exposure to Chinese economic strong-arming. \u201cWhat we want is certainly a decoupling: certainly from China,\u201d Industry Minister Fran\u00e7ois-philippe Champagne said at the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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 \u201cstrategic partnership\u201d with Beijing, declaring his embrace of China\u2019s \u201cnew world order.\u201d It\u2019s not certain that the current American president can be blamed for this. Barton\u2019s Advisory Council on Economic Growth was succeeded by the Liberals\u2019 Leaders\u2019 Task Force on Economic Growth, which Mark Carney took over as chair in 2024, and here we are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A key element in the Invest in Canada mandate is to double Canadian exports to non-american markets over the next decade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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 \u2014 1,019 days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But elsewhere, and especially in the United States, Barton is known for having doubled Mckinsey\u2019s annual earnings to $10 billion during his decade as the firm\u2019s global managing director by means that are an indelicate subject in Liberal circles. Mckinsey\u2019s notoriety didn\u2019t come just from its lucrative habit of providing business services to the legions of kleptocrats and strongmen from the United Nations\u2019 torture-state bloc, which has been growing in number, in power and influence for the past 25 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That phenomenon all by itself goes a long way to explain the collapse of the \u201crules-based international order,\u201d 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\u2019s Most Powerful Consulting Firm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>During Barton\u2019s years as the firm\u2019s Global Managing Partner from 2009 to 2018, Mckinsey\u2019s consultants had also embedded themselves at the senior levels of almost all of the world\u2019s largest corporations, playing their part in raising the income of a typical CEO from 20 times a worker\u2019s wages to 300 times as much. It\u2019s another story that helps explain the rise of Trumpism, and it\u2019s well told in the Atlantic magazine\u2019s How Mckinsey Destroyed the Middle Class.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>During Barton\u2019s time at the top of the company, and during his term as the firm\u2019s Asia chair from 2004 to 2009, while he was based in Shanghai, Mckinsey\u2019s client list came to include 26 of Beijing\u2019s 96 stateowned enterprises \u2014 weapons manufacturers, agri-food empires, telecommunications giants, oil companies and steel companies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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. \u201cI\u2019m really wondering whether, if Carney becomes the prime minister, it\u2019ll be like if Dominic Barton became the prime minister,\u201d Burton told me. \u201cI worry that ultimately, Carney\u2019s plan is to out-barton Dominic Barton.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Article Name:PM\u2019S recruitment of Barton will please China\u2019s Xi Jinping<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Publication:National Post &#8211; (Latest Edition)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Section:FRONT PAGE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Author:TERRY GLAVIN<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Start Page:A1<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>End Page:A1<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>PM\u2019S recruitment of Barton will please China\u2019s Xi Jinping THE ANTIDOTE FOR TRUMPISM IS NOT LIKELY TO BE FOUND IN BARTON, WHO HAD A HAND IN SO MANY PRO-BEIJING POLICIES There has been no greater gift to the Liberal party\u2019s powerful pro-beijing comprador caste than U.S. President Donald Trump\u2019s exasperating bellicosity and exhausting trade-relations vandalism. 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