John Robson: The More Canada Relies on Investment From Corrupt Regions, the Worse Off We Will Be

Commentary

Oh here’s a surprise. A highly-touted, much-sought-after Chinese investment in Canada’s lobster industry has “turned sour” amid charges of corruption and a string of ludicrous lies. Can somebody remind me why we’re going so far out of our way to transform our economy this way?

The company claims it was shocked, shocked to discover alleged shady dealings by two employees who counterclaim that they never worked for the firm, or if they did, not as managers, and were shocked, shocked to discover its alleged shady dealings. Canadian courts will have a field day, or decades, stumbling through this one. But what of the bigger picture?

Are there no Canadians capable of plucking lobsters from the depths, shallows, or wherever to sell to “a growing middle class in China … hungry for Nova Scotia seafood”? I thought people had been fishing there since John Cabot (“the sea there is full of fish that can be taken not only with nets but with fishing-baskets”) or before. Yet our naive politicians routinely go to China begging them to purchase our products and invest in our industries, including a 2015 seafood-focused trade mission to Guangzhou by then-Nova Scotia Premier Stephen McNeil.

The news story says, “According to lawsuit filings, that push worked.” But it depends on your definition of success. Sure, politicians who play by China’s rules often prosper later, say by joining Chinese-connected law firms. But the more our economy is permeated by investment from corrupt regions, the worse off we will be.

So if the details are absurd, the big picture is even sillier without, pace Chesterton, being any less serious. Since the 1970s, Canada has been dominated intellectually and politically by people who tried to break the dreary English-French stalemate with multiculturalism built on two key premises that manage to conflict while both being false.

First, all cultures are equally valid. Second, Canada is immeasurably enriched by people from foreign cultures. But non-Western habits and traditions, even if no worse than ours, cannot be better if all cultures are equally valid. And of course they’re not.

Everyone knows some places stink, even if politicians get into a heap of woke trouble if they blurt it out. And a key cause of the stench is a lack of trust. In societies where people rationally distrust strangers and those in power, they keep one hand on their wallet and the other on their dagger, marry within their tribe, nurse resentments and paranoid political fantasies, and generally stagnate and suffer.

It works both ways, of course. By suppressing cousin marriage, the Catholic Church dramatically increased trust in European society because you absolutely had to find ways to get along with strangers to have families. But the revolt of our elites against Western civilization has included immigration policy systematically, over decades, refusing to prioritize immigration or investment from high-trust societies, or prioritize trustworthy immigrants or investors from anywhere. If anything, it’s done the exact opposite. On purpose.

Including China, long a low-trust society with fake pottery marks, where communism made things far worse, the Cultural Revolution striking an especially savage blow at trust in authority or one’s fellows. No one is surprised to find melamine in the milk or shady groups buying up Prince Edward Island. Or at least no one should be. Yet our politicians cannot get enough of the place, not coincidentally as trust within Western society also erodes, in institutions, in one another, and in our traditions, which our elites hate pathologically.

If I started listing ways Canadian politicians are skilfully eroding remaining faith, from cancelling Christmas to staging phony construction sites to announce non-existent housing construction surges, I’d need the rest of the newspaper. And the worst by far aren’t lies we don’t discover. It’s ones we do and nothing happens, as in Solzhenitsyn’s famous warning about the Soviet Union resting on a foundation of known lies that caused paralysis, not outrage.

It’s a big problem, and it didn’t start in 2016, or 1992, or with politics at all, which is famously downstream of culture. Robert Putnam’s 2000 “Bowling Alone” warned of a decline in American social networking, a.k.a. “doing stuff together.” Which made COVID lockdowns even more destructive, particularly to people already scrolling through social media while walking the dog.

As for catching the lobster, Canada today is overtaxed and overgoverned to the point where, in a version of Gresham’s Law, bad investment crowds out good. Worse, we know, they know we know, and we know they know that our politicians need investment from China, the UAE, and other suspicious state actors because legitimate firms increasingly won’t risk shareholders’ money in projects in a land where political favouritism is rife, subsidies trump markets, regulations strangle enterprise, and truth is at a discount.

Instead of fixing it, we gape at fishy lobsters.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.