Canada Needs to Accept China ‘Believes It Is at War With Us’: NB MLA

Dominic Cardy says Canada must make the necessary preparations for any conflict with Beijing

Chinese aircraft carrier Liaoning (C) participates in military drills in the South China Sea on Jan. 2, 2017. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)

Canada should accept and prepare for the scenario that “China believes it is at war with us,” New Brunswick MLA Dominic Cardy says.

Speaking at a book launch event in Toronto on Nov. 25, the former N.B. education minister warned that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is taking an adversarial stance against Canada and Western democracies, and that Canada should be ready for any conflict.

“I want to make an appeal to you,” Cardy told the audience during the launch of “The China Nexus: Thirty Years In and Around the Chinese Communist Party’s Tyranny,” a book by Asian policy and geopolitics expert Benedict Rogers.

“In the 1930s, Winston Churchill talked about the war party and the peace party. These aren’t political parties, these were coalitions of people who either were seeking to deal with fascism and Nazism through appeasement or recognizing that the best chance we had of avoiding war was to prepare for it.”

New Brunswick MLA Dominic Cardy speaks at a book launch event for “China Nexus” in Toronto on Nov. 25, 2022. (Omid Ghoreishi/The Epoch Times)

Cardy said it is now time to take a similar approach in dealing with the CCP.

“We need to accept that China believes it is at war with us,” he said. “We [need to] start to believe we are at war with China, and start to make the necessary preparations from a military perspective, from a social perspective, from an economic perspective, as we rapidly decouple our economy from a country that does not share our values.”

‘Has to Start With All of Us’

Taiwan’s top envoy shares a similar view as Cardy. During a hearing before the parliamentary Canada-China committee on Nov. 1, Harry Ho-Jen Tseng, representative of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Canada, warned parliamentarians not to take the message from the recent CCP’s 20th national congress “lightly,” and “to prepare in order not to be harmed in the near future.”

“The political report delivered by [Chinese leader] Mr. Xi Jinping on Oct. 16 has sent a chilling message to all of us in the like-minded group [of democracies],” said Tseng, stressing that Xi had used the term “security” over 75 times in his speech.

Xi’s speech emphasized that the communist regime will “strengthen the safeguards for ensuring economic, major infrastructure, financial, cyber, data, biological, resource, nuclear, space, and maritime security.”

In addition, Xi said that the CCP will “hold high the great banner of socialism” and turn China into a country that “leads the world in terms of composite national strength and international influence by the middle of the century.”

Cardy, who oversaw the removal of Beijing’s Confucius Institute from public schools in his province when he was education minister, said the defence against the CCP “has to start with politics.”

“It has to start with all of us as citizens of a free country—having the courage to stand up and push back against our politicians when they seek to appease China, our business people when they seek to profit off of slave labour,” he said.

The MLA proposed implementing a “war party” Churchill spoke about.

“Let’s make sure we avoid those battlefields by having this fight right now by building a war party in Canada and around democracies to start to say to China: ‘no more.’”

Indo-Pacific Region

In late November, Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly announced Canada’s long-awaited Indo-Pacific strategy, calling for collective action with allies to confront China.

The strategy recognizes Beijing’s ambitions to rewrite international norms to its benefit, continued militarization of that region, and its “coercive diplomacy” and non-market trade practices, like forced labour, that have impacted Canada and others, among other priorities.

Joly said issues such as national security, economy and prosperity, democratic values, climate change, and human rights “will be shaped by the relationship Canada has with Indo-Pacific countries.”

“China’s sheer size and influence makes cooperation necessary to address some of the world’s existential pressures, such as climate change and biodiversity loss, global health, and nuclear proliferation. And China’s economy offers significant opportunities for Canadian exporters,” the strategy says.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has not commented on the Indo-Pacific strategy since its release, though he has re-tweeted portions of it posted on Twitter by his cabinet, which focus on promoting trade and collaboration in the region.

Trudeau was confronted by Xi on the sidelines of the Group of Twenty summit on Nov. 16, with the CCP leader telling him that he shouldn’t have “leaked” to the media details of their conversation from the day before. “Otherwise, it is hard to say what will happen,” Xi said.

Trudeau’s office had said the prime minister raised concerns about Chinese interference in Canada and media reports of de facto police stations operating in Canada, among several issues.

‘No Need for Apologies’

Cardy said he is witnessing “a period of nearly unprecedented weakness” in Canada’s democracy and the democracy in the broader Western democratic world.

“And the forces of division and extremism and populism, amplified by social media, in some cases funded by state actors, including Russia and China and Iran, among others—those are all taking a toll on our democratic structures,” he said.

Cardy said there is a need to prioritize political discussion to counteract Beijing’s dictatorship.

“I think it has to be people standing up in the House of Commons. We need to have more people willing to speak bluntly about the fact that we are not going to put up with this,” he said.

“There’s no need for apologies for the need for action going forward.”

Andrew Chen contributed to this report.