News Analysis
Dominic Barton is like the Liberal government’s silver bullet. The newly appointed ambassador to China has his hands full trying to mend a relationship that’s at its nadir. Following the Liberals’ rise to power in late 2015, he was brought in to devise a plan to revive economic growth in Canada.
Now his job is to represent Canadian interests in China. Those interests begin with securing the release of Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, who have been detained since last December, shortly after Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou was arrested in Vancouver on a U.S. extradition warrant.
Barton’s resume includes extensive experience and relationships in China, where he was once based in Shanghai as the Asia chairman of management consulting firm McKinsey & Company. He is also an adjunct professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
But fundamentally, Barton’s role is inexorably linked to Meng’s detention in Canada, said Carleton University associate professor of Asian history Jacob Kovalio.
As Meng’s extradition hearing follows its course in the Canadian judiciary system, Barton, in the meantime, can lay the groundwork to try and appease Beijing, particularly if she is extradited south of the border.
“That is the only thing I see behind the sudden announcement behind the nomination of Mr. Barton to be our ambassador to China,” Kovalio said. “Once the Meng Wanzhou affair is behind us, Mr. Barton’s role there would not be very important.”
Double-Edged Sword
McKinsey has had a very deep relationship with China’s ruling communist regime, and Barton downplayed widespread concerns about the regime’s Belt and Road Initiative—a sprawling infrastructure project to build up China’s influence in the regions it invades, from East Asia to Europe and Africa.
The New York Times laid bare how McKinsey has been assisting authoritarian regimes, like China’s, to gain global influence even at the expense of the United States.
McKinsey is so highly regarded in China that the country’s smartest minds dream of working there, and the firm’s partners have even sat in on Communist Party meetings at companies.
Barton served on the board of the China Development Bank, one of the two biggest financiers of the Belt and Road Initiative. That is an example of the kinds of ties to Chinese Communist Party elites that engender some of the skepticism of his appointment.
Taiwan expert and author J. Michael Cole tweeted on the day of the announcement, “An appointment that will surely please Beijing, but one that I doubt will result in a clear affirmation of Canada’s non-commerce-related interests.”
