We should be looking more closely at Australia as a country that has taken certain measures to try to limit Chinese influence through legislation. Certainly, in our own attempt to rally our allies, I believe that this, unfortunately, has probably had the opposite effect to what's intended, in the sense that we can list 14 countries that support us while claiming other countries support us in their hearts but are afraid to say anything.
I think the Chinese government would compare 14 against the total number of countries in the world and see that they retain support for their horrendous behaviour. With regard to Mr. Kovrig and Mr. Spavor, like Kevin Garratt before them, the Chinese have been unable to provide us with any evidence of any wrongdoing whatsoever in their case.
It would be wonderful if Canada would take the lead in trying to come up with some multilateral coalition of the like-minded to try to put some transparency and honesty in our relations with China. Currently, there's a psychology in Canada that the most important thing in our relations with China is the promotion of Canadian prosperity through enhanced trade, but the cost that China wants to extract from us for that in pursuit of their overall agenda, such as removing restrictions on Canadian exports of high tech to China, allowing unfettered Chinese state access to Canadian mining and oil or insisting that we install the Huawei 5G into our telecommunications and so on, these things are not worth the cost to Canada in the long run.
While we, or perhaps some politically connected companies, may achieve profits from collaboration with the Chinese regime, we're better off standing up for our laws and values. If China wants to punish us because of that, then I believe we have to accept the consequences in the overall longer interests of Canada.