Climate change makes good sense. China is 20% of the world's population, so there are going to be areas where we have common ground.
Health would be another. Unfortunately, it's been damaged in the eyes of the Canadian public due to some of the factors involved in the pandemic: vaccines that didn't go forward, suspicion about the origins of COVID, etc. That is still an area that we can't ignore. The next pandemic is more likely to emerge in China than anywhere else.
When I was a deputy head of mission, I was there during SARS, and we had no medical expert. Every day I was going to the briefings by the health organization, trying to make sense of the technical terminology. When I came back a few years later to be the director general in Ottawa, I said that we needed a health agency doctor in place who speaks Chinese. We did so, but the person was removed before the pandemic. We had someone there when the timing was useful but not essential, and then we didn't have someone there. Little things like that can be hugely important.
I think there are also areas of biodiversity in that broad environmental category. China is almost the same size as we are. It has a lot of species at risk, and it has a lot of clout in the UN system. I think the COP meeting in Montreal was a success overall. It might be hard to think back, but even in a time of fraught relations bilaterally, I understand that worked reasonably well.
A hard-nosed assessment of where we have an interest and where it happens to align—some things won't—with the Chinese interest can work. Finding those areas is not always easy, but it can be done. That's why I look forward to at least a better dialogue at senior levels. It can be behind closed doors, or it can be public. However, we can't go on indefinitely.
Our allies, the Australian prime minister, the Germans, the French, the Americans, the Brits and others—all of our G7 and Five Eyes partners—have been engaging at high levels with China. I'm not saying that it's all our fault that the Chinese are punishing us, but we need to fix that.
It's not a perfect analogy, but we kept our embassy in Berlin open until September 1, 1939. In other words—I'm a former diplomat—you talk. If that utterly fails, you turn it over to the other side, to the military, but we need to be talking. A dialogue from a distance by loudspeaker doesn't work. We need to be there on the ground, having regular contact in both directions.