Thank you very much, Chair.
Thank you to our witnesses.
Professor Massie, I will begin with you. By the way, this is not related to anything that we're doing here, but we just missed each other at Queen's University. I studied with David Haglund and Wayne Cox. I know you know them and others there.
I take your points that you have raised tonight, particularly the one you raised with respect to climate change and how that offers a potential area of collaboration with China. The point has been made before at this committee and elsewhere, but I wonder how that would work. How could that proceed?
On the one hand, I think I see where you and others who have made that point are coming from. Climate change is an existential matter by definition, and therefore we should, on existential matters and existential threats specifically, find room for collaboration and co-operation with all states, regardless of whether or not they are democracies.
However, at the same time, Canada is a middle power and China certainly is not, so where China can find room to collaborate with the United States—and I see that there have been very positive, or what seemed to be very positive conversations, vis-à-vis Presidents Xi and Biden in the past few days on the issue of climate change—one could make the argument that the U.S. is more likely to be heard by China on the issue of climate change. The door then opens to discussion and deliberation between those two superpowers.
However, Canada is clearly not in that category, so how do we get China's attention on this? What areas can we specifically focus on to advance the dialogue?