Well, I mean certainly I think the Chinese regime is trying to get it in all directions, and part of it is their pervasive use of industrial espionage or the use of other programs such as inviting to China scientists who have expertise relevant to Chinese government priorities and giving them different benefits, such as maybe putting them on boards to monetize their scientific achievements.
You know, there's an enormous Chinese diplomatic cohort here in Canada, much larger than those of other comparable nations. One assumes that Chinese diplomats are as efficient as any others in our country and that a lot of those people are in fact coordinating targeted espionage to get technologies that would benefit China's rise.
I think we do have a lot of concerns about the overall Chinese strategy of subsidizing EVs to serve various Chinese regime interests. Xi Jinping has a program called the “community of the common destiny of mankind” and his belt and road economic program, which they're quite explicit about. They want to make China the dominant power on the planet and reduce the authority of liberal democratic institutions like the UN and the WTO. He hopes to achieve this as soon as 2050.
Putting the subsidies into the EVs does address China's problem of needing to have overcapacity to keep their economy going. It's useful for them to weaken our economy by displacing the critical industries that are so important to our economy and enabling espionage. I mean, this is all part and parcel of it.
The other concern we have, which was briefly raised, is that we could have problems bringing in these vehicles because of the recently strengthened forced labour legislation and the reports by, say, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute that suggest the critical minerals in those batteries are the product of Uyghur forced labour.